Achieving Buddhist Not-Self at the Montreal Airport

Anātman, Utilitarianism, Determinism, and AirPods

I was sitting at my gate in Montreal’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport waiting for my redeye flight to Bogotá to board. I sat reading a Haruki Murakami novel, with my AirPods charging next to me. Though I was bleary-eyed and fatigued (due to the late hour and the nature of air travel), I giddily awaited the moment I could, once on the plane, pop in my earbuds and listen to podcasts, music, and perhaps a Gary Gulman set or two. But my drowsiness overpowered my reasoning capabilities, and when my section of seats was called, I dutifully got up, handed my boarding pass and passport to the flight attendant guarding the gate, got on the flight, and took my seat—my earbuds still charging by my bench in the terminal.

The annoyance I felt upon realizing my stupidity was amplified by the unfortunate reality that I couldn’t get off the flight to retrieve my expensive gadget. (The aisle was full of people boarding the plane, not disembarking; the flow was in the wrong direction. And once everyone had taken their seats, the door was already closed.) My earbuds and charger were doomed.

Annoyance and anger flooded into me; I was enraged at my seemingly unfair plight. The Buddhist teaching of not-self, anātman in Sanskrit, would encourage me to take critical distance from these unsavoury sensations, to view them objectively rather than to embody and experience them, to shun them from my self. Here’s how it works:

The self is theoretically made of five aggregates: physical form (the body and its organs), feelings, perceptions, mental formations (thoughts, emotions, intentions, etc.), and consciousness. Buddhists argue that these five aggregates are impermanent and out of our control. If our nature, the aggregates of our self, is constantly in motion, how can we regard the self as a continuous, contiguous entity? And if we lack control over these aggregates, how can we say there is one being, the self, at the centre of it all, calling the shots?

Ever notice how thoughts seemingly pop into your head? You could be trying to read or solve math problems and some foreign thought will invade your consciousness. Sometimes you might even cringe in embarrassment at particularly weird thought. This indicates that your thoughts, perceptions, and consciousness constantly changing, and you lack the ability to guide them. Obviously, this is a short argument for a controversial concept; many books have been written arguing for Buddhist not-self.

Though I appreciate these teachings and consider them to be if not true at least instrumental to happiness, I am not a meditator and so have little capacity to distance myself from my feelings. Merely knowing you lack control over your feelings doesn’t erase the illusion of self and all suffering it entails.

This is where Western philosophy comes in. While I lack anātman, I do have a strong belief in both determinism and utilitarianism, which go a long way to accomplishing what not-self would have accomplished. Determinism demolishes the illusion of self in same way anātman does. It shows that our aggregates are not within our control: they change due to the intricate physical interaction of atoms and molecules. And utilitarianism nullifies the egotistical (or selfish) illusions that often emanate from a belief in the self—for a Buddhist, dispensing of illusions would likely be accomplished by meditating.

When I face my own mistakes, I try to counteract my frustration with a reminder that exogenous circumstances made me do what I did, not my own free will (whose existence I deny). If I truly succeeded in banishing all sense of personal responsibility, that would probably be pragmatically bad. But I don’t worry about this because the beliefs of justice, merit, free will, and personal agency are evolutionarily hard-wired into us as instincts, and I doubt I or humans in general will ever lose them entirely.

Once I had at least partially forgiven myself for my mistake, which lightened the load of my frustration, I tried to embrace a utilitarian view of the situation. Why was my losing my earbuds actually bad? Morally, it wasn’t. The enjoyment I would have gotten from using those earbuds on the flight is probably comparable to the enjoyment some stranger will get from using them, once they find them at the airport gate. And this stranger’s enjoyment is just as valuable as my own. The belief that I am special and extra deserving of happiness is arbitrary and illusory, instilled in me by evolutionary necessity. In fact, the stranger’s enjoyment might be even greater than mine would have been because they’ll get the extra boost of excitement that comes from finding free shit, and very expensive free shit, at that.

Some part of me thinks that my use of the earbuds would have been more pure, more enjoyable, morally better. But that comes from the irrational belief that my taste in music, podcasts, and stand-up comedy is better than that of the person who found my earbuds. I would have listened to refined, cultured music by artists like Stevie Wonder and Natasha Atlas, whereas the stupid freeloading oaf who stumbles upon my earbuds in the airport will use them to listen to Justin Bieber (or to watch homemade-bomb recipe videos, for all I know). But these insane (fleeting) thoughts come from the cognitive bias present in nearly all humans which makes them view themselves as smarter and morally superior to the average human.

The two hundred dollars my parents used to buy me those earbuds for Christmas were not really fundamentally ours. Contingency and irrationality happened to send that money, and the subsequent happiness tied to it, to me and my family for no good moral reason. (Perhaps my parents would take issue here. For the record, I don’t oppose the instrumental value of distributing money to encourage work; I just don’t think people deserve the resources they have.) It just as well could have been that some random stranger got that money and therefore those earbuds.

I hope that lucky bastard enjoys his Justin Bieber.