The self is unavoidable.
So, most talk of “self-transcendence” is a bluff.
There is no cognition without self-reference. Every perception, judgment, memory, or plan is indexed to a point of orientation. Something appears as relevant, as threatening, as useful, as negligible. That indexing is not optional. It is not narcissism, personality, or ego inflation. It is the minimal condition for information to become actionable at all. A system with no center cannot act, cannot learn, cannot even distinguish signal from noise. This is architecture not psychology.
So no, the self cannot be removed. Not by meditation, insight, philosophy, or honesty. Any claim to the contrary quietly presupposes the very thing it denies which is a standpoint from which the denial is made. That is why “no-self” doctrines always smuggle the self back in as “awareness,” “witness,” or “that which sees there is no self.” The name changes. The function does not.
What can change is not the existence of self-reference, but its degree of opacity. The unavoidable part is the self-model as a functional index, this body here, this memory store, this action system, this perspective. Metzinger is right about this. The self is a model, but the model is necessary. There is no view from nowhere.
The optional part is the narrative inflation layered on top of that model. The stories of specialness, grievance, destiny, moral drama, cosmic meaning, personal importance. Those can thin out. They can lose grip. They can stop pretending to be reality itself. That is not self-transcendence. That is self-deflation.
So when people report “self-transcendence,” what has actually happened is one of three things. Either the narrative self has temporarily quieted while the functional self remains fully intact. Or attention has shifted away from autobiographical content, which feels like disappearance but is not. Or language has failed, and a structural change is being misdescribed in mystical terms.
There is no cognition without a center. There is no experience without indexing. There is no action without a self-model. Anyone promising otherwise is selling anesthesia, not truth.The honest conclusion is colder and cleaner, you cannot escape the self. You can stop worshipping its stories. That is not liberation. It is accuracy.
The self does not need to vanish to stop lying; it only needs to be seen as a tool rather than a truth.
