“Well, neither do I.” A sceptical silence fell over the table. For a moment the background barista and Toronto traffic noises were in the foreground.
“Now you’re just being difficult.” My friend broke the silence. He was kind of right, but it was about the wording. He’d said, “I don’t believe I have past and future lives”, which ignores the most important issue.
Who doesn’t believe?
And if you can’t identify who does or doesn’t believe, how do we talk about their past or future – in this life or a different one?
Continuity of consciousness is central to Buddhism, but almost all of the things I use to identify “me” will not continue after I die.
Which leads me to question if the things that I identify as “me”, are actually… me? Or anyone, for that matter?
I’d been studying Buddhism in India for years by then, but I first went over quite unconvinced by many Buddhist views. What I quickly learned was this: when it comes to how reality works, we’re often asking the wrong questions.
And even when they’re not wrong, the questions are still not pushing as deeply as they could.
This series has been building toward this. Dereification of ideas, thoughts and memories can reduce pain, mental illness, and symptoms of trauma. It even gives us the flexibility and nuance to address different ethical dilemmas and better empathise with others. But the most interesting target of dereification is one that, until recently, has been almost uniquely a Buddhist domain.
The self.
Most people first hear about mindfulness as stress reduction, mental health support, emotion regulation and the like. These are all great reasons to do mindfulness training - my own research looked specifically at mindfulness for anxiety and depression, but these are more like supports than the main event.
Buddhist traditions operate a little differently, with mindfulness serving as a skill that enables deconstructive practices1 to target our beliefs about who we are.
This is a different, much stranger project than stress reduction, and it’s gaining increasing interest in psychological circles.
If you’ve ever said something regrettable to someone in your life, this makes you pretty normal. I’ve done it, pretty sure my neighbours will have done it, and most likely your friends and family will have done it. But have you ever identified with it?
Fused the action to your identity?
Doing something stupid doesn't make you stupid.
Saying something mean doesn't make you mean.
Put differently: Have you ever been angry with yourself? If you’ve ever chastised yourself with “what’s wrong with you?”, or “why are you so stupid?”, or something similar, then you’ve most likely reified something you’ve done as part of your identity.
Perhaps it still seems abstract, so I’ll say it like this: doing something stupid doesn’t make you stupid. Saying something mean doesn’t make you mean. It’s you doing something stupid or mean, which is different. People often resist this idea, but the logic is clear, and it works both ways.
If you’ve done something clever or kind (and I’m confident you have), then you might think “I’m clever”, or “I’m kind”. But if you’ve previously done something regrettable and scolded yourself for being stupid or mean, then which is it? You can’t be both.
But you can be neither.
Not long ago, there was no room for a claim like this in psychological circles. For those of us on the contemplative side of things, it has often felt as though contemplative science was more about running meditators through mazes than about a true dialogue. That’s changing quickly, as more and more scientists turn to contemplative theories that underpin the practices they’ve been researching.
Some of their conclusions border on Buddhist philosophy as they trace mental distress to the strength with which we identify with habits, memories, and emotions rather than treating them as ongoing, changing processes.
This gets ever more subtle as we travel from the reification of fear and ideas about pain, to the reification of rumination and worry, and even to metacognitive beliefs – beliefs about our thoughts, ideas and memories.
Two recent papers23 capture this subtlety better than anything I’ve read in years, carrying the field into distinctly Buddhist territory by examining the thoughts and ideas we have about ourselves.
These papers support a classic Buddhist view: what we call a self is a label applied to changing processes, yet we relate to the label as though it were something solid and enduring. This leads to a very rigid sense of self, which inhibits the flexibility we need to live in a complicated world that can throw joy and adversity at us seemingly at random. This flexibility is also related to resilience to trauma and adversity4
In the Buddhist model, there are five of these processes: one physical (the body) and four mental. The researchers identify ten and, in a rare move for a scientific paper, link them to the different components of the 5-part Buddhist model; rather than a self, they call it a “self-pattern”.
A pattern of changing processes rather than a fixed, observable thing.
This caught my attention immediately. It’s not every day that a contemporary psychological model maps onto an ancient framework I’d learned in the Himalayas and translated many times from Tibetan. And perhaps the most important part is this: they also identify rigidity in the self-pattern as a driver of mental distress – identifying with a fixed label instead of the constantly changing processes it points to.
It's not every day that a contemporary psychological model maps onto an ancient framework I'd learned in the Himalayas and translated many times from Tibetan."
This is how you could identify as mean or stupid, despite doing kind and clever things.
Or identify with a diagnosis of depression or anxiety rather than treat them as processes you need help to work back into healthy patterns.
The conclusions are startlingly similar and simple. (i) You don’t exist the way you think you do, and (ii) that’s a very good thing.
This is quite different from many psychological models that rest on the existence of an independent self that engages in patterns of behaviour. Some of these patterns are helpful, and we work to change the ones that aren’t. The self-pattern model says there are ongoing processes that produce a sense of self, and if we identify too much with that and ignore the processes, it creates mental distress.
You don't exist the way you think you do — and that's a very good thing.
This is where the conversation becomes more serious, because there are risks, and a contemplative approach like this should come with a warning. Not fine print hidden at the bottom, and not a graphic health warning on a cigarette packet, but some guardrails need to be built into this. Research into the adverse effects of meditation is a very new field5, and there’s still not much research to guide us in best practices yet, but we can look to Buddhism to find some safety and a middle way, because there are reasons Buddhist traditions rarely taught these practices in isolation.
As meditation begins to loosen the rigidity of a sense of self, we’re moving away from what Buddhism calls the extreme of permanence. This can make for big improvements in our wellbeing, but if we dereify our sense of self without proper preparation, there’s a danger that it can take us from mistaking ourselves as solid and unchanging to mistaking ourselves as not existing at all. Then we fall into the extreme of nihilism, which psychologists might recognise as a type of dissociation or identity destabilisation, and it is a genuine risk of these practices.
The deeper Buddhist traditions recognised this risk long before psychologists began documenting adverse effects. They didn’t avoid these practices. They surrounded them with preparation. And that preparation may prove to be one of the most important contributions Buddhism can make to contemplative science.
That’s where the next post will pick up.
The guardrails that the Buddhist traditions built around these practices aren’t esoteric or inaccessible. They’re structured, teachable, and sequenced — and they’re what Ground State course is built around. It’s also the course I used in my PhD.
If this series has you curious about what it actually looks like to practise dereification safely, with the preparation the tradition recommends, that’s where we go deeper.
Dahl, C. J., Lutz, A., & Davidson, R. J. (2015). Reconstructing and deconstructing the self: cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice. Trends in cognitive sciences, 19(9), 515-523.
Gallagher, S., Raffone, A., Berkovich-Ohana, A., Barendregt, H. P., Bauer, P. R., Brown, K. W., ... & Vago, D. R. (2024). The self-pattern and Buddhist psychology. Mindfulness, 15(4), 795-803.
Berkovich-Ohana, A., Brown, K. W., Gallagher, S., Barendregt, H., Bauer, P., Giommi, F., ... & Amaro, A. (2024). Pattern theory of selflessness: How meditation may transform the self-pattern. Mindfulness, 15(8), 2114-2140
Kotler, S., Mannino, M., Fox, G., & Friston, K. (2026). The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 20, 1812957.
Lindahl, J. R., Britton, W. B., Cooper, D. J., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2019). Challenging and adverse meditation experiences: Toward a person-centered approach.