I can only experience the certainty or the illusion of being. — Louco

You can experience the illusion of being? In the present? Or in other words, you can not be and yet be deceived that you are?

This has already been answered, I refuse to objectify the subject in order to arrive at your paradox. If you are unsatisfied with my answer, we will just have to agree to disagree.

These sound like the ravings of a lunatic to me. — petrichor

Me also. Perhaps there's a problem with the way in which it's being described. But there are many texts in Buddhist and other spiritual literature about the 'death of self' which is like the portal to a higher dimension.

I don't know if you've ever encountered Krishnamurti's writings, but in some of them (particularly Krishnamurti's Notebook) there are very detailed descriptions of the sense of living without any sense of 'I and mine'. This sense, which is automatic and reflexive (which perhaps acts like a kind of 'strange attractor' in chaos theory) subtly but definitely changes the whole nature of cognition and perception. What it would be like to live without such a sense - well, we don't know.

To transpose the idea of the 'death of self' into a religious lexicon which is perhaps more intuitively familiar, consider the Biblical quote 'I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' (Galatians 2:20). There is a contemporary Christian mystic, Bernadette Roberts - I've just learned, writing this, that she only died in 2017 - whose best-known book was called 'The path to no-self'. (People often questioned whether this had anything to do with the Buddhist 'anatta' but she remained devoutly and firmly Christian in her orientation. Her wiki entry is here. I cite this only as evidence of the cross-cultural nature of this kind of insight.)

My point was that when you say that Buddhism says that something like the self or a universal self cannot be demonstrated to exist, whatever "demonstrate" might mean there, this is a faulty objection in a way similar to some of the verificationists saying that conscious experience cannot be demonstrated to exist and therefore should not be accepted to exist. Clearly, despite the fact that it cannot be empirically verified in the third-person, consciousness nevertheless is quite real. There really are experiences. How do you know? You know immediately. You are experiencing. You know that with more certainty than you know anything about any objective, third-person realities. You know that consciousness is real with far more certainty than you know that Antarctica is real. — petrichor

Buddhist philosophy on the matter was very much developed in response to dialogue with the existing mainstream Indian tradition, which is vastly different to our own secular-scientific worldview. In any case the Vedic tradition did have the idea that there was a real unchanging self that remained completely changeless while all else changed; 'set fast like a post' or 'a mountain peak' were two of the canonical descriptions. It was this sense of 'changeless self' which was challenged by the Buddha. This was challenged by appeal to the principle of dependent origination (pratityasamutpada), which describes a 12-fold causal chain that can be shown to give rise to all sensory and phenomenal experience. The Buddha would ask, where in this constant flux of experience (including very refined experiences of higher states of consciousness) is there something which is permanent, stable, and not subject to change? But to really explicate that, would be well beyond the scope of a forum thread, as this is a subject that occupies volumes of debate. (The Theravadin Tipitaka, or collection of scriptures, is about 24 times the volume of the Bible.)

Secondly, the sense in which the knowledge of one's own being is apodictic is, of course, the fundamental idea behind Descartes' famous Cogito. And although the cultural context in which Descartes articulated this idea was very different to the Indian, there's an ancient Indian school called Samkhya dualism, which is some respects is like Cartesian dualism (see here.) But again how all such ideas are developed and what they mean in practice, are very big questions. (There's a very interesting critique of Descartes' in Husserl's posthumously-published Crisis of the European Sciences, by the way.)
'

What is it exactly that Buddhists mean by "anatta"? What is the self that they deny? Is it the identity we have, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves? Is it the 'I thought'? Or are they denying the very witness? Are they claiming that they have gone beyond the witness into non-existence and experienced themselves not existing and have returned to tell the tale? Who is it that experienced enlightenment? Nobody? Who is liberated? What deceived-nobody is now undeceived and freed from the illusion of existing? Who was there to experience whatever it was that is being reported to have been experienced? Is someone reporting a non-experience? — petrichor

A burden indeed
are the five aggregates,
and the carrier of the burden
is the person.
Taking up the burden in the world
is stressful.
Casting off the burden
is bliss.
Having cast off the heavy burden
and not taking on another,
pulling up craving,
along with its root,
one is free from hunger,
totally unbound.

