Your cup is so full of your assumption that you cannot take in what I wrote. You are engaging in circular reasoning — you assume your conclusion as evidence of your conclusion. If you are saying that Buddhism centers on a logical fallacy, I concede your point.
Hume made a similar error of reasoning in assuming that because thoughts “succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” that meant there is no self. Kant showed the irrationality of Hume’s argument, but more importantly, Husserl showed that consciousness always exhibits intentionality — a knower directed at a known. He also showed that consciousness’s intentionality can also be directed at the self.
But we need not rely on philosophers of East and West to know we are a self. We need only reflect sympathetically like strings vibrating in unison.
Buddhism’s reflection is an intentionality at the wrong target. Buddhism is based on negation, the desire to negate the self to escape Saṃsāra. In its desire for No Self it engages in the circular reasoning of assuming that if we can convince ourselves we have no self we will indeed have no self and escape Saṃsāra. Pure assumption, made all the more ironic because it further assumes that all thoughts are illusions, which as I pointed out is contradictory. “I do not want to be a self, so I will ignore the self, and claim all evidence of the self is an illusion.” Circular reasoning.
If however, you meditate with openness, rather than Buddhism’s desire for negation, you will readily see the Self as a rich, vibrant entity. As a self, we have experiences, thoughts, feelings, moods, make judgments, perceive objects and time, and love. The Self has these, they do not exist without a self. As a self, we adapt, we grow, and we continually constitute our self with our thoughts and actions. We are part of the élan vital, individual but interconnected with the universe. able to commune with other individual selves to experience, learn, and love. The more we look inward with openness, the more we see our dynamic Self that is beneath the surface thoughts and reactions to the world, the more we see our connections with the universe they lie at the level of our Self, not on the level of the everyday.
Hume was wrong about the self, as is Buddhism. The self is not a sequence of separate psychological states. We experience our self as a seamless totality — qualitative multiplicity. Our actions flow from our whole self as free actions. We can encounter our real self by, as Bergson said, a sympathetic entering into what is observed. And it is a wonderful knowing.
What I do not understand about Buddhism is why it would throw all that goodness away for nothing.
