On Self

My sister said that some celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker are a bit freaky to her because you think you know who they are from some program like Sex and the City but then they turn up in something else and are completely different and then you read about them and find they have a huge history that simply doesn’t fit into your picture of them, like SJP being in a relationship with Robert Downey Jr during his drug days.

I forget how the conversation progressed but it ended with her recalling that some people with split personalities really are many people in on head. So I asked is that 1 person with many personalities, or many people within one personality. She said the latter. I believe she is right because the point of this is another look at Buddha’s ‘anatta’.

We believe that our personality belongs to us. That is we exist and we wear a personality like clothing. We learn to modify that personality to occasions and people and play the complex social games. This proves that we are independent from personality. However turn that around and ask who is the person behind the personality of someone else like a celebrity etc. We think of some soul, or core that inhabits the body and pulls the strings of that person. We believe similarly that somehow we exist independent of our body and somehow pull the strings of our body and life.

Not so for my sister, she believes that the personality IS the person. When our personality changes so does the person. More akin to the Greek conception of acting, an actor actually becomes the person when they adopt the personality! As far as I can see this is a good way to think because it highlights the problem that Buddha identified with our minds – which is that we behave as though we were protecting an solid and unchanging core to our selves – rather than the reality which is an ever changing, impermanent self.

The true self which survives death is not the physical body or personality, but something less personal all together.