‘At its very simplest, a self is a way that we can make sense of the things that happen to us,’ he told me, leaning back in his chair with his legs crossed out in front of him. ‘You need to have a sense of self in order to organize your life events into a meaningful story.’ The notion that you have a soul, he explained, is an illusion. We feel as if we have a magical centre, a special core in which our moment-by-moment life is experienced. But there is no centre. There is no core. There is no soul. We experience our thoughts as if we’re somehow listening to them, but as the philosopher Julian
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