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Zen and Western Self Unraveled
Seminar_Zen-Self,_West-Self
This talk explores the complex interplay between Zen and Western concepts of the self, highlighting the challenges in defining the self within different cultural frameworks. It examines the implications of language in shaping our understanding of self, how possessive pronouns influence perceptions of identity, and the practice of exploring self through Zen to diminish inherent ego and attachment. The discussion further reflects on feedback, identity, and the nuanced experiences of 'self' and 'soul,' emphasizing the need to recognize the transient nature of self-perception.
Referenced Works and Ideas:
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Concept of Self and Alan Watts: Alan Watts' analogy of defining the self as "trying to bite your own teeth" is discussed, emphasizing the difficulty in pinning down the concept of self.
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Western vs. Zen Self: The comparison of Western self, often defined by individualism and ego, versus the Zen perspective, which focuses on the impermanent, interconnected nature of the self.
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Use of Language in Self-perception: The role of language, specifically the use and impact of possessive pronouns, in how the self is perceived and the distinction between 'what' is self versus 'who' is self.
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Soul in American Culture: The transformation of the term 'soul' in American black culture, differentiating from the concept of 'self' and the challenges of finding a consistent philosophical distinction.
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Practical Application in Zen Practice: Comments on how Zen practice involves identifying the sensations and representations of self, understanding their impermanence, and how these reflections change one's understanding of identity.
AI Suggested Title: Zen and Western Self Unraveled
I mean all of the teaching I've done over the years implies, always implies, a distinction between the self or something not quite the self, that is experienced in Zen practice. And the Western idea of experience, concept of self. Although a distinction is always implied, To try to actually define that distinction is really difficult.
[01:13]
Alan Watts said, who was a friend of mine, it's well that I actually performed his funeral. That's how good a friend I was. Anyway, a pretty good friend of his, and he defined, he said, trying to define the self, is like trying to bite your own teeth. Yeah, so... If we can sort out something during these three days that's useful, it would be great.
[02:14]
Most of our views flow Because most of our views flow and function outside our consciousness. It's funny for me. I say something and then you say it so seriously. It's like I must have said something real. It's almost like it was in print. I find that what's most useful is go to our actual experience and often our actual experience related to our experience of the words which we describe the experience.
[03:31]
In other words, there's our experience. And the form we give, the verbal form, We give that experience. Which are not exactly the same. And then the experience contained in the word. So anyway, we have this title again. Zen self and Western self, I guess. Already this title implies that there are categories of self. For some people, western traditions this is already heresy.
[04:55]
For some western traditions there is one self connected with God and so forth. So we anyway already have implied here that there are categories of self, or different kinds of self. And if there's different kinds of self, it means we have a choice. Or perhaps we have a choice. If we have a choice, how do we make the choice? And how do we know what choice to make?
[05:59]
I mean, a choice was made for you by being born into Western culture. But I think most of you don't feel the choice that you were born into it and that your parents had is necessarily your choice. So we have each, probably each of us, in effect made a choice already which is a little different than our parents' self or even than our culture's self. On what basis did we make this choice? Was it a conscious choice or an epiphany, a realization, a conversion?
[07:00]
Or did you slide nicely into something you liked better? Which isn't so bad. Why not? So looking at the words we use, let's take self. Let's take the word self. Which means something like, the etymology means something like self. what belongs to me and not to you.
[08:24]
And that makes a lot of sense. And we can say we're selfish Can you say that in German? Are you selfish? Yes. Germans are never selfish, right? Don't bet on it. Don't bet on it, okay. Selfish, if you translate it commonly, it's sort of... Selfish is more in the sense of egoistic. Selfish is something equivalent to selfish, right? It must be something equivalent to selfish. Selfish, self... Self-addictive.
[09:35]
You're self-sucking, so to say. Wanting it for yourself. If I said, don't be selfish, you'd say, don't be self-addictive. Don't be a self-sucker. It's a sucking it in for yourself, so to say. Okay. So selfish. Maybe the German self is different than the American self. Then is the Romanian self different from the German self? Could be, yeah. And the French self? Sure. Oh, all right. The French, we know the French think that. But okay, in English you can be selfish. But in English you can't be soul-fish. S-O-U.
[10:37]
What? S-O-U. Unless you're at the fish market, you can be soul-addictive. Can you be soul-addictive? We have to say soul addicted. Addicted doesn't mean the common way of addiction, but it means sort of like this. But you do that with the self, but you don't do that with the soul. No. You don't do it with the soul. No, you wouldn't say that. Okay. Well, I mean, my point is, we speak about self in English, at least.
