“There is no self” is not a very precise or useful phrase, and much of the confusion here arises from that. The wisdom traditions assert that most people suffer from a problem of identification – that you are not who you take yourself to be. The self exists in the same sense that a tornado exists – as a process. The self is an ongoing mental process. The insight that can be found in meditation is that our identification with that process, or with other elements such as memories, personality, the body, our beliefs etc. does not hold up to scrutiny. We are not those things. As we slowly come to understand this, a lot of things begin to feel easier. So the interesting question is: who are you, really?

A second issue is a misunderstanding of “non-duality”. An experience of “having no self” is not the same as apprehending non-duality. All of us frequently experience the absence of self, during flow states, when absorbed in tasks, when asleep, or even when day-dreaming. Non-duality is something much more fundamental and much harder to describe.

A third issue is that apprehending non-duality is not a state of mind. People don’t experience a “state of non-duality”. It’s not a state. Unfortunately words fail us here because non-duality is inherently non-conceptual. But it’s more like: it’s always right here, and you either notice it, or you don’t. In fact it’s so obvious and ordinary that it feels irrelevant, like the screen in a movie theatre when the movie is playing.

Meditation won’t make your self dissolve. It doesn’t take away your memories. Everything is still there, just as it was before. But you can come to see things differently, like looking through a window at the garden outside, and then suddenly realising you can see your reflection in the window. The garden is still there and you can still see it. But it feels different.