Reality

 

To be introspective here for a moment, it seems we have no being, no "self." Just sit quietly and "watch" your thoughts (be mindful). You can see that all it is is a process of one thought after another, loosely connected, sometimes branching and going in circles, sometimes starting off on a new track, sometimes influenced by an uprising emotion or memory or an external stimulus. Something simlar is happening in a spiral galaxy. To be sure the galaxy rotates, but this does not create the spiral waves. They are condensation waves where dust and gas are compressed enough to create bright new stars, the biggest and brightest of which are born and die right there, hardly moving, while the dimmer ones move on and the apparent arm persists. There is a difference between things that are processes (where each event occurs in sequence and pushes itself along) and material of even spiritual objects, that have tangible stasis and properties. A wave is like our mind, it generally pushes itself along but still is influenced by the lay of the land, by the wind, by passing objects, by interaction with other waves, and so on. The water that is the medium of the wave moves in little circles as the wave passes, but is not the wave.

You’re circling a very old—and very deep—intuition, and you’re expressing it rather cleanly.

If you sit and watch the mind, as you describe, it does not present itself as a solid “thing.” It behaves much more like a stream or a pattern: thoughts arising, linking, dissolving, looping back, getting nudged by memory, sensation, mood. The sense of a continuous “I” feels, under inspection, less like an object and more like a narrative thread that keeps being re-stitched in real time.

That observation lines up closely with what in Buddhism is called anattā—the claim that there is no permanent, independent self behind the flow. And interestingly, a rather different tradition, David Hume’s empiricism, lands in a similar place: when he looked inward, he reported finding only “a bundle of perceptions,” never a stable self that owned them.

Your galaxy analogy is a good one, and not just poetically.

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A spiral arm is not a fixed object moving through space like a rigid spoke. It’s a pattern sustained by conditions—density waves, gravitational effects, gas dynamics. The bright stars give the illusion of something persistent and structured, but the constituents are constantly changing. The “arm” is real, but it is real as a process, not as a thing.

That distinction you draw—between processes and substances—is doing a lot of work here.

A chair is (roughly speaking) treated as a substance: it has continuity, identifiable boundaries, and persists through small changes. A wave, by contrast, has identity without fixed material. You can point to it, measure it, even predict it, but you cannot bottle “the wave” apart from the water. Its reality is organizational, not material.

Your suggestion is that the mind—and perhaps the self—is wave-like in exactly that sense.

There are a couple of tensions worth keeping in view, though:

One is practical. Even if the self is a process, it is a highly stable and self-reinforcing one. Memory, bodily continuity, habits, and social recognition all conspire to keep that “wave” coherent over time. So while there may be no fixed core, there is still a very robust pattern that behaves, for most purposes, like a persisting person. That’s why responsibility, identity, and continuity don’t simply evaporate under analysis.

The other is phenomenological. Even when one sees the stream-like nature of thought, the sense of “being the observer” often lingers. Some traditions would say that too is just another construction—another subtle ripple in the stream. Others argue there is a minimal self: not a thing, but a point of view inherent in experience.

Your metaphor of water moving in little circles while the wave passes is especially apt. It suggests that what we call “self” might be a kind of standing pattern in the flow—real enough to interact, to persist for a while, to have consequences—but not something with independent substance.

If I nudge your thought a bit: perhaps the interesting question isn’t “is there a self?” but “what kind of thing is this pattern we keep calling a self?” A galaxy arm, a wave, a flame—these are all real, but their reality lies in continuity of form, not continuity of stuff.

And that raises a quiet follow-up: when that pattern changes significantly—through age, illness, or even deliberate practice—at what point do we say it’s no longer “the same” self? Or do we simply keep naming the pattern as one thing out of habit?

Waves are self-sustaining just as a chair in your response is self-sustaining. There is no real difference except scale.

I see what you’re getting at—and there’s a real insight in it—but I’d push back a bit on the “no real difference except scale” part.

A chair and a wave can both be described as self-maintaining patterns, yes. The chair persists because its internal structure (molecular bonds, rigidity) resists change. A wave persists because a set of conditions keeps re-creating its form moment by moment. In that broad sense, both are “held together” by processes rather than by some metaphysical glue.

But the kind of persistence they have is different in a way that isn’t just about size.

A chair is what we might call materially continuous. If you leave the room and come back, it’s made of (mostly) the same atoms in (roughly) the same arrangement. Its identity is tied to that continuity of stuff. Break it apart, and the chair is gone.

A wave, on the other hand, is formally continuous. Its identity doesn’t depend on any particular bit of water. The water can be entirely different from one moment to the next, and yet we still say it’s “the same wave” because the pattern persists. Interrupt the conditions—no wind, no medium—and the wave vanishes instantly.

