Classical Sāṃkhya philosophy draws a distinction most Western psychology never quite makes: the difference between buddhi — the faculty that discriminates and decides — and ahaṃkāra, the sense of 'I' that immediately appropriates every judgment as personal. The sequence matters enormously. A perception arises, buddhi evaluates it clearly, and then ahaṃkāra says 'I see this' — and in that claiming, the pure evaluation gets colored. What's striking is that contemporary research by Jonathan Schooler (University of British Columbia) on 'meta-awareness' maps almost exactly onto this: Schooler found that people lose access to what they're actually experiencing the moment they begin narrating it to themselves as experience. The Sāṃkhya philosophers reached this diagnosis seventeen centuries earlier, and they drew a sharper practical conclusion — not that the self is illusory, but that its reflex of appropriating cognition too quickly is the specific mechanism of distortion. The discipline they prescribed wasn't suppression of ahaṃkāra but its deliberate delay: hold the evaluation in buddhi a beat longer before ownership closes around it. For anyone who uses models to think, this is a concrete corrective. The problem usually isn't the model; it's how fast the 'I' claims it as mine, converting a provisional tool into an identity.

Name a position you've recently defended with energy — when, exactly, did it stop being an evaluation and start being yours?

Drawing from Sāṃkhya (classical Indian philosophy) — Sāṃkhya philosophical tradition (Sāṃkhyakārikā framework of tattvas), cross-referenced with Jonathan Schooler (University of British Columbia, meta-awareness and verbal overshadowing research)