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Society tells you that you must suppress your urges for the good of society. Yet all of these same social codes are based upon a profound misunderstanding of who we truly are. They’re based on the concept of the individual self. The concept of self relies upon past and future. “I have a past. “I have a future.” You say “I was made fun of as a child because of my horribly out-of-fashion shoes,” or fear that “I will die some day in a freak accident with a bowling pin.” Where is that I who will die? For that matter, where is the I that is reading this word right now?

Try to define it. Try to find it. Really, really try. It’s essential you do.

I lived in Africa as a child, played bass for Zero Defex from 1982 to 1984, moved to Japan in 1993, got married in 1999, and so on, and so on, and so on. Though I did all of these things, there was, from the beginning, no “self” involved in any of these actions. We tend to think of time as a line stretching from the past, to the present, and into the future, and we can see the action of cause and effect. For instance, when I was a little kid living in Nairobi, Kenya, I kept three-horned Jackson’s chameleons as pets (amazing creatures they were too, just like miniature triceratopses), and these lizards left scratches on my hands that turned into tiny scars I can still see. So there is some relationship between the boy of ten in 1974 and the person who’s typing this now. This is a fact, and based on these kinds of facts, we’ve created the idea of “self.”

But time isn’t really like a line.

Sure, you can find evidence that things happened, photographs, old letters, scars on your hands. But the time itself is gone. I can plan for the future. I’m writing these words right now hoping someday they’ll end up in being read by someone who’s interested in them. But that doesn’t exist where I am now. It’s a dream for me. The only thing that exists right now is the action of typing. The only real time is now. Real time is so short you can’t even perceive it. Perceptions necessarily lag after the real events that trigger them. Thoughts are even further behind.

There’s no past and no future. And if there is no past and no future, the concept of “self” ceases to make any sense.

It’s like when The Who were on The Russell Harty Show in 1973. Pete Townshend pushed over one of his Marshall stack amps which fell with a thud and a crash of cymbals onto Keith Moon’s drums, which in turn collapsed upon John Entwistle’s Ampeg amp stacks, which also crashed to the studio floor. “Now” is like Keith Moon’s drums. “The past” is Pete Townshend’s amp, which created the motion by which Keith’s drums now fall. “The future” is John Entwistle’s amplifiers. “Self” only exists as a collective name for that series of smashes, crashes, and bangs. That’s all.

“He pissed me off,” we may say. The actual fact is that some action took place in the past that wasn’t to your liking at some specific time. What arose in response to that action were your long-developed habits of feeling aversion to that kind of action. A “you” appeared because of what happened. “He pissed me off” isn’t what happened. What you should say is, “being pissed off caused me to exist.” “You” didn’t exist until there was something for “you” to exist in relationship to, and in this case that something is something to be angry about. “You” are the reaction called “being pissed off.” “You” is that sustained stream of thoughts that reinforces anger, that sees itself as being the same entity to which “he” did something in the past. It is a memory being played over and over like an old school dance-beat on a DJ’s tape loop, working hard at sustaining itself, knowing that the moment it stops repeating itself “you” will cease to exist. “I’m angry” is wrong. “Right now I am anger,” is closer to the truth of the matter.

My sister’s ex-husband wrote me an email as he was going through the divorce proceedings with my sister, and stated our usual concept of anger wonderfully: “It’s impossible not to feel angry