[11:38]
And we can be negatively selfish. And we speak about having a soul. But we can't speak about negatively having a soul. So in English at least, our language does not allow us to use the word soul negatively. So if I, over 50 years or so, or 75, I've been trying to distinguish soul, psyche, self, spirit, I can't really figure it out. Yeah. So psychology uses psyche. Christianity uses soul. Most people use self.
[13:02]
When they talk about an experience separate from others in the world. But really they're entangled ideas. And I don't find any philosophical... any consistent philosophical distinction. I'm not... And I can't... But we know there's a difference. And in America, black culture has pretty much taken over the word soul. In its popular use, popular or common use, and you would say some music has soul, but you wouldn't say that music has self.
[14:15]
So, although a philosophical distinction would be hard to make, it's very clear in the use of the words, we experience the territories. These are two different territories of experience. So, anyway, so there's the Western self, whatever that is. Now, Buddhism has been quite rigorous in philosophically and... in its teachings and in its practices, to expect the individual, particularly for practitioners, to expect the practitioner especially, to locate the experience of self.
[15:53]
And once you locate the experience of self, then what kind of reality does that experience have? Now we don't practice Buddhism in the West, or in general probably, in a very consistent way. What's exactly consistent? A consistent or intellectually organized way. Systematic? Yeah, okay. For instance, if I were going to If I teach my daughter, Sophia, 10 years old, something about Zen, I might put in the conversation every now and then.
[17:04]
What is your experience of self? She says, I don't do it. I say, what do you mean by I? Because I think that in actual fact, if we were systematic, the first two or three years of practice should be hunting for the sensation of self, locating the many ways it appears, and really feeling the ways in which you see it's impermanent. And ways in which you think it's impermanent.
[18:13]
And ways in which you refuse to think it's impermanent. And as long as you can insult a practitioner they have a sense of self. As long as you can offend a practitioner, they have a sense of self. If I can say to somebody, look, you've been practicing 10 years, you don't understand a thing. Or if you take that negatively, you have not gone very far in Buddhism. You bring your shitty practice into this room?
[19:13]
Do you realize how selfish you were when you talked to that person? Until you can speak to a practitioner that way, they are not really a disciple. But it doesn't mean you have to do it, you have to be harsh. It doesn't mean you have to make a point of being harsh and tough and 30 blows and blah, blah, blah. But a practitioner has to be able to get feedback. A main barrier to feedback is a sense of self. An invariant sense of self. And that sense of self appears as being upset or hurt,
[20:30]
Or it appears as reinterpreting whatever the teacher says. But again, we have a problem here. Who the hell is a teacher that has a result to insult us? So there has to be some kind of mutual agreement, a kind of permission that, yes, I allow something that's outside the categories of self and selfness to occur. And actually one in a thousand practitioners get there. If you say to somebody, I don't like your practice anymore, you ought to leave, they probably leave.
[22:13]
Instead of deciding, well, he may want me to leave, or she may want me to leave, but I like being here, so... unless they take me out to the parking lot at gunpoint. When the teacher pulls a gun out of his nose I mean what I say Then you know you're in trouble But the sense of self is very intractable Intractable means unable to be moved. So one of the things you have to look at is that sense of self that you're unwilling to give up.
[23:13]
Okay. If you really get to that point, that sense, and you notice that sense of self that still can be offended, I mean, there's a certain degree of being offended which is natural. And there's a certain degree of praise which is natural. But the degree of investment in needing praise or being offended is what's important.
[24:25]
I mean I like it when Someone says to me, well, that was a nice lecture. I felt good hearing it. And I don't feel so good when it's clear that nobody in the room liked the lecture and they're all sitting there kind of, ugh. But fundamentally, I give the lectures I have to give, whether you like them or not. I wouldn't know what else to do. So there may be some fine tuning for likes and dislikes, but basically I have to do what I do.
[25:30]
Okay. So if I take my finger, my finger, if I take my finger, Will you take my finger please? Thanks. But his taking my finger is quite different than mine taking my finger. Okay, so let's take our fingers together here. And it's very interesting that your right hand can take hold of your left hand. And there can be a sense of agency, a sense of the right hand is where you're located. Or you can change and have your left hand the location. And you can try seeing you can have both hands touching each other at once.