Bhāra Sutta

As far as the identity of the Tathāgata (which means 'thus gone' or 'well-gone', an honorific title describing the nature of the/a Buddha):

Freed from the classification of form, Vaccha, the Tathāgata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the sea. 'Reappears' doesn't apply. 'Does not reappear' doesn't apply. '

Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta

Perhaps there's a problem with the way in which it's being described. — Wayfarer

I've not yet looked deeply into Buddhist doctrine to try to understand exactly what their conception of a self is to see what it is exactly that is being denied. But I've sometimes suspected that what I have in mind when I use that word might not be what they are denying.

very detailed descriptions of the sense of living without any sense of 'I and mine'. — Wayfarer

I don't have any problem with the idea that one could live without the sense of 'I and mine'. But there still is the experiencer who simply is no longer generating self-referencing mental content. And perhaps this leads to a more peaceful state of mind, since detecting threats to self require thoughts of self and also identification with the forms threatened.

'I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' — Wayfarer

I am not sure how this is supposed to be understood. Is it that I, the previous experiencer of being Petrichor, am no longer here, no longer experiencing it, and now, Christ, a different subject that is not me, is experiencing being Petrichor? I have died or gone elsewhere and someone else has taken over my body? No, I think the mystic is probably instead making a statement that describes their overcoming of their false identification with the local body-mind. They have realized that the very experiencing subject that was the one doing all the experiencing all along, in other words, their very self, the one they always were, is actually the very same as the God-self, the one self, the only self. They have experienced God-union. They realize themselves to be one with God. In other words, they realize who they really are and always were. Petrichor didn't realize himself to be God exclusively. No. Petrichor isn't God. But God, who, in Petrichor, thought he was only Petrichor, now remembers himself and now sees Petrichor as one of the many jackets that he wears. God sees through Petrichor's eyes and always did. There never was anyone else seeing through Petrichor's eyes.

Death of self, ego death, in my view, is just realizing that you are not who you thought you were. But the real you, that which is everything, is still there in this new state.

Since there is no other, and self and other are defined in relation to one another, there is also, in some sense, no "self". When there is no "there", there are also is no "here" in opposition to it. When there is no you, there is no I. But there is still that which transcends these dualities and experiences the union. There is still that which is what was the very experiencing subject that experienced everything you experienced all along. That, for me, is the true self. Is that nothing? Since it isn't related to anything, there is no form. It involves no difference. In that sense, it is nothing. It isn't even a space empty of things.

That same nothing which knows is also that which "looks out" from behind Petrichor's eyes.

All the talk that tends to emerge among mystics about love, compassion, and so on, naturally is part of realizing your true identity with everyone else and everything. To love someone is to some degree to include them in your sense of self, to walk in their shoes, to make their interests your own. If you were to take this all the way, it would mean fully and actually being them, being not distinct from them. To not literally be them is to stop short, to fail to love completely and truly. Complete universal love then is also completely being all. If God is love, as they say, and if God loves us perfectly, as they say, God then is us. The one suffering in us, our very self, is God suffering as us. Is this the "Christ in me"? I think so.

To stop thinking yourself a separate being apart from the world is also to stop not being everyone else. Your identification changes from the local to the universal. The sense of identity once encircled only a single body. Now the circle has either expanded to include everything or it has simply been erased. To the extent that this boundary is the self-idea, the ego, or whatever you want to call it, this event means the end of it. You live no longer in tunnel, but in the open air. But you haven't thereby ceased to exist. You aren't that boundary. And you aren't exclusively that which was inside the boundary. The boundary was a delusion all along. That you identified with it was ignorance.

Who am I? My jacket? No. These arms, legs, freckles, and so on? No. Step it back further. The story I tell myself about myself? No. The brain in which my body and life are represented? No. Step it back further. The atoms themselves? The fields themselves? Step it back further. Deeper. Wider. Go to the ground. The Universe itself? Getting close... What you are is underneath, behind, around, above, inside, beyond, all throughout, the very substance of, and so on, all of that, all that is. And taken as a whole, you are without form.

:up: