How the affective process creates the “self”
From here on the affective process begins. Once the cognitive process gets started, the feelings become ready for action. The three kinds of feelings (vedanā): pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral, become targets to which emotional reactions (tanhā) are fired. At the beginning during the cognitive process the experience was only objective and single. Now with the coming of the emotional reaction (tanhā), the experience of perception is bifurcated into a subjective and an objective. The object perceived becomes the objective, and the emotional reaction and the process of perception becomes the subjective.
When this happens the subjective part is personalized (upādāna) as “mine.” What is personalized turns into the personality, the “self.” The personality is created by the emotional reaction (tanhā). The object is externalized as “other.” When the question arises: What are we referring to as the “self?” The only answer is the body that occupies space and time. Thus begins the “‘I am the body’ perspective” (sakkāya diṭṭhi).
When the body has become the “self,” I have a past, present and future. The past of the body is birth, the future of the body is death. The present of the body is ageing. With this comes meeting the unpleasant ageing, sickness, and death, and parting from the pleasant youth, health, and life. Not getting what one desires: eternal youth, health, life. This ends with grief, lamentation, pain, distress, and exhaustion.