I am using my newly purchased Russian Nesting Dolls as a working metaphor to help answer the question—or how to ask the question—Who Am I? 

The question is fundamental: Who am I? Am I created? Am I the creator of I? Am I a thing or am I the knower of all things? The problem is that we approach this question with Classical logic or either/or. I must be created or the creator, but either way, I am divided, yet I must be One, but my logic creates two. So I cannot answer the question Who am I? logically. This is like a butcher trying to put the cow back together. What is a cow? Let me chop it up to find out. Logic is a cleaver because it is the law of things and objects. But am I an object? Obviously, I can be the object of my own mind, but what is the mind that knows myself as an object? That is the nothing that knows myself as something. 

Zen arrives at Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Translated that means the known (form) is the Knower (emptiness); the knower is the known. Try to understand that with the logic of thinking. You see thinking as we use it is On/Off thinking. Binary thinking cannot computer ambiguity. On/Off thinking cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The creative mind sees wholes; thinking mind sees parts and pieces.The question is fundamental: Who am I? Am I created? Am I the creator of I? Am I a thing or am I the knower of all things? The problem is that we approach this question with Classical logic or either/or. I must be created or the creator, but either way I am divided, yet I must be One, but my logic creates two. So I cannot answer the question Who am I? logically. This is like a butcher trying to put the cow back together. What is a cow? Let me chop it up to find out. Logic is a cleaver because it is the law of things and objects. But am I an object? Obviously, I can be the object of my own mind, but what is the mind that knows myself as an object? That is the nothing that knows myself as something. 

Zen arrives at Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Translated that means the known (form) is the Knower (emptiness); the knower is the known. Try to understand that with the logic of thinking. You see thinking as we use it is On/Off thinking. Binary thinking cannot computer ambiguity. On/Off thinking cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Creative mind sees wholes; thinking mind sees parts and pieces.

The lessons of the Nesting Worlds is that no matter which world or moment you are in (every moment is a new world)

You as the Knower are whole and undivided by what you know. Everything we know can be doubted, but you as the Knower cannot be divided, so no matter what world you are in, you are OK. You are the Source or creator of everything, every mind world (experience) you know. So the Russian Nesting Dolls are a helpful working metaphor for understanding how our mind works, how it creates the world we live in, but forgets that it is the creator, and so, having forgotten we are the creator, we hurt because our world hurts us…yet, when I know that I am the creator of worlds, I may hurt, but it’s OK. When it’s OK that I hurt, the hurt cannot stay.

The World Wide Web (www) is having a birthday, I understand, and just as the printing press changed the European world, the internet has changed us. Books put knowledge in your pocket. The cell phone puts all the knowledge of humanity in your pocket in realtime. Book store knowledge like coal is stored solar power. The internet not only stores power but allows you to create power. In books, you are the consumer; on the internet, you are the consumer/creator. This changes everything; this is a radical revolutionary change in reality paradigms, how we perceive reality and live in it.

The radical shift in paradigm is that for the first time in Western world view, you are the center of the world; you are the center of the world wide web, if you have a cell phone or computer. You are both in the world and of the world, just like Jesus said he was. You are both at the hub of the world and on the periphery looking at the world. You are both axis and rim at the same time. 

But in our common-sense reality, we feel we are always on the rim taking shit from the world. We don’t know we are also at the center as the creator of the world we live in. We are conditioned by the old paradigm to believe we are created as things in the world, either by God or the Big Bang, it makes no difference. It’s no wonder we spend all out time on the web, because there we are free from the prison of being just another thing among things.

Buddha Dharma (or Zen as I like to say) is arousing the mind that does not rest on form. Jesus said this as much when he said the Son of Man has no place (form/idea/label) to rest his head (mind). Reading this metaphorically, the Son of Man is our human mind, and the Son of this Mind is the sense of a separate self or Ego. 

This Ego can only exist when identified with form because it believes it is form or fixed. So the Ego must have a label with which to rest its mind, otherwise there is no way to orientate itself in the snowstorm of sense data. 

Zen is the collapse of the labeling mind, the terror of having nothing to cling to, and then the discovery that you are the Knower of form and not the form itself. The Knower, free from form, is at home anywhere. The Son of Man is what Zen calls Big Mind or No Mind. It is a creative mind because it creates no ideas, insights out of the forms that are given. The TV metaphor is MacGyver who uses anything to get out of a fix.

