Zero idENtity
Zen practice, if it can be said to be “about” anything, isn’t about believing, or even doing — it’s about identity.
In The Lord of the Rings, when Tom Bombadil is asked, “Who are you, Master?”, he asks in turn, "Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?"
It’s a darn good question. The Buddha Way puts us face to face with it.
We cannot have the Buddha’s experience. Neither could he have had any of ours. Or perhaps more accurately, none of us can ever be anyone else’s experience; we can only be our own experience (among other things).
When we practice zazen — once our minds understand how to let go of rumination, opinion, fantasy — we find no separation, no permanence. Everything is into everything else’s business, and you can always get there from here. But all the heres and theres are just dunes, endlessly constantly reshaping, so by the time you get to there, there isn’t there anymore.
“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.” That’s how the song goes. And it’s hard to argue it’s not literally, physically true. All eyes grow out of the world as sure as do radishes and clouds.
This universe does a lot of things. Most of them, we don’t know about, because our kinds of shapes don’t interfere with their kinds of shapes (and vice versa), or they’re outside our bubble of light and time, or we’ve had no reason so far to notice or consider them. But we do know it does stars, and black holes, and rivers, and love, and pain, and colors, and sounds, and memories.
The “outside world” is constantly transforming itself into “me”, body and mind, as “I” constantly transform into “it” (whatever it may be). There’s no gap between the two. Which means there’s really no two to begin with, or end with.
When we begin sitting, our minds put up a huge fuss. They are not used to being left alone like that. So we have to be patient.
With daily practice, putting aside anything we might want or expect out of it, over a few months or years the mind learns how to not jump around and not fall asleep at the same time. This coincidentally does you a lot of good, mentally and physically, which keeps you going as you gradually get past the physical pain and the boredom and the frustration of sitting.
And then one day there you are — a human, being.
Dogen wrote that to follow the Buddha Way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self. In shikantaza (“just sitting”), finding no good edges, no piece that’s separate from the rest of the world, and everything in flux forever, there’s no “self” to identify with. This zero-self is anatta, the absence of essence.
At what cost do we give up the idea of the soul as an enduring independent essence? We lose that small identity to the experience of no boundaries. Everything I can sense is quite literally a part of me, and somehow I am a part of it. “I” am like a mesa or a leaf, a form taken by the stuff of the universe, a form in time as well as space, a form of time and space and energy and matter.
No thing came into existence when I was born, and no thing will go out of existence when I die, just as no thing passes into and out of existence when the mesa emerges and erodes. The mesa’s isn’t and is and isn’t are all matters of perspective. In reality, it’s the motion of quantum fields, a kind of shape in the quantum sea that my eyes and brain and body can recognize. Or create, to look at it another way.
When we no longer find a separate self to identify with, the same happens for all other things simultaneously. They/We are, each and all, a fluid pose of the quantum matrix, empty of any separate independent thing we might imagine them/us to somehow essentially be. Everything is at ground-zero all at once.
And so the minds and bodies all fall away. There are only locations and events in the fabric of What-Is. We are all floating islands, forever becoming each other and the river.
Image: Creative Commons license via Pixabay
“Eyes of the World” by Robert Hunter