  The centrality of the not-self doctrine in Buddhist thought is  explained on the basis of its pragmatic role in guiding the adept on  the path to enlightenment. Furthermore, the  not-self doctrine provides a justification for treating endurance,  independence, and self-subsistence as neither desirable nor  attainable, but rather as what they are: mistaken notions resulting  from the habitual tendency to construct an identity from a stream of  physical and subjective phenomena. The Buddhist claims that our sense of self as an autonomous being is imputed, and our attribution of  inherent existence to it habitually acquired (see Saṃyutta  Nikāya IV, 102; Majjhima Nikāya I, 130), just as Hume claims that a self is never apprehended in the series of  perceptions that are characteristic of the mental domain (the  parallelism between the Buddhist and Humean reductive analyses of the self is explored at some lenght in Giles 1993, Tillemans 1996,  and Kapstein 2001). This routine misapprehension of the discrete  phenomena of experience as a self leads to a dualistic perspective:  things appear and are categorized as either objective (thus external, but empirically accessible) or as subjective (thus internal, and  immediately accessible to consciousness). Puzzled by this dualistic  outlook, we cope by constructing an imaginary self as the permanent  locus of experience. 