A dialogue between Zen and process philosophy must therefore involve a recasting of the ideas of process thought in first-person terms. The enlightenment experience itself is an uncovering of what has always been present from a first-person point of view. In Zen the first-person perspective is always preferred. One is a third-person perspective the other is a first-person perspective. If we are to understand the true self, though, we must recognize that there are two perspectives from which it can be viewed. As Ummon put it: "When walking just walk, when sitting just sit, above all, don’t wobble" (ZDPR 5). One cannot cling to one’s self one can only be one’s self at each moment. It is a ground because it is the point of departure for all activity in the world, and it is groundless because it is never the same at any two instants. In a certain sense, the self is a groundless ground. Inasmuch as it is always changing, one realizes the impossibility of clinging to any particular moment of the self’s existence. Inasmuch as the self is always here-and-now, one lives fully and creatively in the present. This realization marks the beginning of a new way of experiencing based on the reality of the self. When one attains enlightenment in Zen, the reality of this self is uncovered in an intuitive and nondiscursive way, and it is seen that this self is both always here-and-now and always changing. The self as just defined is the "true self" or "everyday mind" of Zen. Thus a person’s self consists of a different subject at each moment, but at any given moment the self is here-and-now. When a particular subject that is here-and-now perishes, it loses its status as the self of the person at issue. Thus a person is a series of subjects, and a person’s self is the subject which at any given moment is here-and-now. And the word "self" will refer to that particular subject in the ongoing life-history of a person which is present rather than past or future. The word "subject" will refer to any experience in that series, insofar as the experience is a process of feeling and synthesizing data. In this essay the word "person" will refer to a particular series of experiences extending from physical birth to physical death considered as a whole. To say that a human life is a series of experiences, then, is to say that such a life is a series of subjects which become superjects for subsequent subjects. As an immediate process of feeling and synthesizing, it is a subject. As an object remembered, an experience is a superject. When the synthesis is complete, the immediacy of the experience perishes, and the experience becomes an object to be remembered consciously or subconsciously by subsequent experiences. Each experience in this series is a subjective process of feeling many data and synthesizing them into a complex experiential whole. In process philosophy the life of a human being is viewed as a series of experiences extending from birth (and perhaps before) to death (and perhaps after). In what follows I hope to explain some of these qualities and the everyday mind to which they belong. Yet, as Zen well attests, this everyday mind has unique qualities which contravene customary ways of thinking about selfhood and reality. For the true self discovered in enlightenment is the ordinary self or "everyday mind" of each and every human life. The essay is not about Zen alone, or the self alone, but both. The aim of this essay is to interpret these insights from a process perspective and thereby illuminate certain aspects of the human self. And second, one understands that this true self, even though here-and-now, is always changing. First, one realizes that the deepest level of one’s life - what in Zen is called the "true self" - is always here-and-now. When one attains enlightenment in Zen Buddhism, at least two things are realized. McDaniel interprets the insights of Zen Buddhism from a process perspective. In Zen Buddhism the deepest level in one’s life is the true self, the here and now, yet this true self is always changing. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock. Process Studies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. The following article appeared in Process Studies, pp. He is the author of Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life and Earth, Sky, Gods, and Mortals: Developing an Ecological Theology. Steel Center for the Study of Religion and Philosophy and associate professor of Religion at Hendrix College (Arkansas).
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