The World as Just So, Part 7: Who Are You?

So, in Zen, a duality between higher self and lower self is not made. Because if you believe in the higher self, this is a simple trick of the lower self. If you believe that there is no really lower self—that there is only the higher self, but that somehow or other the higher self has to shine through—the very fact that you think that it has to try to shine through still gives validity to the existence of a lower self. If you think you have a lower self—or an ego—to get rid of, and then you fight against it, nothing strengthens the delusion that it exists more than that.

So this tremendous schizophrenia in human beings—of thinking that they are rider and horse, soul in command of body, or will in command of passions, wrestling with them—all that kind of split thinking simply aggravates the problem, and we get more and more split. And so we have all sorts of people engaged in an interior conflict, which they will never, never resolve. Because the true self—either you know it or you don’t. If you do know it, then you know it’s the only one; and the other, so-called lower self, just ceases to be a problem. It becomes something like a mirage. And you don’t go around hitting at mirages with a stick, or trying to put reigns on them. You just know that they are mirages and walk straight through them.

But if you were brought up to believe yourself split—I remember my mother used to say to me, when I did naughty things, she said Alan, that’s not like you. So I had, you know, some conception of what was like me in my better moments—that is to say, in the moments when I remembered what my mother would like me to do. And so that split is implanted in us all. And because of our being split-minded we are always dithering. Is the choice that I’m about to make of the higher self or of the lower self? Is it of the spirit, or is it of the flesh? Is the word that I received of the Lord, or is it of the Devil? And nobody can decide. Because if you knew how to choose, you wouldn’t have to.

In the so-called Moral Re-Armament movement—which is a very significant title—you test your messages that you get from God in your quiet time by comparing them with standards of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute love, and so on. But, of course, if you knew what those things were, you wouldn’t have to test. You would know immediately. And do you know what those things are? The more one thinks about the question, What would absolute love be?—supposing I could set myself the ideal of being absolutely loving to everybody, what would that imply in terms of conduct? Well, you can think about that until all is blue, because you could never get to the answer.

The problems of life are so subtle that to try to solve them with vague principles, as if those vague principles were specific instructions, is completely impossible. So it is important to overcome split-mindedness. But what is the way? Where can you start from if you’re already split? A Taoist saying is that when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way. So what are you to do? How can you get off it and get moving? Fundamentally, of course, you have to be surprised into it.

Winthrop Sargeant not so long ago interviewed a great Zen priest in Kyōto, who posed to him, Who are you?

And he said, Well, I’m Winthrop Sargeant.

And the priest laughed. No, he said, I don’t mean that. I mean who are you really?

Well, then he went into all sorts of abstractions about his being a particular human being, and so on, who is a journalist, and so on, and the priest just laughed and said, No.

Then the priest just tossed off the conversation, and a little later made a joke, and Sargeant laughed. And he said, There you are!

There was an army officer who once came to a Zen master and said, I have heard a story about a man who kept a goose in a bottle, and it was growing very rapidly, and he didn’t want to break the bottle and he didn’t want to hurt the goose. So how would he get it out? The Zen master didn’t answer the question at all, but simply changed the subject. Finally, the officer got up to leave and he went over to the door, and suddenly the Zen master called out, Oh, officer? And he turned around and said, Yes? The master said, There! It’s out!

So, in the same way, if I say to you, Good morning, you say, Good morning. Nice day isn’t it? Yes. Or if I hit you—you know, boom!—you say, Ouch! And you don’t stop to hesitate to give these answers or responses. You don’t think about it when I say Good morning, unless you’re a psychiatrist. What could I be meaning? So you respond. So, in exactly the same way, that kind of response, which doesn’t have to be a deliberate response, a response of a no-deliberating mind, is a response of a Buddha-Mind or an Unattached-Mind. But you must not imagine that this is necessarily a quick response. Because if you get hung up on the idea of responding quickly, the idea of quickness will be, itself, a form of obstruction.

Very often, when Dr. Suzuki is asked a question—very complicated question by some philosophy major from Columbia, when he’s giving lectures there—he’s silent for a full minute, and then says, Yes. And this is exactly as spontaneous a response as it would be if he had answered immediately. Because during the period of silence, he’s not fishing around to think of something to say. He is not at all embarrassed of being silent, or at not knowing the answer. So if you don’t know the answer, you can be silent. If nobody asks a question, you can be silent. There’s no need to be embarrassed about it or to be stuck on it. But you cannot overcome being stuck if you think that, somehow, you would be guilty if you were stuck.