May 15^th, 2026

Welcome to Delusionville: Our Self is Not What We Think It Is

The Buddha refused to say explicitly whether the self did or did not, or did and did not, exist. When Vacchagotta the wanderer demanded to know whether or not a self existed, the Buddha remained silent. He cautioned all monks to avoid the dispute... He observed, instead, that the universe is perpetually changing, which is to say, impermanent.

The Buddha was more concerned with people clinging to the idea of a self... He employed the idea of “not-self ” as a device that was useful for regarding the “outside” world and acknowledging the vast variety of entities our “self” is attached to and dependent on. Everything we can assert about the self, we can assert about a “not-self” and begin to experience our thoughts and feelings as passing before us on the screen of our awareness, like clouds. We don’t need a fixed self to account for reality.

On some level we know this. We can no longer find the child we used to be. Impermanence remains a truth for moods, feelings, impulses, and sensations, as well as the life span of everything from amoebas to mountain ranges. Lines appear in our faces, mottled areas discolor our skin, as we age and move inevitably toward no-being. Unless we can discover and ground contentment within the kaleidoscopic variety and ceaseless change, with lives, moods, and events ticking on and off multiple times a moment, all our efforts to flee anxiety and discontent will remain estranged from the way the universe operates...

Your and my “I” has never been independent of water, sunlight, and oxygen. Our lives have depended on microbes in the soil nourishing the plants and animals we eat. We have also depended equally on pollinating insects and the entire plant and animal kingdoms, which depend in turn on water and sunlight and the Earth’s climate, fixed by gravity into orbit at the optimal distance from the sun...The Earth is held in its perfect orbit and distance from the sun by all the gravitational forces of the universe, which, by the way, are also beating our hearts and breathing us. If we need to have faith in something, perhaps that will do.

Peter Coyote, Tricycle Magazine, Fall 2025 quoted from Zen in the Vernacular, 2024, Inner Traditions