When the Buddha confronted the question of identity on the night of his
enlightenment, he came to the radical discovery that we do not exist as
separate beings. He saw into the human tendency to identify with a limited
sense of existence and discovered that this belief in an individual small
self is a root illusion that causes suffering and removes us from the
freedom and mystery of life. He described this as interdependent arising,
the cyclical process of consciousness creating identity by entering form,
responding to contact of the senses, then attaching to certain forms,
feelings, desires, images, and actions to create a sense of self. In
teaching, the Buddha never spoke of humans as persons existing in some fixed
or static way. Instead, he described us as a collection of five changing
processes: the processes of the physical body, of feelings, of perceptions,
of responses, and of the flow of consciousness that experiences them all.
Our sense of self arises whenever we grasp at or identify with these
patterns. The process of identification, of selecting patterns to call “I,”
“me,” “myself,” is subtle and usually hidden from our awareness.
-Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book