“I decided I was too soft to last, but then I decided to be even softer.”
- Andrea Gibson
(Art by Katsushika Hokusai: The Great Wave off Kanagawa 1831)
"The maintenance/strength of self is a very core concept in Western psychology and is particularly relevant to egoism, a process that draws on the hedonic principle in pursuit of desires. Contrary to this and based on Buddhism, a nonself-cultivating process aims to minimize or extinguish the self and avoid desires, leading to egolessness or selflessness... The ego engages in psychological activities to strengthen the self, applying the hedonic principle of seeking desire-driven pleasure. In contrast, a nonself approach involves execution of the self-cultivation principle, which involves three ways: giving up desires, displaying compassion, practicing meditation and seeking understanding Buddhist wisdom. These three ways have the goal of seeing through and overcoming the illusion of the self to achieve a deep transformation integrally connected to the experience of eliminating the sense of self and its psychological structures."
- Yung-Jong Shiah, From Self to Nonself: The Nonself Theory (2016)
Graduate Institute of Counseling Psychology and Rehabilitation Counseling,
National Kaohsiung University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
"Traditionally, Western psychology has attempted to understand the psychological functioning of the self from an individualistic perspective (Triandis and Gelfand, 1998; Triandis, 2001), emphasizing the need to satisfy, maintain and strengthen the self (Greenberg et al., 1990; Burke et al., 2010)... The origin of the concept of the individualistic view of self can be traced to early Christianity. Protestantism is considered to be the denomination most strongly related to American culture and, more specifically, to the American individualistic view of self (Oyserman et al., 2002; Cohen and Hill, 2007)." However, "[t]he Buddh[ist] teachings are aimed at attaining an authentic, durable happiness by cultivating a transition from the self state to the nonself state (Dalai Lama, 1995a, 2005). Buddhism holds that personal identity is delusional (Giles, 1993), that each of us is a self that turns out to not actually exist (Dalai Lama, 1995b, 2005). Clinging to or being obsessed with the delusional self is the major cause of suffering (Dalai Lama, 1995a)."
And "I came to theory because I was hurting - the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend - to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing" (bell hooks 1991). Perhaps not healing, as now I know how messy of a life-long journey it is to heal both interpersonally and generationally, but I feel in theory a place to understand. To understand why and how we were hurt, so we cause less hurt to both ourselves and others. To study our collective pain is harm reduction, to understand this wound is a the world (Billy-Ray Belcourt) is to study how this world is our wound... For myself, as someone recovering from years of suicidal ideation, recent suicide attempts and self-harm relapses, I came to theory once again hoping to find the meaning to stay alive. Yet there was none, and while purpose seemed like a luxury, I was privileged enough to come back home to my birthplace, to retrace my (baby)steps in memory and rebirth. After 10 years in colonized Turtle Island (North America), I found comfort in saying that home is wherever water flows, but had I forgotten the mountains that birthed me ? Did I forget the land that shook hard but held me softly, even through the deadliest earthquake in Taiwan's history (the 1999 Chi Chi earthquake) being just 11 days after my birth ? How dare I forget the island breeze, both the heat waves (feeling up to 48 degrees in humidity), and the Pacific ocean waves ? Thus now I remember, in all clarity and grief: I'm home.
