Consciousness and the Self

Look closely at the self and it starts to come apart. David Hume, in his Treatise of 1739, reported: ‘I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.’ The Buddha’s teaching of anatta, no-self, had reached a similar verdict more than two thousand years earlier: a person is five changing aggregates, none of them a self. Advaita Vedanta reached the opposite one, that what survives the inspection is the atman, pure consciousness, identical with Brahman. Carl Jung went the other way, down through dreams and symbols into what he called the collective unconscious.

None of these traditions has answered the hardest question in the field: why any of it is experienced at all.

The shelf holds primary texts in translation, Jungian studies, histories of meditation, trance and altered states, and modern philosophy of mind and neuroscience. David Chalmers named that question the hard problem of consciousness in a 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.