What is the ‘self’? The 3 layers of your identity.
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0:00 Gish Jen: The self in culture
3:22 Michael Puett & Mark Epstein: The self in Eastern philosophy
8:35 Sam Harris: The self in neuroscience

Who am I? It's a question that humans have grappled with since the dawn of time, and most of us are no closer to an answer.

Trying to pin down what makes you YOU depends on which school of thought you prescribe to. Some argue that the self is an illusion, while others believe that finding one's "true self" is about sincerity and authenticity.

In this video, author Gish Jen, Harvard professor Michael Puett, psychotherapist Mark Epstein, and neuroscientist Sam Harris discuss three layers of the self, looking through the lens of culture, philosophy, and neuroscience.

Check Bruce Hood's book "The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity" at https://amzn.to/3izeFQy
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TRANSCRIPT:

GISH JEN: In the West, we feel that we must differentiate ourselves from others, endlessly. We have a model of self where the self is kind of like an avocado. We have a pit inside of us. The pit is our self, our essence, our identity. It is the thing to which we must above all be true. And of course, very importantly, we see that pit as unique. So that everything we do we want to show, to reflect that pit, to reflect that self. And we want it to be unique. In Asia, people frequently have a flexi-self, so it's a different kind of self. It is a self that's oriented more to duty than to rights, for instance. And very importantly, it is not, it does not have a cultural mandate to be different and to be unique. So if you ask, are they individuals? Of course they're individuals. Are they different? Of course they are different. But of course, for them, it's like, well of course I'm different, why would I make a big deal of that, right?

The difference is, how much significance do we attach to that difference? In other words, do we think it's very important to differentiate ourselves from others? So one of the ways that we do that, of course, is through choice. Choice in the West is very, very important. Everyone is always making choices. And honestly, a lot of those choices make us a little anxious. If you do a study where you are just sitting in an empty room, and you're making a choice, and you come from a more individualistic culture, you actually show signs of a little anxiety. Every little choice that you make, even in private, because it's defining of who you are, is a little loaded. They feel like, they just choose. When they make those choices it doesn't have this overlay. And that's one of the reasons they feel that actually we are less free than they are. So they think that we are the ones who are kind of in this prison where, like I say, every moment we must define ourselves. Well, isn't that awful? And of course the way that we live, we feel that, we want to be freely electing to live the way that we live. And so even when we're doing things like taking care of the elderly, for example, we want to feel that it's an extension of our great love, and the nature of our being to be able to take care of the elderly. Well, the other day I was having dinner with somebody who said, I just don't feel that. And it's just very, very hard. So somebody from a more flexi-self, or interdependent culture, would say, it's just your duty. And so for them, it's like, they help their elderly parent. They just go take care of the elderly parent because that's their duty. For them, this is really liberating. You just go do it and you don't expect it to be an expression of yourself. It's just what people do. From their point of view, we have made things very, very hard for ourselves to demand that everything should be an expression of our inner nature.

MICHAEL PUETT: We often like to think that the way to become a good person is to look within, find one's true self, the sort of natural self that we have. And once you've found that self, that natural thing that you are, the goal is to be sincere and authentic to that true self. So if we stick to what we naturally are meant to be, the gifts that we're naturally endowed with, that's how we can be a sincere, authentic person. Now, a lot of our Chinese philosophers would say, that sounds good, but is on the contrary extremely restraining—and constraining—to what we could do. The fact is, if we're messy creatures, as many of them would say, what we perhaps are in our daily lives are simply people whose emotions are being pulled out all the time, by people we encounter, interactions...

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