I’m finding Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epistein an incredibly thought provoking read. Underlying the book’s exploration of the intersection between psychoanalysis and Buddhist psychology is an account of the shift from “the breath-based experience of fluidity and change to an appetite-based one of gratification or satisfaction” (pg 146). The former is a temporally experienced self which unfolds in the immediacy of reality, whereas the latter is a spatially experienced self defined by boundaries and depths. He quotes Michael Eigen:
The sense of self based on a normal experience of breathing is an unpressured sense of self which is not easily stampeded. For the sense of self structured by appetite, time is an irritant. The self structured by an awareness of breathing can take its time going from moment to moment, just as breathing usually does. It does not run after or get ahead of time but, instead, seeks simply to move with it.
As Epstein later puts it: “Self … is a metaphor for a process that we do not understand, a metaphor for that which knows“. The spatialised self has or doesn’t have (appetites) in contrast to the temporalised self (breathing) which simply is: “It is enough these practices reveal, to open to the ongoing process of knowing without imputing someone behind it all” (pg 155). Rather than the self being the condition for action, it entails a protective rigidity which actually inhibits action: to cultivate a letting go of that illusion isn’t passivity but rather a trust in the action which ensues from being-in-the-world which “seeks simply to move with it”.
Mark Carrigan 