Four the Road

I would first like to applaud you for your honesty and bravery. In both exploring your reality, and in letting the chips fall where they may – whether or not they agree with what “so called Zen” purports to entail.

After several decades of practice, I have discovered that the makeup of what we call “the self” is far more complicated and interesting than any of the usual models that we are currently given do justice to. I think I understand what your talking about, that “lake of self”, that part of you “that moves when listening to music”.

The true personality that we call our self is far deeper and more rich than these little physical lives that we play out our dramas of reality in. However, this greater personality, though it’s one’s self, is yet not the truth of the self.

In knowing this “self” though, in witnessing its thusness, one is stepping off the terrain into the unknownness of the truth of self. And in that which is known as emptiness, the revelation of the Way is “seen” bare. It is in this revelation that the thusness of the self, that we take for granted as our lives and being, is tempered by the illumination of truth that is the Way.

So in Zen, we watch the “lake”, watch the heart, watch the stirrings of self; aware with breathing. And in this open honest discovery of that which is, our self is revealed. Its not quite searching, or examination, per se. It is “seeing”.