From: Buddhism without Beliefs

by Stephen Batchelor

Self-consciousness is at once the most obvious and central fact of my life and the most elusive. If I search for my self in meditation, I find it is like trying to catch my own shadow. I reach for it, but there’s nothing there. Then it reappears elsewhere. I glimpse it from the corner of my mind’s eye, turn to face it, and it’s gone. Each time I think I’ve pinned it down, it turns out to be something else: a bodily sensation, a mood, a perception, an impulse, or simply awareness itself.

I cannot find the self by pointing my finger at any physical or mental trait and saying: “Yes, that’s me.” For such traits come and go, whereas the sense of “I” remains constant. But neither can I put my finger on something other than these traits that-however ephemeral and contingent they may be-nonetheless define me.

The self may not be something, but neither is it nothing. It is simply ungraspable, unfindable. I am who I am not because of an essential self hidden away in the core of my being but because of the unprecedented and unrepeatable matrix of conditions that have formed me. The more I delve into this mystery of who I am (or what anything is), the more I just keep going. There is no end to it, only an infinite trajectory that avoids falling into the extremes of being and nonbeing. This trajectory is not only the center, which is free from this duality, but the central path itself.

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