A mind that does not rest on form (physical or mental)is a liberated mind. I’ve been talking about grievances for the last two Zen Fits, and a grievance is a form upon which we rest or cling to. You can see that, right? A grievance is a mental state of pain, and when we bring it up and share it with others we are reinforcing the glue of the mental state, or label as I’m saying in this talk. 

Labels stick to the mind and give the mind a sense of belonging, of having authority, credentials, security. There is nothing wrong with working for and having credentials, but there a world of hurt when we identify with the labels. Then we are in pain when the world does not fit our label, our package so to speak. Labels come on packages. 

In yoga and Buddhism this labeling package is called Name and Form. It’s like we have put the ever-changing flued reality whose expose is always a work in process into a pan of fixer. (I used to use a darkroom)

A Zen mind or McGyver mind allows the world to be a process instead of a fixed image. Reality is essentially a verb instead of a noun, but I don’t mean nouns are wrong because the world has to be named and given form and definition so we can catch a bus. But. unless we recognize that realtiy is a verb, a flowing impermanence, we are going to continually stuck and hurt when our nouns change. We then have grievances. 

A Zen Mind or McGyver mind is a mind not afraid of change and using whatever is available to speak the Word, or be free. There is great joy and laughter in this freedom.

I got no grievances means as J. Krishnamurti once said when asked what his secret was: I don’t mind what happens. So I received a FB message from a “friend” who said I block idiots like you. Did a fruit fly that lives at my computer fly by, or was it a floater on my eye? 

If I minded that I have floaters on my retina, I would have a grievance when I noticed one. Damned floaters! I should not have floaters. 

But I do. I don’t mind what happens means that I have no complaint with what is. How could I not have floaters? Oh, I can imagine not having floaters because I remember when I didn’t have them. If I were to imagine myself not having floaters there would be a tension, a pain between the two poles of ME: one me with floaters and an imaginary me without floaters. Ah…there is the cause of my grievance: the wound or division in Me. 

Let there be ONE is the categorical imperative of the Cosmos. There can only be one cosmos, one of anything. Everything is one something. Each floater (I have a bunch of them) is one floater. So there can only be One Me. 

Did you see the movie Oblivion with Tom Cruise? What if there were two identical Toms? Can there be two you’s? Now, there cannot be two you’s. There can be two objects that are identical you’s, looking from your point of view, that is. And you could not tell them apart. But can there be two You’s from your viewpoint? In other words, there can only be one ViewPoint that is You. If there were two you’s, each with a viewpoint, there would still be the one you with your viewpoint. Get that? 

So when I notice a floater and I imagine myself not having a floater, and I have a grievance because I have the floater, where is the hurt in that? The hurt is not in the floater, that’s for sure. 

Which Me (I) am I? Am I the Me with the floater or the Me I imagine without the floater. I should say I instead of Me because it is my I that is divided into two I’s. 

So here lies the hurt of the grievance. I have a moment and I imagine myself not having this moment. I mind what is happening. I mind this moment because I can imagine a better or different moment. If I couldn’t or didn’t imagine a better moment, there would be no grievance, would there? 

Now, can I choose to not imagine a better moment? Well, if I were to choose to not imagine a better moment, then I would be imagining the choice or another better moment. So am I trapped? Is there no way out of the hurt from my grievance with myself, with the wound or hurt of the divided Me or self? 

When I see through and through that I cannot imagine my way out of having floaters, nor can I have an operation to cut out the floaters, well, I accept them. When I accept that the floaters are who I am, that’s it. I realize that it is futile to imagine not having floaters because I cannot have floaters, except in my fantasy. And when I see that the hurt in the floaters is caused by my imagining not having floaters…the floaters themselves drop off. I don’t even notice them, unless like right now I make an effort to notice them because I’m writing about them. 

Not minding something means that you barely notice it. You don’t highlight it. You do not underline it. You don’t pull it out of the background of the moment and think about it. You don’t give it a reality. You have no grievance with it, and then you have no grievance with yourself. Then you don’t mind what happens. 

When the Buddha said, when asked what he taught, he said I teach suffering and the cessation of suffering. What is suffering but grieving, the sense of loss, the feeling of being incomplete, not sufficient, inadequate, not whole? Yes, I want to be whole, said Manaford to the Russian Oligarch. He wanted to be free from grieving, from the sense of being divided and in debt. Being in debt is not being whole. Being in debt is a grievance. 

