A few quotes (as A.A.Milne once said - and I quote - "A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business")
First Thomas Merton, on the self (in his view false and true) The false he sees as a derivative of Descartes, that has infiltrated the modern "western" consciousness.
Descartes finds his basic intuition in the reflexive self-awareness of the individual thinking subject, standing, as it were, outside of and apart from other objects of knowledge. From the starting point of reflexive thought the subject takes the abstract concepts of itself and of its own being as objects —cogito ergo sum.
Merton argues that such a starting point will inevitable lead to the "death of God" - as he says:-
It is this kind of consciousness, exacerbated to an extreme, which has made inevitable the so called “death of God.” Cartesian thought began with an attempt to reach God as object by starting from the thinking self. But when God becomes object, he sooner or later “dies,” because God as object is ultimately unthinkable. God as object is not only a mere abstract concept, but one which contains so many internal contradictions that it becomes entirely nonnegotiable except when it is hardened into an idol that is maintained in existence by a sheer act of will.
Merton then speaks of a "truer" self:-
Meanwhile, let us remind ourselves that another, metaphysical, consciousness is still available to modern man. It starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being, ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object division. Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness. It is completely nonobjective. It has in it none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object. The consciousness of Being (whether considered positively or negatively and apophatically as in Buddhism) is an immediate experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness. It is not “consciousness of” but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such “disappears.”
as the Oriental religions and Christian mysticism have stressed, this self-aware subject is not final or absolute; it is a provisional self-construction which exists, for practical purposes, only in a sphere of relativity. Its existence has meaning in so far as it does not become fixated or centered upon itself as ultimate, learns to function not as its own center but “from God” and “for others.”
(All of Mertons quotes taken from essays to be found in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite")
Then Dogen, who writes poetically, in a style all of its own, often needing commentary to unravel (if such it does!) Anyone reading an essay or two in various translations will see the problem)
......flowers fall even though we love them; weeds grow even though we dislike them. Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization....
To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by all things. To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off. There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped. We endlessly express this ungraspable trace of realization...
......if there are fish that would swim or birds that would fly only after investigating the entire ocean or sky, they would find neither path nor place. When we make this very place our own, our practice becomes the actualization of reality (genjōkōan). When we make this path our own, our activity naturally becomes actualized reality (genjōkōan). This path, this place, is neither big nor small, neither self nor others. It has not existed before this moment nor has it come into existence now. Therefore the reality of all things is thus.
(All from "Genjokoan" from Dogen's "Shobogenzo" - The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye)
Just throwing things into the mix.
