by Herbert Harris

No Selfie

Many years ago, I began a meditation practice, sparked by curiosity and vague, middle-aged worries about stress and blood pressure. To my surprise, it quickly became a regular part of my life. I restlessly explored many forms of meditation and meditation groups, eventually coming to the San Francisco Zen Center. Before long, I found myself seated on a black cushion in the meditation hall each morning at 5:30. Twenty years later, and 2,500 miles away, I have a much more relaxed schedule, but I am still at it.

What is it like to meditate? This is a question I am constantly asked. Would a philosopher or scientist say there’s a distinct state of consciousness with its own special qualia? I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong, but meditation has never given me an experience that I would call altered consciousness. I’ve come to think the more interesting question is not what meditation feels like moment to moment, but what it is like to be a meditator, to live a life punctuated by these quiet, unremarkable moments of sitting still.

There are many ways our minds can store the details of our experience. We put facts and figures in one place, sensory experiences in another, and skills and procedures in yet another. There is a special kind of memory, called episodic memory, that holds not just the information about an event, but also a sense of our being there. Recalling episodic memories gives us a faint sense of time travel. These are the memories we can reinhabit. We remember a beach vacation as if we can feel the warm sand between our toes, hear the gulls above, and sense the light breeze on our skin. They have a lived-through quality, a presence that feels like “me.”

I have a torrent of episodic memories from my time in San Francisco, where I had just started a new job. I felt like a tourist; every street, every café, every meeting at the new company introduced a parade of unfamiliar faces. My memory was overloaded with experiences and sensations. It felt like my life had entered a new incarnation, complete with a new cast of characters I had to learn. As I stepped into a new role, I became, to some extent, a different person as I adapted to meet new duties and responsibilities. I was surrounded by people who each had hopes and expectations that I would be a good employee, a respectable colleague, and a friend. These hopes and expectations exerted palpable influences on my sense of self.

In the meditation hall, expectations were few. Arrive on time, settle onto your cushion, and when the bell rings, participate in the stillness and silence that fill the hall. These simple expectations shaped my sense of self as much as those of my co-workers and friends. Unlike the sensory overload of the outside world, meditation offered almost nothing for memory to cling to. There were the bells signaling the start and end of each session. The blank wall I faced. The painful muscle memory of the half-lotus position my body reluctantly took. And the occasional passing car outside as the city gradually woke up. Still, the hundreds of hours I spent on the cushion merged into featureless moments of stillness. I know I was there, but where exactly was I?

The next twenty years would bring constant change in my outer life, punctuated by these moments of quiet presence. They are like beads without a string. Nothing seems to hold them together, yet they are connected somehow. They don’t fit into any part of my personal narrative. To whom do they belong? Whose story do they represent? Perhaps no one.

Long before I discovered meditation, I struggled to understand the mysteries of consciousness and the nature of the self. They nudged me into a career in neuroscience and psychiatry. It was a long, winding road that led everywhere except to the answers I was searching for. But years later, I could see how my time in San Francisco had given me valuable clues.

That person who subtly changed himself to adapt to the expectations of his new friends and colleagues had gone through many incarnations before and since. There had been jobs, training programs, schools, family, and communities. Each with different roles and audiences going back to early childhood. He is anything but a good actor, so how did he pull off these performances?

Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the brain is highly skilled at constructing predictive models of reality. Instead of directly experiencing things, we predict what the experience might be like, constantly updating our predictions as new information comes in. Our curiosity shapes our experience. The brain functions like a query machine that asks, “Is my experience like my prediction?” If not, it can adjust its predictive model or take action, such as a simple head tilt, to better align its experience with the prediction. Both agency and perception depend on these query acts.

At the top of its hierarchical structure, the brain might ask, “Am I like my predicted self?” Our actions and perceptions could rely on such query acts. Where do our predictive self-models come from? Some, like our predicted physiological states, may be built-in. But humans, from the start of our lives, are immersed in complex social systems and rely on the actions and perceptions of others.

How do babies develop predictive self models? Consider a three-month-old baby. She has no inner autobiography, no story about who she is or how she fits into her family. But she is already a careful observer of the emotional currents flowing toward her. Babies study faces with astonishing precision. They imitate expressions, cry strategically, and adjust their behavior in response to the reactions they receive. They learn what others expect of them, forming predictive models of their caregivers. The caregivers reciprocate, refining their sense of the baby’s developing personality through predictive modeling.

As children grow, developing language and mobility, they experiment with how their words and actions influence their caregivers’ emotional responses. They become very skilled at predicting how their behaviors will affect their caregivers’ mental models of the child. Essentially, the child is building predictive models of how they appear to caregivers. These models form the foundation of our social self. Our caregivers serve as social mirrors that reflect back to us the nature of our selves.

We face a lifelong challenge of being mirrored by many others. Who I am appears differently to different viewers. A child learns who she is in relation to her mother, father, siblings, and teachers. Adolescents figure out who they are through friends, rivals, and crushes. As adults, we gather even more perspectives: colleagues, supervisors, neighbors, strangers, partners, and audiences. Imagine attending a high school reunion as a confident, accomplished middle-aged adult, only to be unexpectedly pulled back into an awkward teenage version of yourself you thought was long gone. The vulnerabilities and shortcomings you spent years overcoming are suddenly put on display. Who is this awkward, embarrassing teenager you’ve become?

Throughout our lives, we try to unify these conflicting selves into a single person. It is impossible to define ourselves within a constantly changing frame of reference. There is no fixed ground, and our identity only exists relative to others and uncontrollable circumstances. This overwhelming instability of selfhood can be nearly unbearable. The vulnerability of the self drives many of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Our most intense experiences of pride, shame, and guilt derive their power from how we imagine others see us. Many aspects of psychopathology may involve distortions and disruptions of predictive self-modeling.

It is little wonder that the Buddhist idea of no self often feels inconceivable and threatening. Zen master Dōgen once advised his students to “take the backward step and turn the light inward.” This backward step is a shift in vantage point, a way of seeing the self as a process rather than a possession. We step back far enough to watch the recursive loops of self-modeling at work, to see the constant mirroring, predicting, performing, and adjusting through which a self is assembled moment by moment. Dōgen goes on to say that in taking this backward step, our body and mind drop away and our “original face” appears. In our recursive self-consciousness, we can find the wonder of nature discovering itself.

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