I am in debt: I should not be in debt. Now there are two Me’s or Selves. The one in debt, the one I image in the future that is not in debt. One is divided, the one that is alive this moment, and One that is whole in the future.  This division of my self into two equally valid but opposite selves is the cause of our suffering, said the Buddha. I must be ONE, but I am two, and that is IMPOSSIBLE. There cannot be two I’s or me’s, or two viewpoints. There can only be One viewpoint that is I. If there were two, then there would be two separate personalities, neither of whom could talk to the other. There cannot be two viewpoints that simultaneously exist as the One that is Two. 

Or can there? I think we have just stumbled upon the Third Noble Truth in Buddhism: the Cessation of separation of the two me’s. 

Now let’s look at the meaning of being OK. Being OK means being whole, being One. I am this moment, what is happening, I am this argument with the sister-in-law. If I’m not OK with this moment, then I split myself and imaging a better moment, a peaceful relationship, and I am OK with that, but I’m not OK with the present self. 

But I can never escape the present self. I hurt. And I blame the other or myself for the hurt, for not being able to be a better self that I imagine in the future. I have a grievance. I have lost my whole self. I have divided the One self and that is impossible, yet there it is. 

How can I be the two me’s simultaneous, which would heal the wound, which would restore me? I must accept that I am perfectly whole in this present moment, even though I in a fight with someone. This moment is it. Now, of course, I can have a better relationship with this person, but the one I’m in right now is the only possible one, yet it could be better. You see. 

I realize through and through that what is happening is OK. And when I accept what is happening without wanting it to be different, without dividing myself, the moment changes, it evolves in the intentional direction I desire, which is to have unity and wholeness in myself. 

You are the world and the world is you. When you are having an argument with the world, you are OK because you are that. Now, having accepted that you are already always whole, the discord in the moment naturally moves towards wholeness and unity because—now listen up—that is what you have already affirmed by accepting yourself as already always whole. 

When you have not divided yourself, you have not divided the world, and your world evolves always towards unity and wholeness without effort. You need to do nothing to attain wholeness because you are already always whole. Can you see right now the great liberation in this understanding? 

It takes a long time for the core principles of Buddhas Dharma to sink in, and that everything is impermanent is a core axiom. This means everything is loss because change is loss. What you believe is fixed is gone, dead and gone. 

The mantra of the Heart Sutra is Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate: Bodhi Svaha! Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone to the Other Shore; Oh, what an Awakening! 

You see…gone, gone is loss, loss, dead and gone, gone beyond going beyond…

How to you go beyond loss? If everything, if all life, all existence, for that matter, is dying, is changing—everything is a verb; there are no nouns—then there is no loss. 

If everything were the color green, there would be no green because you could not see it, and if you are not conscious of it, green does not exist…..unless there one just one dot of another color. Then with that one dot of contrast, Green would pop into existence. 

So how does Loss or death pop into existence? If you imagine one dot of immortality, if you imagine or have one thought of being fixed, then death and loss and suffering pops into mind and then exists. Just one thought, one inch divides heaven from earth, says Zen. 

Our real grievance when we hold a grievance is not for what we lost in the past when we were wounded, but for what we are losing now by holding a grievance. A grievance burns.  A grievance hurts. We hold the hurt under the illusion that we can get rid of it by holding it in the mind. 

All is change said Heraclitus but then with Aristotle and Western science and religion, everything is fixed. Everything is what is is. A = A. But then Quantum comes along with Buddhism (which was before Heraclitus) and says everything is impermanent or change. Reality is a verb not a bunch of nouns. 

But we need nouns to catch a bus. The bus is a noun. I can say catch that noun and everyone knows what I mean. But the catching is the verb, and I am that too. But I cannot say catch that “catching.” We cannot fix a verb. A verb is a wave. But we perceive particles or nouns. 

Now, when I name my grievance which is a verb, a changing feeling, unpleasant as it may be, I fix the verb and give it existence. But I cannot remove this noun because it lies in the past, in my memory. I cannot change the past, so I’m stuck with it, with the noun I have named because I have forgotten that before I’m a noun, I’m a verb. 

When I recognize that the grievance is a very, a fluid feeling that will change if I don’t fix it, then it goes away because I have not named it and fixed it in its narrative, my past memory of the hurt that I call a grievance. 

The truth is that I’m not grieving because I lost something in the past when someone or the world hurt me, no, I’m grieving for what I’m losing right now by holding a grievance our of my ignorance, by my forgetting that before I’m a noun, before I’m defined, I’m a verb, the undefined.