The Self Was Never Solid: What Buddhism Knew and Neuroscience Is Catching Up To

There's a sentence in contemporary neuroscience that would not have surprised a meditation teacher from twenty-five centuries ago.

The sentence is that the self is not a thing you have. It's a process your brain is running.

I wrote about this recently in the context of Anil Seth's work on consciousness as controlled hallucination. Your brain predicts the world and uses your senses to correct the predictions. The same is true of your sense of being someone. That felt continuity, the person you take yourself to be, is generated moment to moment rather than stored somewhere.

Buddhism got there first, by a considerable margin, and by a completely different route.

The parallel, stated carefully

The Buddhist teaching closest to this is anattā, usually translated as non-self.

It isn't the claim that you don't exist. It's the claim that when you look closely for a stable, unchanging self behind your experience, you don't find one. You find sensations, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and awareness, all of them in motion. The self shows up as a pattern in that motion rather than as the thing having it.

That's remarkably close to what predictive processing describes. Not identical, and I want to be careful here. Buddhist teaching arrived through introspection and centuries of argument. Seth arrives through cognitive neuroscience. They're answering different questions and they don't map onto each other cleanly.

But the shape is the same. There is no small person inside your head watching the show. There's a process that generates the impression of one.

Both get misread the same way

Here's what I find more interesting than the resemblance itself.

Both frameworks spend enormous energy defending against the same misunderstanding.

Seth has to keep clarifying that calling perception a hallucination doesn't mean the world isn't real. Controlled hallucination is a claim about how experience is produced, not about whether anything exists.

Buddhist teachers have to keep clarifying that non-self doesn't mean nothing matters. Nihilism is explicitly rejected in the tradition. It's treated as an error, not a conclusion.

This isn't only a resemblance people notice in passing. Researchers have built formal accounts of it, which I've written about separately in When the Mind Stops Predicting.

Where psychedelics come in

The most striking study combined both directly.

A team at the University of Zurich, led by Lukasz Smigielski under Franz Vollenweider, ran a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial inside an actual meditation retreat. Thirty-nine experienced meditators spent five days in silence following a structured Zen discipline called sesshin, a fifteen-hour daily schedule of sitting meditation, walking meditation, mindful work, and recitation. On the fourth morning, half of them received psilocybin and half received placebo.

The psilocybin group went deeper into meditation and reported self-dissolution experiences that were overwhelmingly positive rather than frightening, with no accompanying spike in anxiety. Four months later, they showed greater gains in how they were functioning socially and psychologically than the placebo group did. Those gains were confirmed by people who knew them, not just self-reported. And the size of the gain tracked how intensely the self had dissolved during the session.

So this is not hypothetical. Psilocybin has been formally studied inside a Zen retreat, with the retreat structure fully intact.

The part that surprised me

Here's where my own assumption turned out to be wrong.

I had a vague sense that contemplative practice aims at transcending the body. Leaving it behind. Getting out.

That isn't what the traditions do. In Theravāda practice, the unusual states that arise along the way, including lights, rapture, and dissociative phenomena, have a classical name: vipassanā-upakkilesa, the corruptions of insight. They are explicitly things to notice and not to chase. Zen has a parallel category in makyō. Attachment to remarkable states is treated as a trap, not a destination.

What the practices actually instruct is attention to breath, posture, and bodily sensation. The method is going further in.

And this is exactly where Seth's account points. He emphasizes that the sense of being a self is grounded in interoception, the brain's ongoing perception of signals from inside the body. Your feeling of existing is built from your body's continuous modeling of its own condition.

Put those together and something clarifies. If the self is constructed largely out of the body's self-monitoring, then the way to loosen the construction is to go toward that monitoring rather than away from it. You don't dissolve the self by escaping the body. You dissolve it by paying such close attention to the body that the construction becomes visible as construction.

That's a strange and satisfying convergence. Two thousand five hundred years of practice arriving at a method that predictive processing would recommend.

The disagreement is real

I'd be misrepresenting the situation if I made this sound harmonious. Buddhists are actively arguing about this, and the argument is substantive.

Some teachers have moved toward integration. Writing in Lion's Roar, Matteo Pistono reported from the first Psychedelic Buddhism conference, held in February 2025 at The New School in New York and drawing more than six hundred participants online and in person. Teachers from Theravada, Insight, Zen, and Vajrayana lineages spoke about ethics, risk, legality, and the difficulties of integrating psychedelics into practice. Stephen Batchelor, whose talk was titled "Psychedelics and the Middle Way," described LSD bringing him to a profound state of non-reactive awareness, which he identified as the core of dharma practice.

Others object, and not casually. The fifth precept calls for abstaining from intoxicants, and many teachers remain committed to it. In a 2018 piece for Tricycle, Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, resident teacher at Vipassana Hawai'i, argued that practitioners get attached to marvelous states while calling it spiritual exploration. His formulation is worth quoting directly. Wanting things to be other than they are is the heart of our imprisonment, he told the magazine, and changing the colors, textures, and flavors of the prison doesn't lead us to freedom.

I think that objection is worth sitting with rather than answering. It names a real failure mode. A powerful state is not the same as a changed life, and the gap between them is where most of the actual work lives. That's the same gap that shows up in psychedelic therapy for depression, where the opening is the easy part and what follows is not.

The same Tricycle piece notes something else worth knowing. Many of the Americans who converted to Buddhism in its early decades here arrived by way of psychedelics in the first place. Whatever anyone concludes about the precept, that history is already in the tradition's American bloodstream.

What I take from it

Not that science has validated Buddhism. That framing flatters both and clarifies neither, and philosophers have pushed back on it hard. Evan Thompson's Why I Am Not a Buddhist is the serious version of that critique if you want to read it. Chris Letheby's work is worth reading alongside it, since he asks a closely related question about what psychedelic experiences can actually establish.

What I take is narrower and more useful.

Two traditions with nothing in common methodologically arrived at the same description of the self. Both say it's constructed. Both say the construction can be seen. Both say seeing it changes something. And both, when you look at what they actually recommend, point you toward your body rather than away from it.

For anyone carrying a version of themselves that has felt permanent for a very long time, that convergence is worth knowing about. The permanence was always the illusion. Not the self, and not the suffering, both of which are real enough. Just the sense that either one is fixed.

The work of integration, in any tradition, is learning to live from that knowledge rather than merely having had a glimpse of it.