What is the ‘self’? The 3 layers of your identity. | Sam Harris, Mark Epstein & more | Big Think

Chinese philosophers would say it is extremely restraining to stick to what we think we naturally are meant to be.

Our responses can fall into ruts and patterns that repeat endlessly.  For example, when someone does something against you, it can make you angry because it brings back a childhood memory of being angry. What it really is, is a patterned response.

Many of the patterns you've fallen into could be potentially destructive for you and those around you.  Instead, you should be trying to break those patterns and change the way you interact with the world.

You'll never get to the good life unless you work through these patterns and create different patterns.

Most people misinterpret the idea in Buddhist psychology of egoless-ness or no-self. They say we don't need the ego or the self at all. 

We need our egos. But we take ourselves more seriously than we need to. The self is not as fixed as we would like to think. The ego is a way of organising oneself from a young age.  For many people, it stays in an immature place where our intellect defines who we are.  Because the ego likes repetition, we're always reinforcing its own vision of itself.  And that restricts us.

Consciousness is very subjective. Consciousness is what it's like to be you. Its an experiential internal qualitative dimension to the physical system.

We can't reduce that experiential side to neurotransmitters and states of the brain. So, when you're trying to study human consciousness by looking at the states of the brain, you can only correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states but you can never dismiss the first person experiential side.

Most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel they have bodies and that they're inside the body, inside their heads. But that locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion, meaning it makes no neuro-anatomical sense.

The processes in the brain can be independently erupted . We are a changing system, a process.