Expert: Joe McSorley - 1/8/2008

Question
Hi Joe, I don't think i know anything for certain and its really troubling when I'm trying to get a handle on who i am and what i'm about. I wondered when you talk about quietening the mind to see beyond human thought, and I wondered if this was a state when there are no contraditions all is understood. Obviously you use your mind to answer these emails but doesn't it change from one minute to next, how can a person maintain their core values and what if there completely wrong, how would zen get around this.
I hope you can make some sense out of that!
steph

Answer
Hi Steph,
  My teacher, Dr DeMartino, always referred to the self as the ‘ever-regressing self’ and described it as “seeing your shadow and then stepping back to see who is casting the shadow and yet ever moving away from it”.  This is the self, it is this nebulous floating aggregate of features we call “I”
so getting a handle on who you are is impossible.  You can get an idea of what you like and dislike but who is at the core of the like and dislike?  We try to anchor ourselves to ‘core values’ to define who we are and stick to them no matter what.  There is a line in American politics that goes like this: a Republican is a Democrat who just got robbed and a Democrat is a Republican who’s son just got arrested”.  As soon as the supposed ‘core value’ is not what we want we change it.  This idea of hanging on to our idea of who we are also creates our fears.  We fear change, that which we do not understand and death because all of them threaten this idea of who we think we are.  We constantly hold and protect this idea of who we think we are whether it be the extreme of religious or political views or just our desires.  
Many years ago I wondered what people will do when their search for any truth comes into conflict with what they believe. Many will stick to their beliefs rather than confront the truth.  If you are doing research on a cause for cancer and after thirty years some underling in your university comes up with a better and contradictory cause do you abandon your years of research or do you fight them tooth and nail?  History shows you fight them tooth and nail and not face the truth.  If the truth and facts conflict with your core values you need to reevaluate your life and change them but most people will not do so.  Look at those people who still defend the Catholic Church and its cover-ups.


No matter how many desires we fulfill do we become fulfilled?  I can never understand people’s idea of heaven; riches, food and all the pleasures of life, because none of them are fulfilling.  There are those born into rich households that have these things and they are not happy so why should getting them after death make a difference?  All of these things just distract us but they don’t fulfill us.  This is important to understand because if you are trying to get a handle on who you are you need to realize what can and cannot make you happy.  Since we don’t know who the ‘who’ is we distract ourselves with pleasures.  We search in our minds for those things that we think will do the trick be it fame or fortune but simple observation of those who have gained those things will reveal that this does not do it.  We posit religious and philosophical ideals that can’t be won in our lifetime as being the answer because they cannot be tested.  All in all, no matter what we do or believe it comes down to the source of the problem, that which seeks an answer.
   When you remove all of the projections of what will make you happy or who you are then you start to get a glimpse of something different.  By stilling the mind you are not numbing it or putting a gag on it but freeing it from constant wandering thoughts to just observe in the moment.  When we see something we react to it, that’s a tree or whatever, but we are not seeing it.  We see and then immediately have a thought and muse on the thought and not the object of that thought, the tree.  Everything we see we reflect on, the thought is an echo but not the source.  The thought arises and we are not in the moment seeing but now reacting to our own interpretation of things.  From this point of separating with thought to know we realize we can’t know anything, we can only know our thoughts about it.  You don’t really know a tree, cat or another person, you just know the mental images you have of them.  Likewise you only know the mental images you have of yourself.

An animal makes critical decisions in the moment without these machinations and does so by fulfilling its own nature.  By stilling the mind we remove all of our personal biases about what we are observing but we do not lose our innate ability to see what is good or bad for us.  So stilling the mind is not some idiotic mind exercise but a sharpening of the entire self.  Mountain climbers often describe the ecstasy of living in the moment because they are forced to do so when climbing or they will die.  It forces a single-minded observance of what they do at every second and thus they feel full alive and in touch when doing so.  They often feel a let down after such an experience.  There is nothing simple minded about what they do, in fact, they are at the height of their facilities when climbing.  When climbing they are not hanging on do some self created core value such as political ideologies or religious zeal but just being in the moment without the mental biases of their past.
 Have you changed over the years?  I am sure your desires and tastes have but what about you, the you behind it all, has that changed?  Don’t you have the same sense of self that you did when you were a child; has this sense of self aged?  If we look in the mirror we see an aging body but without looking in the mirror does our consciousness age?  You can look back at an old picture and see a younger ‘self’ but can you look back and see a younger consciousness?  I am not talking about experience and maturity, I am talking about the sense that “I am”.  What about that has aged?  It is not different when we declared it as a two year old or an eighty year old; it means the exact same thing.  With all the changes on the surface the root remains untouched.  When you cannot observe your body or be aware of your prejudices you just ‘are’ the same as you were the first day you became aware that you were, it does not change.  What does change is the anxiety that you will lose this ‘self’ to death and it becomes greater the more you think about it.  Were you there at your birth?  When did you realize you were you?  This you is as much as a distraction as our aging bodies because it is a product of our minds, self created.  The root of this is not realized by thinking or objectification or perception, all of these things are what continue our ignorance.  Even the desire to know who we are creates this problem.  By wanting to know means we want to understand it as an object of our perception and thus we are in the same problem as the ever-regressing self.  You cannot be that which you perceive.  Anything you perceive stands outside of you to be an object of your perception and thus is not you.  From this standpoint you cannot ‘know’ who you are, you can, however, be who you are.
  All Zen practices are geared towards doing this or at least they should be.  Mindfulness, zazen and koan practice all aim at stilling the mind to force consciousness into the moment.  You don’t need anything called Zen to do it, it means nothing.  Whatever it takes to resonate with you and motivate with you to do it is what you do because ultimately all attempts will exhaust the reflective mind and it will collapse into the moment.
 I hope this helps you, take care.
         Joe