Realizing the True Self

My dear friend, the Zen teacher Dosho Port, recently posted a challenging essay on his blog.  The gist of his message was that Zen communities are not like church communities -- the emphasis, while celebrating community through practicing together -- is about waking up together.  Zen Buddhist temples are not meant to be social clubs.  

And more important, Zen teachers are not therapists, pastoral counselors, or caregivers primarily.  In those kinds of relationships, the relationship is client-centered.  The practitioner/minister/therapist focuses on the student/parishioner/client and their particular constructed stories  about reality, and especially about their unique "habitualized self."  Instead, a Zen teacher focuses on how to awaken to a recognition of the truth of the awakened heart, which exists beyond all kinds of self-identities, personal traumas and narratives. This is my version of what Dosho wrote, so my apologies to him if I missed or distorted anything.  And of course, this is what all of us human beings are doing continually!

And here is the most radical part of the essay, in Dosho's own words: 

"In Zen, the student must direct themselves toward the teacher. Why? If a student is really going to do what's necessary to awaken and go deeply into post-awakening training, it will only work in that way. Plainly put, as long as a student is making the practice about their habitualized self, they will not realize the true self. And only when the student finds the aspiration that burns deep within will they have the power for the Way."

In my experience with students, the journey within, Dogen's "backward step" and Shitou's "Turn around the light to shine within, then just return" are important pointers to a challenging investigation.  We spend so much time building up walls of protection so that we will feel safe in our constructed selves, and once we let someone else in to that tender and deep place we can feel exposed and terrified.  My sense of the Zen teacher's job is to wait for a moment when someone seems ready to open up to a different way of being, and then begin to gently probe, challenge, and affirm.  What is affirmed, of course, is not the constructed, habitualized self, which we cling to for dear life, but the unconstructed self that lies at the core of those layers of protection.  And this is where awakening comes from.  

Awakening is not a thing that happens and then is over.  It's the beginning, and sometimes only a glimpse, of the possibility of a life supported by the energy of the universe.  It is contained in every sensation in the body, every emotion and every thought.  We dismiss too much of our lives because we also have a constructed idea of what awakening is.  We can't believe that awakening includes what we don't want.   And so we exclude many doorways to awakening, because we become selective.  Everything is a doorway to awakening.  Dharma gates are boundless.