Peg Syverson - Soto Zen priest ... speaks of an encounter with her late Zen Teacher, Joko Beck (1917-2011).
Early in our spiritual work together, when I was a single parent juggling three jobs and a full-time graduate program, she asked me what had brought me to Zen practice. I knew that this was not a casual question. For weeks I reflected on it, and finally I came in for daisan (private practice interview), met her piercing gaze, and said, truthfully, "I just want to be a better mother for my son." She tartly replied, "Well, that's a story!"
I was startled into wonder and, for just a bit, completely lost my bearings. I barely managed to stand, bow, and leave the little room where she was even then ringing the bell for the next student. I felt as though she had suddenly tossed a pitcher of ice water in my face.
But at some level beyond language, I knew she was right. My "story" was suddenly quite clear: the core belief that I was perpetually failing at some performance of "being a good mother," despite having neither models nor even any idea what such an ideal might be. No, I was always just coming up short, always scrambling to improve, and still failing. In fact, deep in my heart, I held this lacerating belief as a virtue - a sign of both my noble aspiration and the humble recognition of my terrible failings. It was poignant and heartbreaking. Yet this very story was actually coming between my son Ben and me, a filter through which I was always anxiously and apologetically and sadly viewing our marvelous life together. That single retort in Joko's tiny daisan room changed the entire course of my relationship with Ben. Simply staying present with him without the story was infinitely more challenging, and yet the intimacy it opened was vast and luminous.
*"Joko Beck and the Thought of Enlightenment." In Florence Caplow & Susan Moon, Eds. The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women.
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The true I is unchanging, is authentic. And there is only one true I. The false I is never the same, is illusory. The false I is often called False Self in contrast to True Self. False does not mean bad but connotes not authentically that we are. True does not mean good, but connotes authenticity - not play-acting.
Trying to be a great mom or dad is as much False Self as striving to be an ax murderer or a bank thief. Your personality is a persona, a mask - "persona" is the Greek word for "hypocrite" and derives from actors wearing masks covering their true identity. Often, men played roles with a mask representing a woman.
Beck's words called Syverson back to herself. Her efforts to be something in addition to herself had distanced her from both her son and herself. Trying to be a super mom, to get it right, was blocking her genuine presence and, so, intimacy with others.
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This innate, natural being-presence is what Buddhists call our Original Face. The Original Face can shine forth through the authenticity of our particular selves. So, when Jesus says, "Let your light so shine," he does not refer to our personalities or our trying to be something or someone. There are many lamps, but one light.
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The Way is a returning to ourselves, again and again. We are all hypocrites sometimes, it seems. Some people all the time. Our religious, spiritual, political, national, family, gender, sexual ... identities can be a means of expressing or covering who we are. We are none of these things. We are before. We are more.
When I was vowed to religious life in 1996, it was a time of trying to appear monkish. This effort to appear contemplative and holy was a move from myself. This intention was not a bad thing; instead, it was a normal developmental transition, which moved into a dissolving of that effort and desire to appear monkish. - See, appearing other than you turns you into an appearance, a loss of realness. - Now, I realize that living a monk-like life is one way of living a genuinely human life, even as being a plumber or basketball player can be the same. So, a vowed life is one of many equally capable of leading us home to the True Self. Our roles can lead us farther away or closer to the Original Face; some might say to God, or as the Quakers say, "That of God in everyone."
This brings us to a critical point of understanding. No name, title, or label is equal to the authenticity we speak of here. The "Original Face" is not in our vocabulary anymore than "God" is. You are nameless. We are nameless.
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Let us not live down ourselves by attaching to self-identities. Let us wear them like wearing clothes. We use them as needed, taking them off and putting them on, but never saying, "I'm my clothes."
Our authenticity invites others to feel safe to be true in our presence. The result is true intimacy rather than social game-playing.
But what of those who cannot tolerate realness? We remian real. We do not yield our authenticity to comfort others in their distance from themselves. Simply, the True Self is you, not some distortion of you seen as okay or not okay by others. And spiritually-speaking, you cannot be equal to "Christian," "Buddhist," "Taoist," "Muslim," or any other. You are.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
