Daniel Kahneman and Jason Riis once suggested that we do not live as a single self, but as two. One is the remembering self, the inner narrator that looks backward, gathering scattered moments into the story of “my life.” The other is the experiencing self, which does not tell stories at all but simply lives each moment as it unfolds—raw, immediate, without commentary.

At first glance, this distinction may seem like a neat psychological model. But when held beside Zen Buddhism’s ancient teaching of the relative and the absolute, something more profound comes into view. The relative is the world refracted through concepts: roles, judgments, categories, identities. The absolute is life itself, before it is parceled out and named. As Yamada Ryōun, former Abbot of the Sanbō-Kyōdan lineage, expressed: “the self and the whole universe are originally one being” (1).

The resemblance is not superficial. The remembering self is the relative, living in stories and concepts. The experiencing self is the absolute, life before words. What psychology and Zen seem to have discovered in parallel is a single truth: reality is lived twice—once directly, once through the lens of conception.

Two Selves, Two Ways of Reality

Kahneman’s research showed that these two selves not only differ, but sometimes contradict. A person may remember a vacation as blissful because it ended well, though most of the time was stressful (2). The story rewrites the life that was actually lived.

Zen speaks similarly. The relative is not false—it is essential for planning, for communication, for navigating culture. But it is partial. It carves life into pieces and mistakes those fragments for the whole. The absolute is the same life, but seen before division: the river flowing before we call it water.

The Diamond Sutra counsels us to “abide nowhere” (3). Even the idea of “self,” even the word “truth,” becomes a distortion if clung to. What remains is what Kahneman would call the experiencing self: the pulse of life before narration.

The Remembering Self and the Relative

The remembering self is useful, even indispensable. It gives continuity and identity, allowing individuals and cultures to persist. Yet it is selective. It edits, chisels, and reshapes. In Zen language, it is the relative self: necessary for survival, but clouded by illusion when mistaken for the real.

Yamada warned that when this true self is not directly discovered, people project it outward—onto gods, doctrines, or transcendent ideas (1). Psychology would say that the remembering self is forever creating stories, even about that which cannot be narrated. Its mistake is not in telling the story, but in mistaking the story for reality itself.

The Experiencing Self and the Absolute

The experiencing self does not narrate. It does not stand back to judge or compare. It simply lives. Kahneman’s data revealed how much this perspective diverges from memory: moment-to-moment reports often tell a different story from what is recalled later (2).

Zen names this the absolute: life before conceptual partition. Yamada expressed it as nonduality: “the self and the whole universe are originally one being” (1). In such vision there is no “other,” no division to defend, no distance to close. It is intimacy itself.

Steven Pashko’s novel The Hero’s Gift: A Journey to the Inconceivable offers a literary mirror of this. When the characters put on their special glasses, the ordinary overlay of concepts dissolves. A tree is no longer “tree”; a face no longer “friend” or “stranger.” Nothing has changed, yet everything has—things are no longer mediated by words but revealed in their immediacy (4). This is perception without conception: the absolute glimpsed in fiction, echoing the experiencing self in psychology.

Why Two Selves at All?

If the absolute and the experiencing self are so primary, why does humanity live so deeply entangled in the relative and the remembering self? Neuroscience offers one clue. Michael Gazzaniga’s work revealed that only one hemisphere of the brain specializes in language and concepts (5). The remembering self may emerge from these linguistic structures, while the experiencing self reflects a more fundamental, bilateral form of perception. In this sense, the remembering self is not original but layered atop a deeper ground.

Zen would agree. The relative is derivative; the absolute precedes it. The trouble comes when the derivative masquerades as the whole.

Shifting Between Selves

Meditation is the ancient art of redressing this imbalance. Techniques such as just sitting, breath counting, or body scanning invite the practitioner to remain indifferent to thoughts and concepts, letting them drift by without reinforcement. Psychology might call this extinction: persistent non-attention weakens the dominance of concepts. Over time, thought loosens its grip, and perception clears into the simplicity of the absolute.

This toggling also clarifies puzzles such as the placebo effect. Placebos relieve suffering, though they contain no active agent. One possibility is that attention shifts, however briefly, from the remembering self’s story—“I am ill”—to the experiencing self’s direct perception, where symptoms are not framed as “mine” (6). When the story loosens, the suffering loosens. In The Hero’s Gift, this is dramatized through the toggling of vision: with the glasses on, the world is whole; without them, the conceptual overlay descends again (4).

