Self and Satipaṭṭhāna

Exploring the psychology of Early Buddhist meditation

Join the Apsis Newsletter community

1 Introduction

In 2008, researcher Franco Bertossa and colleagues set out to answer an intimate question: does our sense of self have a spatial location? Is there a center point to our experience of “I am”? Of the participants questioned, 83% identified a localized sense of self behind the midway point of the eyes (323). This is not entirely surprising, as many of us carry around a felt sense of being at the helm of experience. We feel localized and concrete and the people that we interact with treat us as conscious decision-making agents. And yet, just as when Saint Augustine speaks on his familiarity with the concept of time, but his inability to properly describe it — we are in a similar position with the self (Chadwick 1992, 591). What are its boundaries? Is it one thing or many things? Despite feeling like a monolithic entity, it is becoming increasingly evident that the self is neither a singular object nor a thing, but a dynamic process (Damasio 2012, 17). As such, there is an incongruency between what modern science tells us the self is and how we feel reality to be. It is precisely the misapprehension that we are a concrete, unchanging, and enduring entity that the early Buddhist tradition cites as…