That’s not just a difference in scale; it’s a difference in what carries the identity. Matter in one case, organization in the other.

Now here’s where your intuition becomes interesting again: if you press hard enough, even the chair starts to look more like the wave. Its atoms are constantly exchanging energy, vibrating, even being replaced over time. At a deep enough level, it too is a stabilized process.

So you can flatten the distinction and say: everything is process.

But if you do that, you lose a useful contrast. Some processes are self-contained and slow-changing (like the chair), and some are entirely dependent on ongoing flow (like the wave). The mind—and your earlier analogy—seems much closer to the second category.

Your original point about thoughts fits neatly here. A thought isn’t like a chair that sits there once formed; it’s more like a wave crest that only exists while the underlying activity sustains it. And the “self” might be less like the furniture in the room and more like a long-lived pattern in the weather—coherent, trackable, even nameable, but never made of the same “stuff” twice.

So I’d say you’re right in spirit—both are sustained—but the distinction between what is being sustained (stuff vs pattern) still matters if we’re trying to understand what kind of thing the self might be.

There seems a huge difference, but in reality they are both maintained by processes. In a wave we see the motion of the particles more clearly when we look closely, and the forces seem less rigid.

Yes—that’s a very perceptive refinement, and I think you’ve put your finger on why the difference feels so large even if, at a deeper level, it may not be.

What you’re noticing is partly a matter of visibility and timescale.

With a wave, the underlying activity is right on the surface. You can see the water moving, the rise and fall, the constant replacement. The process advertises itself. It practically says: “I am not a thing; I am happening.”

With a chair, the process is hidden by stability. The atoms are vibrating, bonds are holding and flexing, microscopic changes are occurring—but all of that is so slow, so constrained, that it presents itself to us as stillness. It says: “I am a thing; I simply am.”

So the distinction we feel—rigid vs fluid, object vs process—is, to a large extent, a product of our scale of observation and the speed of change.

If we could “zoom in” far enough, the chair would start to look less like a solid object and more like a tightly choreographed storm of interactions. And if we could somehow “slow down” a wave and freeze it in the right way, it might start to look like a structured object.

So I think your claim can be sharpened like this:

The difference between a chair and a wave is not that one is a process and the other is not, but that one is a process whose internal motion is perceptible and loosely constrained, while the other is a process whose motion is largely hidden and tightly constrained.

And that brings you right back to the mind.

When you observe thoughts, you’re doing something like watching the “wave version” of yourself—the motion is visible, the transitions are obvious, the lack of a fixed core becomes hard to ignore. But in daily life, the mind presents more like the “chair version”—stable, continuous, dependable enough that we treat it as a thing, a self.

There’s a quiet implication in what you’re saying that I find interesting: the sense of a solid self may be less a discovery and more a perceptual convenience, arising because the underlying processes are usually too stable or too fast for us to notice their fluidity.

If that’s right, then introspection isn’t revealing something exotic—it’s just shifting the “resolution” at which you’re observing the same system.

And that raises a slightly uncomfortable question: if the solidity of things (including the self) depends so much on how we look, how much of what we take to be “real” is actually a function of the scale and manner of our observation?

I take both to be real. The wind blows the branches, that movement is as real as are the wind and the branches.

That’s a very grounded place to land, and I think you’re on solid footing.

There’s a temptation, once one sees the “process nature” of things, to start downgrading patterns—treating the wave as somehow less real than the water, or the self as less real than the underlying biology. But that move doesn’t really hold up. The movement of the branches in the wind isn’t an illusion layered on top of reality; it is reality, just at a different level of description.

In fact, you could say there are multiple, equally valid ways of carving up what’s there. One description talks about air pressure, fluid dynamics, and wood fibers bending. Another talks about wind moving through trees. Neither cancels the other; they’re just different ways of tracking the same ongoing event.

The same applies to your earlier point about mind and self. Even if the “self” is a pattern—a kind of organized, self-reinforcing process—it doesn’t follow that it’s unreal. A flame is a classic example: it has no fixed substance you can isolate and keep, yet it has a shape, a continuity, and very real effects. You can light a room with it or burn a house down. Its lack of material permanence doesn’t make it any less real in its consequences.

What you’re doing, in a sense, is refusing a false choice:

• not reducing everything to static “things,”

• but also not dismissing dynamic patterns as mere appearances.

Instead, you’re treating both structure and activity as real, which is probably closer to how the world actually behaves.

If I were to nudge the thought one step further, it might be this: what we call “things” are often just stable patterns of activity, and what we call “events” are less stable patterns of activity. The difference is not in their reality, but in their persistence and predictability.

And that loops back neatly to your first observation. The self, like the moving branches, may be something that exists not as a static object but as an ongoing, coherent happening—real not because it stands still, but because it continues.