SpiritWeb

Relationship Is Not to Each Other

We sit sesshin in order to know who we are. We have a mind and body; but those elements don’t explain the life we are. Shakespeare’s Polonius said, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” We want to know our true self. We may form a picture of something called “the true self,” as if it were an actual entity, floating about. We are in sesshin to discover, to be our true self. But what on earth is it? If you had to define “true self” what would you say? Let’s think for a moment. What am I coming up with? Something like: the functioning of a man or a woman in which there is no self-centered motivation. It’s not hard to see that such a person would not be human in any familiar sense. From a different point of view such a person would be fully human—but not in the way we usually think of ourselves and others. Such a person would actually be nobody at all.

As we struggle though life and sense the shortcomings of our relationships to this person or to that person, or to our work or a particular activity, one of our blinding errors is the idea that “I am related to that person or event.” For instance, suppose I’m married.

The usual way we think of marriage is, “I am married to him.” But as long as I say, “I am married to him,” there are two of us and in true self there cannot be two. True self knows no separation. It may look like me being married to him, but true self-call it the infinite energy potential—knows no separation. True self forms into different shapes but essentially it remains one self, one energy potential. When I say I am married to you, or I own a Toyota, or I have four children, in everyday language that is so. But we need to see that it’s not the real truth. In fact, I am not married to somebody or something; I am that person, I am that thing. The true self knows no separation. Now you may say that’s all very pretty; but practically speaking, what do we do about the difficult problems that occur in our lives? We all know that work can present enormous challenges; so can children, parents, any relationship.

Suppose I’m married to someone who is extremely difficult—not just a little difficult, but extremely difficult. Suppose the children of the marriage are suffering. I’ve often talked about the fact that when we are suffering, we must become the suffering. That’s how we grow, true enough. But now does that apply when a situation is so difficult that everyone involved is taking a beating? What do we do? And there are many variations on relationship problems. Suppose that I have a partner who is deeply committed to a field of study, and the only place the study can be carried out is in Africa for three or four years—and my work keeps me here. Then what? What do I do? Or perhaps I have aged parents who need my care—yet my profession, my responsibilities and obligations, call me elsewhere, what do I do? Such problems are what life is made of. Not all problems are as tough as these, but less demanding ones may still send us up the wall with worry.

In any situation our devotion should be not to the other person per se, but to the true self. Of course the other person embodies the true self, yet there is a distinction. If we are involved in a group, our relationship is not to the group, but to the true self of the group. By the “true self” I’m not talking about some mystical ghost that floats above. True self is nothing at all; and yet it’s the only thing that should dominate our life; it is the only Master. Doing zazen, or sitting sesshin, is for the purpose of better understanding our true self. If we don’t understand it, then we will be confused forever by problems and won’t know what to do. The only thing to be served is not a teacher, not a center, not a job, not a mate, not a child, but our true self. So how do we know how to do that? It’s not easy and it takes time and perseverance to learn.

Practice makes it obvious that in almost all of our life we are not greatly interested in our true self; we’re interested in our small self: we are interested in what we want, what we think, what we hope for, what would make us feel good, what would ensure our health, our well-being; that’s where our energy goes. An intelligent practice slowly illuminates that fact. And it’s not good or bad that we are like that, it’s just the way it is. When we have some illumination of our usual self-centered activity, when we are aware of the grief and the agony that it produces, sometimes we can turn away from it. We may even get a glimpse of another way of being: the true self. In a concrete situation, what is the way to serve the true self? The way may look very rough, very unkind—and sometimes it will be the opposite. There are no formulas. Perhaps I give up my good job in New York and stay at home to take care of my parents. Or perhaps I don’t. No one but my true self can tell me what I should do. If our practice has matured to a point where we don’t often fool ourselves—because we are in touch with our actual experience—then we know more and more what is the compassionate action to take. When we are nobody, no-self (and we’ll never be that completely) the right action is obvious.

All relationships can teach us something; and some of them, sadly, must come to an end. There may come a time when the best way to serve the true self is to move on. No one can tell me what is best; no one knows except my true self. It doesn’t matter what my mother says about it, or what my aunt says about it; in a certain sense it doesn’t even matter what I say about it. As one teacher says, “Your life is none of your business.” But our practice is definitely our business. And that practice is to learn what it means to serve that which we cannot see, touch, taste or smell. Essentially the true self is no-thing, and yet it is our Master. And when I say it’s no-thing, I don’t mean nothing in the ordinary sense; the Master is not a thing, yet it’s the only thing. When we’re married, we’re not married to each other, but to the true self. When we teach a group of children, we’re not teaching the children, we are expressing the true self in a way appropriate to the classroom.

Now this may sound idealistic and remote; yet every five minutes we get a chance to work with it. For example: the interchange with someone who irritates us; the little encounter that goes sour, when we feel they should “know better”; the irritation when my daughter says she’ll telephone—and she forgets. What is the true self in all of these incidents? Usually we can’t see the true self; we can only see how we miss it. We can be aware of irritability, annoyance, impatience. And such thoughts we can label. We can patiently do that, we can experience the tension the thoughts generate. In other words we can experience what we put between ourselves and our true self. When such careful practice is put first in our life we serve the Master—and then we grow in knowledge of what must be done. There is only one Master. The Master is not me, nor anyone else, not Sabba Somebody or Guru Somebody; no person can be the Master. And no Center is anything but a tool of the Master. No marriage, no relationship, is anything but that.

But to realize that fact we have to illuminate our activity not once, but ten thousand times. We have to put a searchlight on our unkind thoughts about people and situations. We must make conscious how we feel, what we want, what we expect, how terrible we think someone else is, or how terrible we are—that cloud over everything. We’re like a little squid that produces a flood of ink so our mischief can’t be seen. When we wake up in the morning we immediately start squeezing out ink. What is our ink? Our self-centered preoccupation, which clouds the water around us. When we live self-centered lives we create trouble. We may insist we don’t like horrible fairy tales, but we do like them. Something within us is fascinated by our drama and so we cling to it and confuse ourselves.

True practice brings us more and more into that plain and undramatic space in which things are just as they are—just functioning. And that functioning cannot come from self-centeredness. Sitting in sesshin greatly increases our chances of spending more of our life in that plain space. But we have to have patience, persistence, and posture; we must maintain equanimity and sit. True self is nothing at all. It’s the absence of something else. An absence of what?