For many people, the Buddha’s teaching about “not-self” (anatta) feels like an assault on themselves.  In fact, it’s the jailer come to unlock their cell door.  Tagore, the Nobel poet laureate wrote: 

He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon.  I am ever busy
building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by
day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.
I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand lest a
least hole should be left in this name; and for all the care I take I lose
sight of my true being.

This wall contains the cause of all unhappiness, and there is no freedom within it.  Still, we resist anything that could knock an opening into it, like the idea that no thing exists separate from everything else, or endures without change – including us.  We are dependent on rain and sun and plants and animals and other people and their machines and labor to eat, have shelter, move around and do our work.  And of course we change.  Hold a picture of yourself as a baby and look in the mirror. 

We all really do have a concept of ourselves and without it we couldn’t function in society, because we need some understanding of our relationships to everyone else in order to interact with them.  Where we really get into trouble, though, is coming to believe that this self-concept is a thing and that thing is us.   That’s when we build the wall that Tagore wrote about.   

It might help to think of this self-concept in terms of ego, because ego saturates all the details that go into what we think we are.  Ego is what clings to whatever characteristics we feel we should have, and it causes that painful rip in our pride when we’re forced to think we might not actually be all that.  Ego gives us that giddy pleasure of a compliment as well as the gloom when that glow wears off. 

Every phenomenon, including ourselves, is a flow of events.  Countless causes join in what we are being in any moment.  This is hard to see because when we try to look, and then when we catch a glimpse of this, there’s usually a backlash of the self, a period of feeling unsettled and out of sorts.  That’s when Tagore says we “plaster it with dust and sand” to make the wall impenetrable again.   Clinging to our self-concept is the root cause of all our clinging, the ultimate source of all our dukkha.

Whenever we can accept ourselves just as we are, we get some peace from the miseries inflicted by our egos and from all the things it compels us to cling to.  Letting go of our ideas of what we are or should be frees us from wanting to be anything.  We just are.  Totally free.  And finally, ironically, seeing through the concept of our selves as a separate, enduring thing frees us to truly love ourselves.