Uprooting the Self (Not Possible Completely)
In Understanding Our Mind (previous title, Transformation at the Base), Thich Nhat Hanh says,
. . . We may think that we have pulled up the roots of being
caught in the idea of self. But those roots were there before
we were born and much more work still has to be done to
transform them. We must be careful and recognize the latent
tendency of attachment to self when it arises in one form or
another. [1]
Presumably we inherit roots of self from our previous incarnation. I know virtually nothing about reincarnation. But I want to point out the usefulness of Thich Nhat Hanh’s warning for zazen practitioners, not to suppose carelessly that self has been left behind. To leave it completely behind may not be at all possible.
In the early 1970’s, I knew a spiritually advanced psychotherapist who was also the editor of a journal in the field of transpersonal psychology. This person told me that when his editorial board, mostly meditation practitioners, got together periodically to decide on contents for an upcoming issue of the journal, they would sometimes fall into vociferous disagreements among one another, but that eventually someone would laugh, others would join in, and the group would return to itself. Here was an eruption of self among a group of spiritually developed people.
The mantra at the end of the Heart Sutra, Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate – go beyond, go beyond, go completely beyond – is an injunction to throw the self aside. It is an injunction to break free completely from one’s “I-consciousness” or sense of personhood. This jettisoning of the self produces Bodhi, the awakened state.
Even so, the self or ego hangs around. So thinks Ajahn Chah, Jack Kornfield’s main teacher. In Food for the Heart, Ajahn Chah says that in the development of a spiritual life, eventually the ego or self can seem like a mischievous child, who is “simply behaving according to its nature” and whom we can disregard and attend to other more consequential things.[2] So the ego or self hangs around, but we can attend to it mindfully and prevent any harm from it. It needn’t disturb us. We can brush it off.
Footnotes
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Understanding Our Mind, Parallax Press, Berkeley, 2006, p. 226.
- Ajahn Chah, Food for the Heart, Boston, 2002, pp. 254-255.