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[...] you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, “What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?”
William James "Varieties of Religious Experience"
William James: Potential being
“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.” —William James.
Evelyn Underhill - Mysticism (1911)
Humans are not just social animals. Rather, our consciousness of a Self there inside comes from dukkha, the thirst to keep existing that's inherent to having a body, intimately personal but also universal for sentient beings.
A dhammic perspective on individuality is that it's simply not there. The self-assured individual, the most independent person you can imagine, is still composed entirely of elements that aren't just them. Others tell us what's real and who we are, and we learn responses, and that's all we are. But that also doesn't mean "I" or "You" DON'T exist, that we started to exist at any point, or that we can meaningfully cease to exist.
A self can be represented and perceived, and we have solid explanatory reasons courtesy of evolutionary sciences to understand why humans evolved Being as a practical survival tool; we have solid explanations from behaviorist psychology of all sources for how dukkha works in individual consciousness. Our bodies have mechanisms to sustain a sense of self, monitor our bodies and contexts, form conceptual thoughts and volitional intentions, and that fact has only been rigorously studied by modern science, it can't effectively be proven or perceived except by practice at the scale of the person. I can know with extreme certainty from Western sciences that my self is simply not a thing -- it is and isn't a social environment, a body, a brain, a physical environment, such that "Self" just isn't A thing. It doesn't exist or not exist, it's just not A thing that's true anywhere, ever, for anyone.
William James spent a lot of his life making a variety of interconnected arguments against the existence of the self, even as he has enjoyed a very limited reading in this sense. Despite James' legacy as the first distinctly American philosopher, the scope of his legacy has been VERY limited to a kind of bland secularism. As Westerners, we're very used to Idealist and Absolutist thinking just...implicitly. We accept arguments against Idealism and Absolutism when we think the final implication is just secularism or atheism, and I see well-intentioned people including myself, all the time, neglecting to acknowledge that every argument for Atheism also holds for AMeism. If God doesn't exist because an Absolute, Idealized thing can't exist, neither does the Individual.
That does not, as many religious idealists would like to claim, indicate the existence of any God. It also does not indicate any sort of evidence for Rationalist Materialism. It indicates absolutely nothing about the existence of anything, that isn't true of all persons and all things said to exist. Jamesian Empiricism and Pluralism say we should understand all things by their parts and differences; the Dhamma tells us we can find out empirically how we are both made of non-self elements, AND pluralistic and diverse by nature. Modern civilization is not lacking in clear knowledge of non-self. It's practically applied all over: manipulating dukkha to create greed and ignorance is the basis of marketing; reaffirming people in their greed, hatred, and ignorance of mara is the basis of nationalism, capitalism, the military industrial complex.
Every single ideology that governs our lives in an unequal society is complex BECAUSE people are made of non-self elements and therefore extremely complicated. The same property of interdependence gives us individuality AND conformity, free will AND predictability at sufficient scale. A person is smart, independent, and to a fault does not *mean* harm. But "A" person does not exist, and a body of people in which each of us believe we're individuals, even if we believe those individuals compose a "We" and try very hard to *be* a good person, we should simply not try to "Be" a person. It's an unrealistic goal for all of us.
Can anyone seriously entertain that we would be here if the ultra rich understood they can't take it with them? That they can't digitize themselves, can't build indestructible bodies, can't live forever but AT BEST condemn themselves to consuming everything else to sustain themselves? The rich and powerful can't even pass it on as lasting existence in the world by building foundations or "leaving a legacy," not in any way that isn't just more senseless biting and eating. They do not understand that. I promise you. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump -- they sound ridiculous because they're being honest about how they regard themselves. They think they're Absolutes. We know enough about psychology, sociology, evolutionary theory, anthropology, *more than enough* to understand why a people with this extremely heightened dukkha, this implicit delusion of immortality, would be more successful in virtually any "civilized" "modern", society, let alone under Capitalist hegemony. We do not seem to understand how this relates to any given individual or what any of us can do about it.
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There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever.
William James "Varieties of Religious Experience"
De la discontinuité des extases
“Discontinu” ©Philippe QuĂ©au (Art ΚÎω) 2026 William James fait remarquer que l’expĂ©rience mystique s’impose comme une absolue Ă©vidence pour la conscience subjective qui en est favorisĂ©e; mais, pour tous ceux qui ne l’ont pas vĂ©cue eux-mĂŞmes, et qui ne peuvent donc s’appuyer que sur des tĂ©moignages Ă©trangers, avec toutes les mises en doute et les suspicions que cela implique, la notion mĂŞme…
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