From the new moon in Leo to the moon in Virgo, I came to write again in study of the "nonself". I honour myself to the moon in ritual of anew thus returning myself to my initial Buddhist devotion, not as a religious practice but a philosophical study of life and being. I believe that part of my decolonizing process is to un/relearn "a state of nonself[, which] involves renunciation of worldly things, particularly those that are attractive because of egoism and desire. Personal identity or the self is delusional (Giles, 1993; Joshanloo, 2014); such a self is assumed to not actually exist or not to be permanent (Dalai Lama, 1995b). The Dalai Lama (2005) asserted that the term nonself refers to the realization that the self or the I lacks intrinsic existence" (Shiah 2016). And part of my suicidal journey driven by madness is deeply rooted in the shames of "self-love", where we as marginalized people are conditioned in colonial-capitalism that we must practice self-care or obtain self-love to survive. However, it was impossible for me, and now I understand just how and why it is fundamentally in conflict with my core philosophies of life. The concept of "interdependence" may be crucial in the languages or politics against the independence or individualistic freedoms of a "modern" (colonial-capitalist) Western society, the ideals of cohabiting in relation for the collective good have always been a core teaching in not only Eastern philosophies, but in Western Indigenous cultures as well... In 'The Blackfoot Wisdom that inspired the Maslow's Hierarchy' (2021), Teju Ravilochan wrote on how "[d]eeply curious about the reason for the stark difference between Blackfoot culture and his own culture, Maslow sought out positive deviants, or unusually successful individuals. He started with the wealthiest members of the Blackfoot tribe. He discovered that 'for the Blackfoot, wealth was not measured by money and property but by generosity. The wealthiest man in their eyes is one who has almost nothing because he has given it all away' (Coon, 2006)... Maslow observed different qualities in members of his own culture: To most Blackfoot members, wealth was not important in terms of accumulating property and possessions: giving it away was what brought one the true status of prestige and security in the tribe. At the same time, Maslow was shocked by the meanness and racism of the European-Americans who lived nearby. As he wrote, 'The more I got to know the whites in the village, who were the worst bunch of creeps and bastards I’d ever run across in my life, the more it got paradoxical...'" And yet while Maslow himself studied and was inspired by the Blackfoot tribe, the research was eventually lost in translation by societal interpretations, with an example being that Maslow never depicted his theories of hierarchy as a pyramid.
And "Maslow appeared to ask, 'how do we become self-actualized ?'. Many First Nation communities, though they would not have used the same word, might be more likely to believe that we arrive on the planet self-actualized...
As Maslow witnessed in the Blackfoot Giveaway, many First Nation cultures see the work of meeting basic needs, ensuring safety, and creating the conditions for the expression of purpose as a community responsibility, not an individual one. Blackstock refers to this as 'Community Actualization'...
Scott Barry Kaufman (2020) shares an excerpt from an unpublished Maslow essay from 1966, 23 years after he published his paper on the Hierarchy of Needs, called 'Critique of Self-Actualization Theory': … self-actualization is not enough. Personal salvation and what is good for the person alone cannot be really understood in isolation. The good of other people must be invoked as well as the good for oneself. It is quite clear that purely inter-psychic individualist psychology without reference to other people and social conditions is not adequate."
- Teju Ravilochan:
Could The Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow Guide Us Now/
The Blackfoot Wisdom that inspired the Maslow's Hierarchy (2021)
Thus now back to the Buddhist meditations and teachings: "Because we realize the impermanence experientially, we arrive at the understanding of nonself. This is not a loss of the self. It continues to exist, but we don't see it the same way. What we gain is the true insight that the self is not the body and the mind (Dalai Lama, 1995a)... In the meantime, our practices aimed at absorbing wisdom eventually reach a stage at which we clearly understand that everything, including the self's activities and all physical phenomena, arise, change and eventually pass away (Dalai Lama, 1995a). Finally, step by step, we attain the deep reflexivity that sees through and overcomes the delusion of the self and then dissolves the self. Thus, reflexivity is essential for maintaining meditative awareness, obeying the precepts, absorbing Buddhist wisdom, and cultivating a state of the self that is conducive to the creation of the state of nonself" (Shiah 2016)... From my own understanding through various readings, many misinterpret the teaching of nonself as an abandonment of one's needs for the self or an idea that there's no "self" at all, but we continue to co-exist with ourselves, including our identities, our desires, our shame and our dreams...etc, yet is it ours, just ours ? Are our ideas, our bodies, and even our ideals really us ? As I come to understand that the only permanence is relation, and the only constant is change. I realize that self-love will not save us, but compassion, solidarity, and forgiveness through/with each other just might. So I'm no longer searching for softness but seeding softness instead, back into the soil and growing roots, one breath and one moon phase at a time...
