Seeing Into Our Multiple Self Nature

The essence of Zen consists in acquiring a new viewpoint of looking at life and things generally. By this I mean that if we want to get into the inner most life of Zen, we must forgo all our ordinary habits of thinking which control our everyday life, we must try to see if there is any other way of judging things, or rather if our ordinary way is always sufficient to give us the ultimate satisfaction of our spiritual needs.

D. T. Suzuki is explaining the essence of Zen Buddhism in his essay On Satori, but his statement applies not only to Zen, but to understanding the self or the various aspect of the self that move in and out of choices and probabilities to create experiences.

The self is not controlled by the ego consciousness. alone. We look at the self as a singular, but it is actually a gestalt nucleus that contains a plethora of selves that are constantly in motion. The psyche is a conglomeration of highly charged particles of energy that follow properties and rules that are simply unknown to us consciously. The intensity of the nucleus attracts certain masses of the entire energy available to a particular identity or self. In other words each self vibrates at a particular frequency and they blink in and out of various realities in order to experience beliefs and choices.

At birth our identity is composed of a variety of selves which are attached to a self nucleus and from that bank of selves the ego has the freedom to draw and create a personality. The other selves become trace selves which help form a particular personality. The abilities and interests of these trace selves become subsidiary or they remain latent, but on occasions these highly charged selves exert as much energy as the focused self and they may actually interact and experience things in another reality which we call unreal. At certain points in life the sportsman self is not as active as the writing self or the business self, but they still are present and can be energized in this reality by the focus self by forgoing our ordinary habits of thinking.

Zen is not about the separation. It's units of consciousness that express themselves by “doing without doing” or “seeing without eyes.” Intent is stabilizing and no system is closed so becoming aware of the unification of self or the impetus of Zen is the act of seeing into our multiple self-nature.