To be clear, I do believe that some people have these experiences (some people I know have had them, even). Where my issue comes in is that I think it’s a mistake to assume that because you experience having no self, that means you actually literally have “no self” in all the meaningful senses of that word. 

I have two concerns here.

1) An experience of something being a certain way does not itself make it not that way. By analogy, if someone has an LSD trip where they have the experience of “not having a body”, that experience itself doesn’t necessarily imply that they truly don’t have a body. Similarly, the experience of not having a self doesn’t automatically mean the self doesn’t “exist” in any meaningful sense. An experience of something being true is different than the thing being true, even if that experience feels incredibly real and accurate.

2) The “self” refers to more than just the feeling of having a self, or there being a “self” that chooses our thoughts. There are lots of aspects of self, and even if we rule some out, that doesn’t mean there is no self at all; it only means some versions of self don’t hold. For instance, one part of having a self – and of myself being different from you – is that when I prick my finger, I directly feel it, but you don’t. That makes me a self that’s different than you. Meditation doesn’t remove this notion of self. There are many other notions of self as well, such as us existing as a bundle of personality traits, associations, memories, etc., that meditation also doesn’t remove. 

On the other hand, to defend meditation practices for a moment, I do think that they can show us that some of our naive assumptions about our experiences are genuinely incorrect. For instance, by causing us to pay a lot more attention than normal to our moment-to-moment experience, meditation can lead us to realize that our mind doesn’t work the way we assumed. A good example of this is when we pay close attention to where our thoughts come from and, in doing so, notice that many of them seem to just appear in our minds without us consciously choosing to think them. I believe that’s a valid observation. It’s less “I feel this is true, so it must be” and more “I paid more attention to what’s happening moment-to-moment and noticed things weren’t operating the way I had assumed”. I think, at most, meditation may show that we don’t have a “self” in some particular sense of the word “self” that many people might assume we do have.  This may be important (perhaps very important), but it’s different from saying “we have no self,” full stop.

Additionally, I know that people who have nondual experiences (where they experience a lack of self during meditation) often view it as very beneficial. For instance, they may feel it leaves them feeling more deeply okay, more joyous, and less prone to suffering. I believe that some people do have experiences like these, and that that’s awesome. But also, that’s different than saying that “there is no self”.

Finally, I want to clarify that not all non-dual practitioners and teachers make the claims I’m describing above – I’m just reacting to those that do. I also am not saying that none of our naive ideas about the self are confused – some likely are, and some definitions of the self that we might assume exist don’t exist in the way we might think. For instance, if you pay close attention, there is no separate, identifiable, enduring, independently existing controller of our thoughts and actions – and you may well find, upon searching, that every candidate for self ends up just being an object in awareness. And you may even find that the feeling of having a self is itself simply a feeling. Yet, there’s also a lot more to ideas of a “self” than only those things. And saying “something isn’t what appears” or “this one definition doesn’t hold up to careful observation” is different from “this thing doesn’t exist at all”. I think that just claiming “there’s no self” may be more accurately re-stated as “some notions of the self turn out not to make sense or to dissolve when you pay close enough attention.”

This piece was first written on March 23, 2026, and first appeared on my website on April 10, 2026.