In Zen, the task is to find the true Self. But it does not exist, and that is the mystery of our existence. In a world of representations, cognitive dissonances, and alternative facts, it feels good to sink into the essence of existence, into non-dual being. Thinking helps only in a very limited way, because thinking is, in fact, always a thinking-of-something, a thinking-about-something. Thinking is an activity that relates to something, that concerns itself with representations of the world. What I think, whatever it may be, is not real in the material sense. It can represent something material. We think thought — or, more generally, mind — and matter as different. This is the fundamental problem of thought: thinking cannot be non-dual. It is caught in duality, yet cannot dissolve it.
The Self is quite different, though similar in its paradoxes. The Self is what drives us, what lets us be conscious, what identifies and distinguishes itself; it is singular and individual. But it does not exist, neither materially nor logically-transcendentally. It may be connected with the soul, with the heart-mind, but that does not help here, because it becomes dangerously tautological. We cannot understand something we do not understand by equating it with something else we also do not understand. That only distracts us.
The true Self appears when it ceases to exist — and I mean that quite seriously. When I enter meditation, have grown quiet, and concentrate on emptiness, when the pauses between the events of the cinema in my head become longer, a window opens that first fills with a kind of trance state. This is beautiful and allows for entirely different experiences. I have written about it a few times already: thought becomes fast, it understands intuitively, it can enter territories that remain closed to everyday thinking; it is rapturous and intense. But it has only partly loosened itself from the Self. It must loosen itself a little from the Self, otherwise it cannot gain this lightness, yet it remains anchored in the Self. It is still I who am doing something there, something difficult to understand and caught in problems similar to those of ordinary thought. What is real, and what is merely imagination?
So I have managed to free myself a little. I have calmed these thoughts that relate to the world, and I have activated a seeing that feeds on memory, knowledge, vision, imagination, yet moves only in that world of pure consciousness. It is an intuitive knowing, an omnipresence; it is almost outside space and time. It is the place where it is identical with itself, that is, where the Self ceases to exist and connects with the deepest ground of our existence. The deepest ground of our existence is mysterious and rests on something we cannot grasp. It lies beyond our Self.
Zen leads me toward this mystery. It anchors me in my physical existence and at the same time shows me that this existence is, non-dualistically, one with everything. I am Buddha, you are Buddha, we are all Buddha. There is only Buddha — kill Buddha if you see him.
