No Self in Problems

  The holidays come to a slow halt, but people still run around, catching up on sales. From the nearby food court, I can still hear the sounds of Christmas carols, and wonder if I will still hear them tomorrow. One of them talks about the one day of the year when people's hearts start to open and be merry. Still others lament of lost loves, or people they could not be with on the last days  of the calendar year.
     I sometimes wonder if, like myself, others around me might also celebrate having 'survived' the season, and whether they might approach the sentiment with a similar kind of ambivalence.
     I came across a quote from D.T Suzuki which I would like to share, from his book, Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings. The quote reads:
   
"Zen recognizes nothing from which we are to be saved. We are from the first already 'saved' in all reality, and it is due to our ignorance of the fact that we talk about being saved or delivered or freed. So with 'escape', etc., Zen knows no traps or complexities from which we are to escape. The traps or complexities are our own creation. We find ourselves, and when we realize this, we are what we have been from the very beginning of things."(p.254-255)

Reading this quote, I have wondered: does it entail that there are simply no problems to solve from this perspective of Zen? It seems that there is more to this point. If a person sees themselves as someone to be 'saved', there is a self there. But if there is no separate 'self' from the environment, can anyone see a need to escape or rescue themselves from a problem? It isn't that problems magically vanish in thin air. It is rather that there isn't such a strong concept of "I" in the problems themselves. I think that this entails a very different relationship to the challenges of life. Rather than judging who I am according to whether I am able to 'surmount' or overcome a specific challenge, I am freed up to see that the challenge has nothing to do with the self. It is only the causes coming together in that moment to create that situation.

Conversely, even if I do manage to solve the problem, I am free to question: is it just 'me' that did that, or were there other conditions involved? Again, it's not about avoiding challenges altogether, but rather, not assigning a self-reference to the challenge. In this way, I am able to see things not from the perspective of having to prove the self, but from the idea of what really needs attention in the moment. My self-worth does not depend on dealing with a situation in a specific way. In fact, when I let go of self-reference, I am able to see other reasons to do things, which relate to the practice of non-duality. For example, instead of fulfilling a responsibility because 'not doing so will make me a bad person', what would it be like to do something in order to practice non-duality (not separating the action from the person doing it)? This sounds like a strange motivation for doing something, but there is something wonderful about this notion of pushing the boundary of what I think is 'me', by challenging what it means to do anything, and 'who' is doing it in the first place.

Some people might still wonder, does this mean that a person will stop having a sense of purpose in life? If, for instance,a  person stops thinking of doing things with a self in mind (self-advancement, for instance), would all activity cease? What I am finding is that this approach is like an empty canvas, where I am free to add or not add whatever is required to fill the canvas. Not only that, but I am also able to rewrite previous plans. Not being attached to self does not mean that nothing will be done. It simply provides more space to elaborate on certain intentions or modify others as the situations arise.

But there is one caveat, and that is, I think this attitude does require a trust in the non-duality of the present moment. If I still cling to the view that I am 'this body' and the world is 'around me', will I be motivated to work toward the benefits of a community as a whole? Or will I only protect this body? To really interact requires an ability to surrender the narrow idea that I am this body only. I am still puzzled as to where this 'trust' comes from, but I think having a group meditative practice or spiritual community can help in the process. It also requires a simple willingness to cultivate faith that the mind is not separate from any experience.

Suzuki, D.T. (1956), Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki (Ed. William Barrett). New York: Doubleday