Living without my self: Our culture valorises the big, coherent self: reading Robert Musil helps me embrace the beauty of my no-self existence - Sopuli

> Later on, as I moved from literature and into consciousness research in my work, I encountered similar views in other places: most prominently in Buddhist philosophy and in the Western eclectic and non-religious adoption of Buddhism as mindfulness. But also in the reductive and materialist accounts of personhood in Western philosophy that challenge the dominant essentialist and narrative accounts, represented by thinkers such as Hume and Mach, as well as Derek Parfit and Galen Strawson, who is similarly sceptical of the narrative approach: see his Aeon Essay ‘I Am Not a Story’ (2015). > This strand in Western thinking is much aligned with the Buddhist view – and, in fact, potentially originally informed by it. Alison Gopnik has pointed out that Hume might have been influenced by Tibetan and Theravada ideas, made available to him through Jesuit scholars who were familiar with these traditions and who stayed at the Royal College of La Flèche at the same time as Hume was working on his Treatise there. > It is reassuring for me that modern neuroscience finds no sign of a centre of agency or source of awareness in the brain, thus lending empirical support to my non-reductive and non-essentialist experience. Learning about all this has all helped me feel a little less weird. But Musil provided my first and strongest experience of recognition and validation. … > Reading Musil enabled me to poetically and rationally identify with and embrace my philosophical intuitions. The novel supplied me with the guiding existential principles of flexibility and mobility that I have lived by ever since. It helped me make sense of my first, and unintendedly strong, psychedelic trip and to psychologically integrate that experience in my life. And it has inspired and strengthened my meditation practice – when I guide meditation sessions at my philosophy centre in Oxford today, I often start with a reading from The Man Without Qualities. > In this novel, I met two other individuals who relate to the world as I do – without a sense of a singular and essential self or a progressive and coherent life-story – and who develop this experience into a meaningful existential position, illustrating the advantages and beauty of the no-self existence – including the potential for reduced personal suffering, greater social coherence and a sense of universal siblinghood. It alleviated my loneliness as a young student of Western egocentric narrative, taught me how to use my divergent experience as an existential advantage and has helped me live confidently as part of the no-self minority ever since.