A Buddhist fable is told of a small fish that hears a tale about the ocean, which sounds like a wonderful place, indeed. Immediately, he sets out to find this place. He swims far and wide and cannot find any sign of this thing called "ocean." Finally, he meets a wise old fish who tells him that he is already swimming in the ocean, that he need search no longer. The little fish is overcome, and swims away, enlightened.3 This is a tale of the True Self. We, like the little fish, believe that the Ocean, that Life, that God is somewhere "out there." The truth is that we are swimming in God, and we never even knew it. We are not separate, we are not cut off, we do not need to look for anything.
In Zen teaching, the idea that we are separate creatures is an illusion, and the ego that we have built up for ourselves, this "I" with which we refer to ourselves, is also an illusion. Merton agrees, and says that "when the...identity of the ego is taken to be my deepest and only identity, when I am thought to be nothing but the sum total of all my relationships, when I cling to this self and make it the center around which and for which I live, I then make my empirical identity into the False Self. My own self then becomes the obstacle to realizing my true self."4
In clinging to this illusion, we perpetuate the suffering that plagues us. We know that something is very wrong, and we scramble to fill the void we instinctively feel inside us in the only way we know how. We have been well-trained as consumers, and our addictive rush towards anything that will pacify us, however temporarily, reveals the depths of our individual and cultural bondage. "We live in a shadow existence," writes James Finley, "in which we find ourselves between ourselves and God. As helpless observers, we watch ourselves living out a life we know to be a fragmented tragedy."5 The False Self is itself this fragmentation, the very thing that cuts us off from wholeness.
The Zen practitioner realizes that the ego-self is, in Merton's words, "not final or absolute; it is a provisional self-construction which exists, for practical purposes, only in a sphere of relativity. Its existence has meaning in so far as it does not become fixated or centered upon itself as ultimate."6
Of course, once we begin to realize some of this, the ego invariably feels threatened (with good reason!) and switches into survival mode, fighting with everything it has for its continued sovereignty, sometimes causing "spiritual emergencies" and psychotic episodes that are really "spiritual emergences." According to Merton, the False Self "fears and recoils from what is beyond it and above it. It dreads the alluring emptiness and darkness of the interior self."7 Even so, the ego may play along for a while, and allow us our forays into meditation and spirituality, allowing it to be stretched almost to the vanishing point, but so long as it can "snap back" and regain control once the meditation period ends, we are still acting out of the False Self.
"As long as there is an 'I' that is the definite subject of a contemplative experience," writes Merton, "an 'I' that is aware of itself and its contemplation, an 'I' that can possess a certain 'degree of spirituality,' then we have not yet passed over the Red Sea, we have not yet 'gone out of Egypt.' We remain in the realm of multiplicity, activity, incompleteness, striving and desire."8
When the False Self begins to realize its unreality, then, according to Finley, "it begins to convince itself that it is what it does. Hence, the more it does, achieves and experiences, the more real it becomes."9 Unfortunately, this is a futile effort, and in its insecurity, in trying to prove its efficacy in the world, the False Self can drive a person to exhaustion or madness. Suzuki says, "If you want to seek the Buddha, you ought to see into your own Nature, which is the Buddha himself. the Buddha is a free man--a man who neither works nor achieves. If, instead...you turn away and seek the Buddha in external things, you will never get at him."10 The great Ch'an master Hui-neng agrees, saying "the deluded mind looks outside itself to seek the Buddha, not yet realizing that its own self-nature is Buddha."11
Eventually, the seeker must realize that "the nothingness he fears is in fact the treasure he longs for."12 Merton says that
The only full and authentic purification is that which turns a man completely inside out, so that he no longer has a self to defend, no longer an intimate heritage to protect against...the full maturity of the spiritual life cannot be reached unless we first pass through the dread, anguish, trouble, and fear that necessarily accompany the inner crisis of "spiritual death" in which we finally abandon our attachment to our exterior self and surrender completely..."13
This is the purpose of Zen practice, then: to bring us to this point. It may seem a lonely and desolate point indeed, but it is only in this sort of death that the True Self may be born in our consciousness. On the eve of writing this paper I had a dream. In it, I had been condemned to death by burning. All of us who were condemned were together in a classroom receiving instruction from a cheery man on how to die. We were told that it would not be painful and that we would have the best seats in the house! What was most curious though was that we would die in neat rows, sitting in a zazen position. I was scared of course, but the instructor was very comforting. Perhaps it would not be so bad, after all, I thought. After I awoke I realized what a meaningful dream it was. Zen is about death. The death of the False Self; the extinguishing of the ego and the birth of our true knowing. As Jesus says, "He who loses his life, shall find it."
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