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But then the external world does exist, for how could our mind be encountered by nothing and there be an impact of our mind against nothing? But this non-self that encounters self is precisely a product of self, a product of the imagination which creates an object, which projects outside us an appearance before which we pause as before something real which should be outside us.
For how can there be perception without a percipient? or how consciousness without a conscious entity? or how can that entity be conscious of feeling without being simultaneously conscious that it is itself which feels, without knowing, consequently, that it has a self, or without being warranted, if it possess the gift of speech, in declaring, in words even more emphatic than those of Descartes, 'I myself am'? And how, if these questions do not admit of reply, can Professor Huxley be warranted in declaring self and non-self to be mere 'hypotheses by which we account for the facts of consciousness, and adding that of their existence we 'neither have, nor by any possibility can have' the same 'unquestionable and immediate certainty as we have of the states of consciousness which we consider to be their effects'? Surely the existence of self is one of the most direct and immediate subjects of consciousness; yet it does not depend for evidence on consciousness alone, but is as unanswerably demonstrable as that two straight lines cannot enclose space or that parallel lines cannot meet, or as any other mathematical negation.
That is why the nature foreordained, through which music expresses itself to this world of appearance, is one of the most mysterious things under the sun an abyss in which strength and goodness lie united, a bridge between self and non-self.
One thing which can, by strictest logical process, be shown so to rest, is the existence of a thinking self; and another is the existence of a non-self or external universe; but of this external universe we know scarcely anything beyond the bare fact that it exists.
Then he won't feel his self any more, then he won't feel the pains of life any more, then he finds a short numbing of the senses. When he falls asleep over his bowl of rice-wine, he'll find the same what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape their bodies through long exercises, staying in the non-self. This is how it is, oh Govinda."
Whoever thus assures himself of the existence of self obtains simultaneously equal assurance of the existence of non-self; for feeling that his conscious self is not boundless, but is confined within limits, he cannot doubt that beyond those limits there must be space, and, receiving continual sensations from without, he perceives that there are, in external space, potentialities of imparting sensations.
It is very unwise to apply tests and use arguments concerning animals which, if applied with equal strictness to human conduct, would prove human society irrational and purely selfish. Mammals may be self-centred. But the highest forms have set their faces away from self and toward the non-self; some have at least started on the road which leads to unselfishness.
These and other ways he learned to go, a thousand times he left his self, for hours and days he remained in the non-self. But though the ways led away from the self, their end nevertheless always led back to the self.
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