Zazen as looking behind the shoji screen to discover no-self

In our own personal Wizard of Oz story, when we do Zazen, we’re taking the opportunity to look behind the shoji screen and see: Who is it that sees… hears… craves… wants all the things… gets offended… gets afraid… carries around all the stories and yada yadas about who I am, who you are, and how everything is supposed to be?

And when we take our seat to sit… breathe… listen and notice… to look behind the shoji screen of “self”… we might notice there’s no one there, but rather a story about someone supposedly “there.”

Not “no one” in the negative sense of a body somehow vacant of a person… some kind of zombie walking around with nobody home. Instead, what we don’t find is a tangible, fixed, separate, representative self we’ve spent so much of our lives assuming is in there running the show… and, as a result, investing in a personalized version of a Ponzi scheme.

Put another way, for the people I tend to hang out with… it’s like giving somebody money to go get drugs and hoping they’re gonna come back with them. They never do… we get pissed off about it… and then somehow we give them money again, expecting a different result.

We keep investing in this representative self… and it keeps promising something it can’t deliver.

There’s seeing… hearing… thinking… feeling… wanting… remembering… responding… but where exactly is the solid “me” that supposedly owns and controls all of it?

In a way, it reminds me of what Don Miguel Ruiz describes in The Four Agreements as the “parasite”… those conditioned, fearful aspects of mind that become so dominant that we mistake their voice for our identity. We become entangled with the stories, judgments, fears, cravings, wounds, and defenses and call the mental narratives “me.” ERROR!

Zazen invites us to peep behind the shoji screen rather than keep taking orders from the voice coming through the loudspeaker of thought. And perhaps what we discover isn’t that we don’t exist… but that we don’t exist in the way we’ve been hallucinating. The brain can create a pretty convincing mirage.

Without having to constantly protect, defend, satisfy, improve, or obey that representative self… there’s a little more room to live from what was never actually absent in the first place: genuine kindness… compassion… generosity… friendliness… and Love.

—We Are the Practice Itself