Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.

This is episode number 56.

I am your host Noah Rosheta and today I'm talking about what makes you you.

Andrew Olensky, author of the book Untangling Self, a Buddhist investigation of who we really

are, says that according to classical Buddhist thought, self is a view.

In other words, it is a product of our perception.

Perception is something that's always happening.

It's the ongoing stream of perceptions that help us to interpret the experience we're

having of reality.

And this is a process that's happening all the time from moment to moment.

Olensky says that perception is an event that occurs rather than a thing that exists.

So we can imagine it like we're watching the still frames of a film.

Each frame is unique as it's captured, but as it's played in our mind, it's like a continuous

film.

We see this process as a cohesive narrative or a story.

So if we were able to pause this ongoing film that I like to call the perception of life

or something like that and see the individual frames frame by frame, what would we see?

And remember from the Buddhist perspective, it's not even necessarily about what we see.

It's about how do we see what we see?

This is where the teaching of the five aggregates come in.

Before I jump into the teaching, I want to give a quick update on a few house cleaning

items with the podcast.

...