One day when I was around sixteen or seventeen, musing intensely on these swirling clouds of ideas that gripped me emotionally and intellectually, it dawned on me -- and it has ever since seemed to me -- that what we call "consciousness" was a kind of mirage. It had to be a very peculiar kind of mirage, to be sure, since it was a mirage that perceived itself, and of course it didn't believe that it was perceiving a mirage, but no matter -- it still was a mirage. It was almost as if this slippery phenomenon called "consciousness" lifted itself up by its own bootstraps, almost as if it made itself out of nothing, and then disintegrated back into nothing whenever one looked at it more closely.
Would this be the same as notself?
