Anyone who has the fortune of a deeply involved family, or gets to experience having a child, or finds themselves in a truly crystalized organization will find themselves returning to that childlike state of wondering where they end and others begin. And, in the other orientation, when we experience any crises of belief, when we are immersed in altered states, and when we undergo different sorts of trials, we sometimes find ourselves questioning how many disparate beings make up the thing we call a self. One can come to see oneself as nothing more than a battleground of alien interests.
Much of this body of thought involves the dissolution of false dichotomies that we’ve grown attached to. One such falsehood is the notion of the benevolence of selflessness and the malevolence of selfishness. This false dichotomy relies on a poorly simplified notion of what a self is and can be.
In this chapter, we will investigate the different selves that we experience as ourselves. We will see that none of us have a consistent experience of the individual self — even though we may really want to believe that we are a consistently bounded self. It just isn’t so.
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