Practical Implications

If the remembering self and the relative mirror one another, and the experiencing self and the absolute likewise, then this understanding reshapes more than philosophy.

• Well-being. To measure life only through the remembering self is to mis-measure it. The experiencing self lives the texture of reality that memory cannot preserve. Both accounts must be honored.
• Ethics. From the absolute’s perspective, wholeness shines. In nonduality there is no “other” to harm. Ethical behavior arises as naturally as breath: generosity, compassion, and restraint are not duties, but inevitabilities. No one willingly harms their own hand; in nonduality, no one is separate enough to harm.
• Science. Health economics and policy largely measure the remembering self, relying on retrospective surveys. But the experiencing self can be measured directly through diaries and momentary assessments. Comparing the two perspectives functions as a sensitivity analysis: how do valuations change when seen through the eyes of memory versus the eyes of experience? To include both is to approach a truer picture of human life.
• Practice. Zen practice cultivates the experiencing self without erasing the relative. It restores balance, allowing the conceptual self to serve its role without tyranny. Yamada expressed Zen as “experientially finding one’s true self and then living out this discovery” (1).

Living More from the Absolute

If both selves are part of the human condition, the question becomes one of balance. For optimal well-being, perhaps it is wiser to dwell more often in the absolute—the experiencing self—and enter the relative only when required by the necessities of culture and survival.

The reasons are compelling. Living from the absolute means not being harassed by the endless chatter of unwanted thoughts; it offers mental clarity and a quiet satisfaction that needs no object. Existential questions lose their sting when lived from direct contact with reality rather than from the abstractions of memory. To live more in the absolute is to be intimate with the world rather than a word’s distance removed from it. Suffering lessens; ethical conduct arises unbidden; generosity flows more freely, because what is there to withhold from oneself?

The relative is not to be discarded—it is essential for speech, planning, and shared meaning. But the deeper life, the freer life, is likely found in spending more of our days awake to direct contact with reality, and only stepping into the story-world of concepts when it is time to speak, plan, or survive among others.

Conclusion

Kahneman and Riis spoke of two selves. Zen speaks of the relative and the absolute. They seem to belong to different worlds—one drawn from psychological experiment, the other from centuries of contemplative practice. Yet the parallels are too striking to dismiss.

The remembering self and the relative are the same in spirit: conceptual, narrative, indispensable yet distorting. The experiencing self and the absolute are likewise the same: nonconceptual, direct, whole. Neuroscience traces their roots in the asymmetry of the brain (5). Medicine hints at their dance in the placebo effect (6). Literature brings them alive in vision (4). Zen recognizes them as the ground of awakening itself (1).

The likely truth is not that they merely resemble one another, but that they are two languages describing a single reality. Life is lived twice—once in perception without conception, once in conception without perception. To confuse the second for the whole is to walk in shadows. To know both is to return to light.

And perhaps the greater wisdom is this: to lean more often into the absolute, the experiencing self, where thoughts fall quiet and the world is met without a word’s distance between us. From here flow clarity, ease, and the natural ethics of wholeness. The relative, the remembering self, has its role—to speak, to plan, to share in the culture of words. But it is not the ground. The ground is what breathes before naming, what shines before telling, what is never absent.

To live from there is not to abandon life but to embrace it more fully. It is to suffer less, to harm less, to give more, to be intimate with the world as it already is. To step back into this intimacy is to discover that what Zen calls the absolute and psychology calls the experiencing self may well be the same—and that they are not elsewhere, but here, now, before us, in every unmediated moment.

References

1. Yamada R. Zen is not a Religion. Kyôshô (Sanbô-Kyôdan’s official magazine). 2011;347 (Mar/Apr). Available at: http://www.sanbo-zen.org/artikel-1_e.html
2. Kahneman D, Riis J. Living, and thinking about it: Two perspectives on life. In: Huppert FA, Baylis N, Keverne B, editors. The Science of Well-Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005. p. 285–304.
3. Pine R. The Diamond Sutra: The Perfection of Wisdom. Port Townsend, WA: Counterpoint; 2001.
4. Pashko S. The Hero’s Gift: A Journey to the Inconceivable. Herndon, VA: Mascot Books/Subplot; 2025.
5. Gazzaniga MS. Organization of the human brain. Science. 1989;245(4921):947–952.
6. Pashko S. Conceptual versus perceptual information processing: Implications for subjective reporting. J Neurosci Psychol Econ. 2014;7(4):219–226.
7. Wick GS. The Five Ranks: Keys to Enlightened Living. Boston: Wisdom Publications; 2005.