i'll be talking to you for four weeks 00:06:02 um about what i call losing yourself that is really understanding the idea of no self of selflessness not in the moral sense specifically though that will get there but not having a self 00:06:14 and of what it is to exist as a person uh without a self and i'll be doing this um from a variety of perspectives and one of the things that might make this 00:06:27 set of talks different from a lot of the talks that the barry center supports is that it won't be specifically or uniquely buddhist doctrine i will be relying on a lot of 00:06:40 buddhist arguments because i do that but also addressing a lot of western arguments in western literature and i won't be interested in doing a lot of textual work in fact i won't do any textual work at all even though i love doing that this will be really about the 00:06:53 idea about really how to understand the idea of not having a self and the idea and how to understand what it is to be a person so i'll draw on buddhist ideas and non-buddhist ideas on western ideas 00:07:07 but i won't be specifically giving a course in the history of buddhist thought about no-self nor will i be talking about practice this will be a very theoretical um set of lectures um but i think what i have to say will 00:07:20 be relevant um to those who are coming here in order to enrich their practice but i won't be specifically talking about that um most of what i'm doing will be based on a book that is 00:07:33 now in press called losing yourself how to be a person without a self

we can understand the fact that we exist conventionally um but as 00:53:05 neither the same nor different from the various constituents that we have that we can lack any core or self but still have a perfectly good existence just like chariots do and that that kind 00:53:17 of existence is enough to account for our existence through time without positing a persistent self or a soul that is strung along through all of those moments

in the third section we're going to focus on the ethical implications of all of this because i think that's really important that's why we do this and then in the fourth part we'll be 00:10:51 talking about what life looks like as a person as opposed to a self and why we should take all of this very seriously