[26:54]
But that's a little more difficult. The sense of self as a location tends to be singular. And that tells us something. So if I point, put my finger in the middle of my forehead, in the middle of my forehead. You know, when Sudhakrishi came to the United States, He found it very funny, he'd say, my stomach hurts. My what? He found it very funny, people would say, my stomach hurts or my head hurts or something like that.
[28:00]
Because you don't put the possessive pronoun onto stomach if you're talking about your own stomach in Japan. Who else's stomach? If I said head hurts, I don't think Ulrich is going to say, do you mean my head? No, I mean, how can I know his head? But if I say, Ulrich does the head hurt. When it becomes a generalization, it almost becomes a kind of Christian heresy. Because if I say, the head hurts, it's almost like science.
[29:06]
I'm talking about the physical object hurts. then it's almost like science. For example, as I've often pointed out, if you ask who is breathing, You feel something. If you ask, what is breathing? You feel something different. And this is quite amazing to me, how words can direct attention in ways that's experientially different. So, if I find it more interesting to say what is breathing, and I explore breathing through There's lungs.
[30:15]
There's air. And so forth. There's the movement. There's not much who in that. It's an autonomic breathing process with a little editing on my part. And the editing isn't much of a who. So, but if I always say who, who is breathing or I am breathing, you're reinforcing a very particular, in fact, mostly Western sense of self.
[31:18]
So one way to explore the shift between an Asian or Zen or yogic sense of self, is to feel in yourself the experience between What and who. Between using possessive pronouns and not using possessive pronouns. So ideally, a Zen practitioner really tries to use possessive pronouns as little as possible. And when it's unavoidable.
[32:19]
In English it's unavoidable most of the time. It's not a complete sentence unless you have a subject. Someone who did it. I chopped wood. We have to say I chopped wood. We have to say it rains. But no one's ever found that it. But we do think we found the I that chops wood. So maybe you have to, as a practitioner, all of your possessive pronouns should be in Who are you? Are you Richard Baker? Sometimes, you know, I guess so. But if you answer that way all the time, you seem ridiculous.
[33:21]
But if you answer that way all the time, Yeah, so you say, yes, yes, yes, I guess so. I don't know what you say, but I always don't know what to say. Yeah, possibly. Unfortunately. Okay. So let's say that I, one of us, all of us, we put our finger on our forehead. Well, what are the ingredients of this event? The event is related to the French veneer, what comes forth. So event means what appears.
[34:35]
So event is what appears here. What is this event? Well, there's an experience of a finger. An experience of touching. There's a sense of location here, forehead, finger. So there's a sense of a... bodily, sensorial location. Now, is that self? Let's just look at ingredients. The sense of a bodily location. And I think there's a feeling of prior experience. And there's views.
[35:54]
Like, should I be doing this? Or is this silly? Or something like that. Oh, okay. Or you're willing to experiment. Those are views. And there's a feeling of, in the past, having your forehead touched and so forth. So there's an interior context which includes views and and prior experience. So that would be a second ingredient. A second ingredient. But there's also the experience of observing.
[37:00]
And we'd have to call that a third ingredient. Because the the act of observing both the act the agency of observing and the activity of observing are a particular ingredient. And among these ingredients we've identified so far there can be a different emphasis. Zen practice changes the emphasis already of the ingredients we've pointed out with our finger on our forehead. and this sense of observing and bodily location also create an interiority of context.
[38:11]
which we can call the present. We can feel the difference between prior experience we remember and the present experience. So the ingredients of a simple act by touching the forehead with a finger, forefinger, includes the sense of present. And it also includes a sense of agency, of I doing it, or I experiencing it. And I think this experience of I is inseparable from a feeling of responsibility.
[39:33]
I'm responsible for putting my finger on my foot. This belongs to me, it doesn't belong to you. Yeah, and this sense of an interiority of context is parallel to an exterior context. An exterior context which includes other persons sometimes and phenomena. Okay, so just from doing something like that, you can see, I guess there's about five ingredients I listed.
[40:45]
It seems to me those five ingredients, to various degrees and emphases, must be common to all people. human aliveness. As you know, what we share with all other humanoids are the five physical senses. On that we may not have the same minds, but we have the same five physical senses. And which senses dominate makes a difference.
[42:12]
But I would say that we have the five physical senses and we have the five ingredients of bodily location and an interior and exterior context, etc. Now, there may be other aspects, but I will leave that up to our discussion. So why don't we have a break? Okay. Okay? Thanks. Thank you. Don't bite your teeth.
[43:05]
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