I thought about Buddhist meditation, in which the goal is to dissolve the self. Of course, one must know what the self is before it can be annihilated. The way the “self” is described in Vipassana, a form of Buddhist meditation, is as a collection of tiny, quivering units. Some call them atoms. At the root, though, is the idea that we are not ourselves—rather, we are only the sum of a bunch of individual flecks that happen to be humming along in the shape of a person. The self is dissolved when that is understood.
