When we are born, we respond to life in a very immediate way. A baby is hungry and looks for milk. Something hurts and the baby cries. Someone smiles and the baby may smile back.
Then life begins to accumulate.
We learn language. We learn names. We learn what is considered good and bad, desirable and undesirable, acceptable and unacceptable. We develop preferences, fears, habits and expectations. We learn who we are supposed to be and how the world is supposed to work.
None of this is necessarily a problem. We need much of it to live our lives. But over time these layers can become so familiar that we stop noticing them. They become the lens through which we experience ourselves and everything around us.
We say: this is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I like. This is what I don’t like. This person is like this. That person is like that.
And perhaps, without noticing, the world becomes increasingly solid.
One of the things that interests me about practice is the possibility of observing some of this conditioning rather than automatically believing everything it tells me.
A thought appears. Where did it come from? A judgement appears. Why this judgement? Something makes me angry. What exactly has been touched?
The more I look, the more difficult I find it to locate something completely independent that I can call “me”.
My body depends on food, water, air and the environment around me. My language came from other people. Many of my ideas, habits, preferences and fears developed through family, culture and experience. Even the thoughts appearing in my mind seem to arise from countless conditions that I could never completely trace.
Sometimes this makes me wonder whether what I call “my mind” is quite as private and separate as I normally imagine it to be.
I look at the natural world and see life responding everywhere. A wound begins to heal. A plant grows towards the light. An animal responds to its environment. None of this requires the kind of conscious commentary that fills so much of my own day.
I don’t know that I need to turn this into a theory about one universal mind. But it does make me curious about where I draw the boundary between myself and everything else.
Where exactly do I begin?
Where do I end?
Zen practice gives me an opportunity to explore these questions directly.
When I sit, thoughts arise. Emotions arise. Memories, plans, judgements and opinions appear. I can become completely absorbed in them, or sometimes I can simply notice them.
There is a thought.
There is anger.
There is fear.
There is excitement.
I don’t necessarily have to get rid of any of it. But perhaps I also don’t have to immediately turn everything that appears into “me”.
Over the years, reflection, meditation and inquiry have helped me understand some of my own patterns more clearly. They have also helped me understand other people a little better.
I have noticed that when I see my own conditioning more clearly, it sometimes becomes harder to point the finger quite so quickly.
At other people.
And at myself.
Someone reacts badly and perhaps I can wonder what conditions might be behind that reaction. I react badly and perhaps, instead of immediately condemning myself or defending what I have done, I can become curious about what happened.
This doesn’t mean that everything is acceptable or that actions have no consequences. It simply means that there may be more to our behaviour than the simple stories we tell about ourselves and each other.
Perhaps this is where the idea of the mind we all share becomes useful to me.
Not necessarily as a statement that there is literally one enormous mind somewhere containing all of us, but as a question about how separate we really are.
How much of what I call myself came from somewhere else?
How much of what I think belongs only to me depends on everything around me?
And what happens to the way I meet other people when the boundary between “me” and “them” becomes a little less solid?
I don’t have a final answer.
But I find the question increasingly difficult to ignore.
Perhaps practice begins simply by looking.
What is arising?
What am I calling “me”?
And how separate is it, really?
