self is a myriad

  

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We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. 

Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.


—William James

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Self is a myriad. We can use the word to cover both our sense of extension over time – the feeling that somehow I am the same person I was as a child – and for the constantly changing ungraspable flow of consciousness. 

Which is the true self? That question, the basis for so many Zen koans, immediately leads us astray.

Instead of fully experiencing ourselves in the very act of asking the question, we imagine there is another more real, truer, more essential self hiding somewhere out of sight that we have to go search for. Not surprisingly, we can never find it. 

But when a problem remains intractable for so long and so many answers that are proposed are so unsatisfying, one must begin to suspect that the question is either being asked in a way that makes it inherently unanswerable or that we are looking for the wrong kind of answer.


—Barry Magid
Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

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Morning and afternoon are clasped together 

And North and South are an intrinsic couple 

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers 

That walk away as one in the greenest body.


—Wallace Stevens
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

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