Zazen and Ego (personal experience of loss of "I")
Within a Buddha, presumably ego – personal self or “I” – has been permanently expunged. For most zazen practitioners, though, ego is going to hang around.
What may happen, however, is an experience, usually short-lived, in which the practitioner’s sense of “I” does leave the mind. A contemporary Zen teacher, Adjashanti, described this experience in an interview for a journal article published some years ago.[1] He referred to the loss of the sense of “I” very briefly, however, devoting most of his description to the experience of unity that accompanies this loss.
To elaborate on this loss, in my own case it was a totally unexpected, very startling, experience. As with Adjashanti, the experience occurred outside of meditation. With my daughter driving her car and me in the passenger seat, we were traveling from Lake Jackson, Texas to Houston. Looking out the front window of the car, I suddenly saw that the “me” I carry with me all the time, my consciousness of myself, my idea of “I,” was absent from my mind. As a way of casting about in my mind to find this idea, I looked out the side window, then the rear window. Gone! No idea of myself at all!
I knew that the idea would return. Sure enough, after something less than a minute, it did return. Its temporary disappearance, however, left quite a mark on me.
How real is something that can disappear like that? When you are not looking at a tree, you don’t have an idea of it, but if you shift your eyes to the tree, the idea of it enters your mind. But that wasn’t the case with the idea of “I” for which I deliberately cast about in my mind. The idea that I was looking for simply wasn’t there.
So how real is the vanished “I”? Not real at all! “Anatman,” or “no self,” is a major Buddhist belief, but now, in me, the belief had passed from belief to knowledge. I saw that in reality, I simply had no self. I knew that absolutely.
As I mentioned, “self” returned in me. I have to ask myself, what is the status of a self that I know isn’t real? I can’t embrace or own something that I know isn’t real. I can also see that I have no control over the way it reacts: if it is spoken harshly to, it feels stung; if it is cut off when speaking its mind, it feels irritated, and so on. I read something in Ajahn Chah’s Food for the Heart that seems to reflect my view of the self in me. Ajahn Chah, the teacher of Jack Kornfield, says that this self “is similar to a child who likes to play and frolic in ways that annoy us.” Ajahn Chah advises, “We should understand that it’s natural for a child to act that way. Then we can let go and leave them to play in their own way.” “We accept the ways of children.” “We let go and our heart becomes more peaceful.” [2]
Such good advice! Gradually, I think I am taking it in. If my wife says something that irritates me, I am learning that the irritation I feel is the child simply acting as it acts, with me not having anything to do with it, and I can brush the incident off pretty easily. So I’m learning, and as Ajahn Chah says, I feel, gratefully, that I am becoming more peaceful.
Footnotes
- Luc Saunders and Sy Safransky, “Who Hears This Sound? Adyashanti On Waking Up From The Dream of ‘Me,’” The Sun, December, 2007, p. 10.
- Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart, Boston, 2002, p. 157.