Zen

[Guest guest]

Through confusing words and abstractions with reality itself we have created an

artificial role or personality for ourselves and in the process forgotten that

it is just a role and not the real source of our actions. Society has tricked

us into the belief that our minds are inside our heads and act independently

from it at the same time it is telling us who we are and what we should be

doing. But since the mind then includes all of one's social relationships, it

is not inside the skin of the individual at all but is actually outside it.

 

And that is just the paradox of the situation; society gives us the idea that

the mind, or ego, is inside the skin and that it acts on its own, apart from

society. Here, then, is a major contradiction in the rules of the social game.

The members of the game are to play as if they were independent agents, but they

are not to know that they are playing as if! It is explicit in the rules that

the individual is self-determining, but implicit that he is so only by virtue of

the rules. Furthermore, while he is defined as an independent agent, he must

not be so independent as not to submit to the rules which define him. Thus, he

is defined as an agent in order to be held responsible to the group for " his "

actions. The rules of the game confer independence and take it away at the same

time without revealing the contradiction.

 

The ego-contradiction is the basic thorn which society has implanted since

childhood and from which we are suffering without being able to see the vicious

circle involved. We have been convinced that we are free and independent agents

and yet, the very agent referred to is actually a social role that is defined by

other people and has no real freedom to act at all.

 

When beginning to understand the trap involved, the usual question is to ask

what one should do to get out of it. And here is where Zen is rather ingenious.

For we are told to " do " nothing to get out of it since the very doing will only

be another level of the same contradiction that one is trying to see through.

Instead of " doing " , or for that matter " not doing " , we need a kind of passive

awareness of ourselves in every situation. For only awareness, now, in the

present moment can reveal the true source of action, which is not the ego at all

but rather the total environmental field of which the organism is only one side

of a mutual polarity.