Fashioning Experience Into What We Call Myself

Fashioning Experience Into What We Call Myself

 

From the nondual perspective it is obvious that the true nature of an object experienced and the true nature of the subject experiencing it are not two different things. The myriad dharmas always around you is you – seeing this is seeing Buddha, seeing Buddha is making Buddha, making Buddha is being Buddha.

The sense organs do not convey signals from an alien (independently existent) realm to the mind of an isolated self; the sense organs are integral aspects of the ‘actualization of the universe’ (genjokoan) which is experienced/exists as the world/self unity a human being calls ‘myself.’

What we experience – dharmas – is what we are. And since experience is ever active, never static, what we are is an activity, a doing. And this doing that we are is a continuous ordering, fashioning, or arranging of dharmas, which are the ‘bits and pieces’ we experience as ‘myself.’

In a similar manner, we are continually arranging bits and pieces of what we experience in order to fashion them into what we call ‘a self ’, which we treat as ‘myself ’: this is the same as the principle of ‘we ourselves are just for a time’.

Shobogenzo, Uji, Hubert Nearman