@JLNobody,
Thanks. I've done lots of vipassana and samadi meditation. I was a monk in Thailand for a year. My experience in meditation contributed to the description of the self in my previous post. I can't find anything stable or enduring about it, including the sense of self itself, which comes and goes and while it's present, must be constantly generated. A process, not an entity.
Here in Korea, and in Mahayana Buddhism in general, there's the concept of a True Self. If you study the Pali canon, you'll find that it's in direct opposition to what the Buddha taught about the nature of the self.
Anyway, what other sort of statement about something is possible, except for statements about its qualities? When you say "it is a statement ABOUT its nature", you seem to be presupposing the nature of the self as a discrete, individual, enduring entity. My post says that that presupposition arises from inaccurate, usually unexamined assumptions that arise from the brain's near-constant generation of a sense of self.
When you examine the actual contents of a human, including non-physical aspects such as habits, behavior patterns, you can't find a single thing that you can point to as your 'self'. Instead, it's a abstraction based on a mental composite of all these things. We imagine that we're singular, discrete, time-enduring entities/identities, and doing so aids survival, but it just doesn't match careful observation. Emergent properties are not independent, discrete entities in themselves. We just tend to treat them that way in discourse for linguistic convenience.
There's nothing wrong with the phenomena, by the way. The error is in how the phenomena are interpreted.
