About That “Self-Awareness” Thing

This is a work of fiction. image by AI; my own prompt I had been blathering on about our lack of free will, in my usual annoying way, when my friend said to me: “You keep insisting that we have no free will, and no ‘self’ even to have it. But at the same time you say that we are somehow able to become more ‘self-aware’, enough to recognize our conditioning for what it is, so when we are ‘self-aware’ we aren’t so reactive.” I nodded. She went on: “But if there’s no ‘self’, how can there be ‘self-awareness’ — ie awareness of what the ‘self’ is doing? And what is it exactly that is ‘aware’ of the what this illusory ‘self’ is doing?” Sometimes my friends are just too smart for me. I had no answer. So I decided to think it through, out loud, with my friend’s forbearance, using an example: “I used to suffer from road rage. Not to the point of being dangerous or hysterical. But enough to fume about these incidents long after they’d passed. And enough to upset my fellow passengers. My wise…