There was a passage in Julia May Jonas’s recent post that brought to mind a book I like called Buddhist Practice on Western Ground: Reconciling Eastern Ideals and Western Psychology, by a psychologist and longtime practitioner of Buddhism named Harvey Aronson. TF writes:
I love writing plays and prose but a statement about “who I am and what are my goals as a writer” – well don’t they know I’m a Buddhist and have no solid sense of self?

In a chapter called “The Joys and Perils of Individuality,” Aronson writes about how in Western culture, “in contrast to societies in which togetherness rests on extended family, stable identifiable roles, rules of behavior, shared myths and rituals, and some degree of nonverbal emotional attunement, we create create relationships through establishing ourselves as individuals and verbally sharing our separate feelings and exploring our free choices with each other.”
He continues:
Our sense of individuality and our emphasis on personal choice is often striking to foreigners, who are astounded by the array of options presented for eating lunch at a restaurant or shopping for shampoo. . . As a translator and practitioner, I’ve had years of exposure to indigenous Tibetan Buddhists, and as a therapist I have noticed that “making individual choices” is not a prominent value for Tibetans. With that cross-cultural experience as a backdrop, and knowing many Buddhists in the United States who use that sort of cultural model as a support for debilitating psychological passivity (even though Tibetans themselves are not, for the most part, passive,) I am particularly sensitive to how in our culture the experience and articulation of preference is significant. . . The capacity to evaluate preferences and make choices is a critical marker of mental health according to modern Western psychology.
His observation helped to highlight for me that, while as Buddhists are cautioned to be careful not to reify our senses of selves, as Westerners it also seems to be important to the well-being of many essential aspects of our lives (relating to others, livelihood) that we have at least provisional senses of selves to which we can refer readily. Provisional senses of self that we must actively work to construct.
A fine line to walk, wouldn’t you agree?