Artistic creativity won’t heal the horrors of the world; it won’t save anyone or anything. But it is practice — and through practice we change the self, and the relationship of the self with all things.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

As you might expect from the title, the self is central to ‘A Selfless Art’ but I’m far from alone in thinking about it. I’ve read books on the self from the perspectives of psychology, philosophy, medicine, Buddhism, and art, and found a striking coherence. They describe the mountain from different sides, but it’s the same mountain. Still, some of this is very hard to grasp. The Thai Buddhist teacher, Ajahn Chah, warned that trying to understand the concept of not-self intellectually would make your head explode. I know what he meant.

Friends who have read short passages of work in progress have given me valuable feedback, but have also reminded me how differently people can see the same word. How, for example, should we distinguish between self, individual, person and identity? Do they overlap, like the circles in a Venn diagram, or are they quite separate? I’m also learning how important is a sense of self, even if people understand it differently.

I’m a community artist, though, not a philosopher, and I don’t feel obliged to answer such questions; that’s why I read those who do. But I am writing about how co-creation needs and nourishes a very different relationship between me and my self, as well as me with others (perhaps also between them and their selves, but I don’t know). And that matters because, as Stephen Nachmanovitch says, in changing our selves and our relation to all things we might do some good in the world.

Right now, I don’t know whether I’m writing anything good or if anyone will want it if it does get finished. That’s okay: I’m writing, not editing. But I do know I want to write this and, just as in co-creation, I’ll find out where I am when I get there.

• Douglas, A. 2025 Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, Allen Lane
• Lowery, B. 2023, Selfless, The Social Creation of ‘You’, HarperCollins.
• Nachmanovitch, S. 2019, The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life, New World Library 
• Theise, N. 2023, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, Spiegel & Grau
• Wright, R., 2017, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Simon & Schuster