One of the core differences that sort of sets Buddhism, the darma apart, the Buddha's

insights was the teaching of Anatta, which is the very profound proposition the Buddha made some 2,500 years ago that if you observe your feelings, your body, your perceptions, your thoughts, your consciousness, if you observe your

consciousness if you observe what's going on that makes up your experience you will not find anything that makes up your experience you will not find anything that could possibly present a stable lasting inner identity yourself.

Which is not to say that at this moment you don't have a self, of course you do.

We all have selves at any given time.

And in fact, we have personality traits traits but we don't have anything that is

static lasting frozen

unchanging this is

when the Buddha says, you know, if you look really closely over time, you'll see that not only do body feelings, perceptions change, but if you observe your thoughts, sometimes they'll spiral out of control and they'll lead you in directions that are completely outside of your control. So there's nothing really in there that is a little inner me guiding and making all the decisions.

To have a human birth means that you're going to inherit a body with its own needs emotions that are largely

acting on unconscious impulses as our feelings and that even our thoughts are very often not within our control.

If you think of it in terms of what we know about evolution, it would make no sense for

us to have a static unchanging inner self because we are constantly in radically different situations.

Just today you probably went on the New York City subway system or you walked around the street

where you were surrounded by complete strangers that you didn't know.

But then you may have gone to a workplace or to a place where people that you did know and engaged

in whatever does you do for a living or do for you did today.

And those different contexts require completely

different actions completely different states of vigilance completely

different states of awareness if you had one single frozen state you would only be good for one context in your life.

But in fact, most of us quite effortlessly

change the way we think and act when we're around friends, then we act when we're at work,

...