I was talking about ahaṃkāramamiṃkāra, usually translated as “I-making and my-making”, which occurs a number of times in the suttas for example in the Upasena Sutta (SN 35.69)
I think it’s only incompatible if one takes the anatta teaching to be an entirely an “an-atman” teaching. But the Buddha also indicates that part of the point is to correctly understand everything one encounters within one’s experience as not a self and not possessing anything pertaining to or related to a self. We are constantly constructing a self out of the khandas, the raw materials of our experience, but that constructed self is illusory, like the conjurings in a magic show. The goal is to achieve a state in which we stop doing that. There is no doubt that this state is quite difficult to attain.
Well, after 2500 years, it appears they have not been doing a very efficient job of it! But that view is popular, and Venerable Brahmali probably agrees with you. Nevertheless, I do not think it is the whole story, and if we assemble all of the sutta discussions of nibbana and try to take them in their totality (such as is done, for example, in Ajahn Amaro’s and Ajahn Passano’s text The Island), I think a different picture emerges.
My reading is that earliest Buddhism was primarily an ascetic or renunciative tradition. It wasn’t supposed to be life-transforming in the modern, secular sense of a kind of mental health program that helps you chill out while you clock your 50 weekly cubicle hours at Samsara Inc. But it was certainly radically transformative. The early texts, especially the verses left to us by some of the earliest elder monks and nuns, and also the Buddha I believe, testify to how liberating it was to become a wanderer who had severed all ties to worldly burdens, obligations and responsibilities, had conquered the fear and dread of living alone in remote forest dwellings, and had reduced their livelihoods to what was required to live a bare minimum. Upon achieving the goal of the holy life, they exult, and give expression to their sublime peace.
It is hard to read these verses as anything other than the testimony of a person whose life has been utterly transformed:
Having renounced All,
he is said to be at peace;
having clearly known, he
is an attainer-of-wisdom;
knowing the Dhamma, he’s
independent.
Moving rightly through the world,
he doesn’t envy
anyone here.
Whoever here has gone over & beyond
sensual passions —
an attachment hard
to transcend in the world,
doesn’t sorrow,
doesn’t fret.
He, his stream cut, is free
from bonds.
Burn up what’s before,
and have nothing for after.
If you don’t grasp
at what’s in between,
you will go about, calm.
For whom, in name & form,
in every way,
there’s no sense of mine,
and who doesn’t grieve
over what is not:
he, in the world,
isn’t defeated,
suffers no loss.
To whom there doesn’t occur
‘This is mine,’
for whom ‘nothing is others,’
feeling no sense of mine-ness,
doesn’t grieve at the thought
‘I have nothing.’
Not harsh,
not greedy, not
perturbed,
everywhere
in tune:
this is the reward
— I say when asked —
for those who are free
from preconceptions.
For one unperturbed
— who knows —
there’s no accumulating.
Abstaining, unaroused,
he everywhere sees
security.
The sage
doesn’t speak of himself
as among those who are higher,
equal,
or lower.
At peace, free of selfishness,
he doesn’t embrace, doesn’t reject,"
Sn 4.15