I witness many ideas of self-love or self-care stemming from systematic survival, and while absolutely justified as well as honoured, no amount of self-love will exempt us from the complicities of upholding colonial-capitalist ideals even when surviving them at the same time. Whether or not we are Buddhists or if we agree to the teachings of Blackfoot Indigenous communities, we are all subjects to colonial-capitalism and are functioning within a society that demands to know, who we are and how do we want to be ? Thus I choose collective struggle over individualistic survival, and perhaps not an honoured virtue but a humbling acceptance of not living long. I embrace my disabilities in this cruel world, maybe some see it as mental fragility but I simply do not wish to live in a world like this... My therapist said that I'm like the kid who called out the nudity/truth in folktale: "The Emperor's New Clothes", but in reality the peasant who embarrassed the king would be sentenced to death, even if they were speaking truth. And perhaps I rather die, I really did, but now I dare to write/speak again in study of our multiple truths, pains, and realities co-existing at once. How do we break the cycle of the colonized colonizing ? How can we stop the cycle of hurt people hurting others ? How do we love without preservation based in fear ? How can our survival ever liberate us when we shelter ourselves from truth ? And when it's time to blossom under the light, our preservation against our own shadows may not protect us. This is my truthtelling, a story of how self-love couldn't save me when the self was trying to kill me. This is a lesson of how a femme so obsessed with ego-death almost died, then realized there's no actual self to kill. This is a relevation...
We are not ourselves, and since change is the only constant, we can not be defined by the conditions that allow us to be either. Thus we are both in relation and by influence, we are the spaces we occupy and we are the people we love. We must be accountable to the places we colonize and the people we harm. As the people who hurt us become us, and the relations or places we exploit are at the expense of ourselves. We are not ourselves. We don't own the self; We simply have a self, for now. So I hope we stay softer in the detachment of our core, enough to be flexible in reflexivity, in relation, and in reciprocity. As a flower after blossom must wilt and shed, perhaps in grief but in clarity of how the bloom was never for the witness but of the land. So we seed for softness again...
Nonself as Enlightened Ego-Death:
"The psychological functioning of the nonself incorporates three ways of the self-cultivation process: giving up desires (by obeying specific precepts), practicing meditation and absorbing Buddhist wisdom. These three ways are essentially ways to experience the reality of emptiness and the importance of compassion, leading to a sense of no identity. The transition from the self state to the nonself state is a deeply transformative experience of eliminating the sense of self and its psychological structures, seeing through and overcoming the illusion of the self. In contrast, the psychological function of egoism is to strengthen the self by applying the hedonic principle to pursue desires leading to fluctuating happiness."
- Yung-Jong Shiah (2016):
"The Nonself Theory proposed in the present paper provides theoretical direction to the accumulation of such evidence-based data for use in Buddhist psychotherapy. Similarly, Buddhism has adopted an approach to the concept of the self that differs from that in Western psychology. There is a need to construct a nonself psychology based on the emptiness construct...
Buddhism offers ideas about how self-cultivation can be used to attain the ultimate state of nonself-plus-compassion. From the moral perspective, nonself-plus-compassion can be regarded as a very high standard of morality and a high level of moral expertise. It has been suggested that this moral expertise emerges from the interactions among beliefs, desires, and moral actions (Hulsey and Hampson, 2014)...
Though Buddhism is thought to be practiced in all cultures, it developed and is mainly practiced in Asia. One might ask whether it is uniquely suitable to certain cultures. For example, the Buddhist core concept of avoidance of desire-driven pleasure can be found across cultures (Joshanloo, 2014; Joshanloo and Weijers, 2014). Other concepts similar to nonself-plus-compassion, such as altruism, mindfulness, mediation, mystical/peak experience, death anxiety and moral conduct, are also apparently found across cultures. The NT provides a sophisticated framework to explain a possible mechanism for these universal effects and phenomenon."