A few years ago, as some of you know, I pub­lished my third book, This End­less Moment. I wanted to cap­ture therein the essence of what I see as a self-responsible way of being.

One book has a way of lead­ing to another. I quickly real­ized that the idea of the­o­ret­i­cal self-responsibility was pop­u­lar, but as soon as I pressed the per­son to be self-responsible, out popped the excuses.

I notice, in my own life, that when I am hav­ing a mis­er­able moment, I am cre­at­ing it through how I am defin­ing myself. This ‘misery-making’ process is a dance between jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and story invent­ing. In order to escape into self-responsibility, I must take action. The drama stops as soon as I stop think­ing that the story I tell myself is ‘real.’

<>Out of this real­iza­tion is emerg­ing another book, this a col­lec­tion of old and new Zen sto­ries, designed to be heard and inte­grated by west­ern ears. Fol­low­ing is a chap­ter called, ‘The Myth of a Self.’ This arti­cle may also be included in the next Shen, The Haven’s paper newsletter.

Well, we might as well start with the hard stuff. You do not exist any­where but here and now. Never did, never will. Amen.

Here is a Zen joke.
I told it last night and Dar­bella said,
“Am I sup­posed to get that?”
I answered, “Nope.”

How many Zen Mas­ters does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: The rose bush in the garden.

Get it?

Prob­a­bly not.

I am not going to explain it to you, or not really. It is worth pon­der­ing a bit, though. Here is a hint: Wak­ing up requires the drop­ping of pat, sim­plis­tic, and obvi­ous answers.

Con­sider: How often do you find your­self mis­er­able, judg­ing your life to be awful or mean­ing­less, and what hap­pens then? Do you not find your­self ask­ing some form of this ques­tion: “Why is this hap­pen­ing to me? Why is my life like this?” Is it pos­si­ble for you to explore the pos­si­bil­ity that this is the wrong ques­tion? It is the wrong ques­tion because there is no “you” that has a life.

Think about how you define your­self. Your par­ents, tribes, and com­mu­nity, by the way, taught this defin­ing process to you. I wrote about this in This End­less Moment, in the Decon­struc­tion sec­tion. (Wayne C. Allen, 17f.) The process of defin­ing your­self is always (and only) comparative.

If you con­sider the phys­i­cal world, you will real­ize that we know, say, light because there is its oppo­site, dark­ness. This is the mean­ing of the yin/yang symbol—black con­tains white, and both are inter­re­lated and required in order to ‘locate’ the other.

We estab­lish our sense of self in the same way. Each thing we think we know about our self is based upon the cou­plet ‘me/not me.’ I am a male and am not a female. I have blue eyes and not brown eyes. I am human, and not a buf­falo, although I was born there. Our ego, then, is really noth­ing more than an accu­mu­la­tion of iden­ti­ties, or ‘hats’ that we drag out, so as to have some­thing to say about ourselves.

We can add to that the idea of cul­tural norms, which are noth­ing more than agreed-upon lists of ‘good/bad.’ As we note by look­ing around us and around the world, the jury is out on the con­tents of said lists—of the right­ness or wrong­ness of pretty much everything.

It gets even more inter­est­ing when we move to ‘inter­nal states.’ Inter­nal states are noth­ing more than how I am shuf­fling my sto­ries to ‘prove’ what I have pre­de­ter­mined is the cause of my present sit­u­a­tion or self-definition.

Remem­ber­ing our cou­plet rule, con­sider the state­ment, “My par­ents didn’t bring me up right.” For me, such state­ments raise the ques­tion, “Com­pared to what?” To some­one bought up ‘right,’ I guess. There is, how­ever, a prob­lem here. The per­son mak­ing this state­ment is com­par­ing her­self to a per­son she imag­ines to have been brought up ‘right,’ or to what she read in a book, or learned in a class. In other words, she is com­par­ing her­self to ‘non-reality,’ and find­ing her­self lacking.

Let us sup­pose you talk to your best friend, whom you judge to be the ‘brought up right’ exam­ple to your ‘not.’ Your friend says, “But, I had a mis­er­able child­hood, I was deprived, even worse than you were!” Now what can one do? Have a vic­tim con­test? Go to the crappy par­ent­ing tri­bunal, to get a “Who was raised worse” deci­sion? (Actu­ally, many peo­ple go to ther­a­pists for exactly this reason—to have an expert con­firm their belief in their own victimhood.)

Then, the judge­ment starts. “I should not have been treated like that!”

This is sim­ply and plainly silly. “It’s not fair” changes noth­ing about who and where you are right now. Here is the bare truth of life (feel free to take notes…)—your life is as it is, and hap­pened as it hap­pened. It is a mean­ing­less waste of time to sug­gest, “It should have been dif­fer­ent,” because there is no dif­fer­ent, and there is no should. Your life is (always and only) what hap­pens, how you process it, and what you do with it.

While this may seem cold and cal­cu­lat­ing, defin­ing your­self as a vic­tim of your past changes noth­ing in the here and now. End­lessly telling all and sundry of your sad and sorry life changes pre­cisely noth­ing in the here and now. To repeat, “Why did this hap­pen?” is a mean­ing­less ques­tion. “What do I choose to do now?” on the other hand, has some potential.

