Zen and Our Many Selves
Zen often refers to finding one’s “true nature”. Does that mean each of us actually has some specific, singular “true natural self” just waiting to be found? How is that “self” different from the “self” that has perhaps not yet found this true self?
Apparently modern psychology has been working on a similar question, as described in Fadiman and Gruber’s recent work, Your Symphony of Selves. After reading the book I got to wondering if the English language is not revealing something quite analogous to Eastern Zen in our very Western thinking.
Dōgen famously said, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.” Consider this slippery idea of one’s self in these various common English language phrases:
“I was beside myself” — an indication of being someone other than your current self.
“I don’t know what got into me” — possession by a different self.
“I’m debating with myself” — as if there are two different people having a debate.
“A part of me wants …” — as if the self is divisible.
“I was not myself” — indicating that one can be someone other than themselves.
Situations matter. Thinking of the self as a pattern of behavior across time quickly confronts the key insight that we have a multiplicity of self-states depending on context. Our behavior is largely a function of the situation. This fact should not be too surprising, but it is a surprisingly easy thing to lose sight of when trying to establish who your “self” is.
Dōgen’s quote above continues, “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”
A common misconception is that Buddha taught that we have no self. Close, but not quite. While to many it may feel like a play on words, Buddha taught anatta (anatman), or not-self. This doctrine says that there is no permanent, underlying substance that can be called the soul or “self”.
For me the intuition is easier when thinking about how our concept of self gets in the way. It is our desire to locate and depend on a permanent, inherent, enduring self-nature that is ultimately so futile and dissatisfying. Things are impermanent and subject to change.
Buddha taught the practice of not-self, where you learn to refrain from the habit of identifying the things you encounter as being part of self or belonging to self. Essentially, we recognize things as “not self” to begin to relieve ourselves of all kinds of obsessions, worries, and experiences of dissatisfaction and suffering.
In other words, it’s the act of clinging to a single self that gets in our way. The exact line between self and not self is besides the point, a distraction that we pick up, fondle, and play with infinitely. The only solution is to just set that thing back down. Setting it back down begins to open the door to a state of “not self”, a place where you can start to stop clinging to such distinctions.
Then what exactly are we studying when we study the self? No matter how hard or long we look, we’re not going to find anything enduring, inherent, or a graspable thing we can call “self!” So what are we studying? We are studying our own desire for self, our own fabrication of a separate “self”. That is why, “To study the self is to forget the self.” And from this lens, being “besides yourself” or “not yourself” in a given context might potentially become a bit less confusing.
