Anil Seth

speaker

1,118 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Anil Seth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

I think I am that is an interesting way to put it from, you know, I was listening to your conversation with Swami Sriva Piyananda and he talks about I am that as a way of summarizing some of Advaita Yitvedanta.

And it's a really nice way of, I think, summarizing this idea that within that tradition, you know, the world that we experience is part of our consciousness.

That's kind of not, I mean, I'm intrigued by those ideas.

But when we come to this idea of pure bare awareness, I becomes problematic because the word I as we use it, at least in the West,

is all about personal identity.

It implies a sort of duality between subject and object, a perspective, a first-person perspective.

And you can say, well, I'll strip away the memories of I so that I don't have a name or I don't remember anything, what I had for breakfast and so on.

But still, this I does lead us to think that

There will still be a first-person perspective maybe.

There'll still be a difference between self and other.

And I, now I'm using it because I'm not in that state, I think that's probably wrong.

And I think there are states of consciousness where the first-person perspective can dissolve, where the boundary between the experience of self and world

can dissolve and I think that gets us closer to what this this most basic experience would be which again it's hypothesis but perhaps the one thing you can't get rid of is this experience of being alive experience of aliveness which is actually a little bit related to I was thinking some years ago about the soul which is a concept that's got it's not got a great reputation in modern science these days but

But different traditions talk about the soul in different ways.

In Western philosophy, the soul is often associated with a kind of disembodied or disembodyable seat of rational thinking.

I mean, Descartes would have described it maybe in those terms.

But then in Hinduism, we have this concept of Atman,

which isn't about rational thought.

It's much more about breath, about life.

And I'm not saying that this is, that we should say, oh yeah, great, now we've really, that's true.

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