A client once told me a story of her self-described ‘stu­pid­ity and inep­ti­tude.’ She had dropped out of High School, had sev­eral failed rela­tion­ships, got preg­nant, got mar­ried, got preg­nant, got sep­a­rated, and showed up on my doorstep, 3 year old in one hand and a one year old in the other. Woe, oh woe, was she.

Her story was a well-practiced, inter­nal com­par­i­son with what her ego told her she “should have been.” She berated her­self end­lessly that, at 23, her life was, and would always be, a failure.

I said, “Have a breath, and then tell me what you might choose to do dif­fer­ently with your life.” For some bizarre rea­son, she looked at me, smiled, and said, “I want to be a nurse.” I said, “Walk down to the High School, enroll, get some child care, go to Col­lege, become a nurse.”

Rather than argue with me about the impos­si­bil­ity of such a thing, she looked at me with great curios­ity, said, “Hmm. OK,” and went and did exactly that. Four years later, Dar­bella and I attended her grad­u­a­tion as an R.N.

All I can say is that she stopped iden­ti­fy­ing her­self using her inter­nal story of how hard done by she was, stayed present, and started doing things dif­fer­ently. None of this was easy, but she did it.

So, who was she? Was she the dud, the fail­ure, the poor abused vic­tim? Was she the sin­gle mom with no hope? Was she the suc­cess­ful stu­dent, the nurse? Of course not. Those are just sto­ries, and not very help­ful ones.

As she dropped the sto­ries, she dis­cov­ered that her life was a flow of present moments. She was who she was, each moment of the walk, and noth­ing more (or less) than this. She heard me ask­ing another ques­tion, find­ing another way of look­ing at things, (the rose bush in the gar­den) and this broke her cycle of see­ing things only one way. She had a break­through and that break­through was all about let­ting go of pre-defining her future based upon her sto­ries of her past.

The Zen-ish idea of “no self” is how life is. I can­not show you any more of myself than who I am right now. Even as I tell you sto­ries, all you see is me, right now, telling sto­ries. You do not see the ‘real­ity’ of the story—even if you were there, watch­ing it unfold with me, you would still see it dif­fer­ently than I did. That is why we call them sto­ries. My story, my sense of my self, is not ‘true.’ I am only who I am right now. In this way, a sense of a fixed self is sim­ply a convenience.

It is a use­ful tool to define myself as “Wayne.” Hav­ing this iden­tity makes it pos­si­ble for you to write me cheque, allows the gov­ern­ment to know what to put on my pass­port, and I can eas­ily remem­ber I wear a shirt with a 15-inch col­lar. My mother men­tioned that they were going to call me Dar­ryl, and I am no more Dar­ryl than Wayne. I may be male, but this label is only use­ful for enter­ing the right wash­room. I actu­ally think that uni­sex “Ally McBeal” wash­rooms make more sense anyway.

I grew up more priv­i­leged than some and less priv­i­leged than oth­ers, sucked at rela­tion­ships until I didn’t, and to this day catch myself judg­ing that I am unloved, or not loved enough, judg­ing that I am excel­lent, or mid­dling, or a fail­ure at some­thing. I find myself imag­in­ing all kinds of dire out­comes for my life, and then I remem­ber I do not have a life. I have this moment, and this moment is pretty damn alright.

My story of my past is fluid and flex­i­ble, and I dredge up exam­ples (or invent them…) that prove what­ever point I am try­ing to make. I am thus ‘more’ some­thing and ‘less’ another because of the sto­ries I select. Per­versely, if I am des­per­ate to prove some story regard­ing my imag­i­nary life or self, I just twist the story in my head to make it fit. That will be the moment that Dar turns to me and says, “You might want to get over your­self.” I give my head a shake and feel the heat of embarrassment.

The approach I take is to poke holes in the sto­ries you tell your­self. I want you to join me and give your head a shake, and to won­der over the fool­ish­ness that goes on between your ears. This fool­ish­ness, by the way, will go on until you die. All we can hope for is an acute aware­ness that it is hap­pen­ing, and then a sense of humour. From this place, we can be like my client. She did not deny her past (hard to do, con­sid­er­ing the two kids she car­ried with her,) nor did she declare her life to be a closed book. She looked at her choices, noticed her judge­ments, and decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent anyway.

I know that it is a stretch to under­stand that you have no past, no his­tory, and no self. All you are right now is what­ever you believe that you are. Your sub­con­scious mind is expert and cre­at­ing drama and ‘evi­dence’ for what­ever you are shovelling.

If you will con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that this is so, you can begin to act in this moment, not out of habit but out of choice­ful focus. You can do what needs doing, in this moment, with­out all of the “But I…I… can’t! (Sob, snif­fle.)” non­sense. The essence of being is to rec­og­nize our non-being—our non-self-ing. In this space, I, and you, and the uni­verse are One—the same ‘stuff,’ man­i­fest­ing for a while in a cer­tain ‘pack­age,’ and soon to return to formlessness.

It is a lot to wrap your head around, and in a sense, you can­not. One moment it makes no sense, and in the next, it does, at some deep, intu­itive level. It is what I call the moment-by-moment path of wak­ing up.

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Wayne C. Allen is a Zen-based psy­chother­a­pist and author. His lat­est book is This End­less Moment.