Self-actualization has been a topic in Eastern psychology and philosophy for centuries, and in the West for decades. It has also become a familiar word in everyday conversation. But even though the term is well known, most people have only a vague idea of what it really means, and even less sense of how deep that meaning can go. Any serious attempt to explore it has to start with a harder question: what is this self that is supposedly being actualized? Is it something stable, with an enduring core around which change happens? Or does the process of actualization itself define the self, meaning the self is less a state than a process whose only constant is change?
Buddhism offers one of the oldest and most detailed answers. The Buddha described five skandhas, or aggregates, as the processes that combine to produce our sense of self. Form comes first: the physical body and its structures. Sensation follows, the five senses plus our emotional response to what we perceive. Perception is third, the labeling and conceptualizing of what has been sensed. The fourth skandha, the one most people identify with ego, is built from volition, the willful attitudes, morals, and habits, positive and negative, that we form and re-form moment by moment, generating what gets called karma. The fifth skandha is consciousness itself, the platform of awareness on which the first four rest and through which they merge into a single, individualized experience. None of these aggregates are fixed. Each is a bundle of attributes in constant flux, shaped by inner and outer conditions, and together they act as the tools by which consciousness hones itself toward higher states of perception.
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