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Your desires are not what you really are. Not even close. Your thoughts aren’t the real you either. They’re just electrical energy bouncing around in your brain. If you do lots of zazen you often end up going for longer and longer periods where very few thoughts occur. The brain goes quiet and Descartes’ old axiom “I think therefore I am” makes no sense anymore because you’re not thinking, yet existence still is. (But be patient with this: most folks have to do zazen many years before anything like this happens.)

What is existence then? Sit zazen and see for yourself.

Your opinions and preferences are not you either. A famous Zen poem called Trust in Mind begins, “It’s easy to follow the Buddhist Way, just avoid picking and choosing.” Opinions, preferences, and other such mental crap are just thoughts that have been reinforced so often they’ve become unconscious and nearly unavoidable habits.

Your personality isn’t you either. It’s just a collection of very deeply embedded opinions and preferences. Again, if you do enough zazen there will come times when even your personality ceases to function—at least in the old familiar way. Things you’d taken for granted as unique to you are seen as facets common throughout the universe.

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: Everyone has a self-image, an ego. You have one, I have one, Nishijima has one, Dogen, Nagarjuna, and Gautama Buddha had one too. The difference is the way a Buddhist views his or her self-image. When a person who understands Buddhism uses the word I, the word is just a convenient way of locating something. The word I is used by Buddhists in the same way people use any other designating phase, the phrase Les Paul guitar for instance. You don’t have any really strong attachment to the guitar (well, if it’s a Les Paul, you may—but that’s not what I’m talking about); you know it’s just a bunch of wood held together with screws, and that the wood had its origins as parts of trees, and that the tuning keys, frets, and screws were once parts of rocks in the ground. The guitar will come apart eventually (and it’ll come apart really quick if you take to a hardcore gig at a redneck bar in Ohio). But none of its components will ever really disappear. They just change form. And though they don’t disappear, there comes a time when they can no longer be called a guitar. After this point you can never reassemble that Les Paul guitar no matter how hard you try. The thing that the word I refers to is just like that.

It’s very difficult to reach this kind of understanding when it comes to your sense of self. We’ve been taught implicitly since birth that our “self” is something fundamental and important and real. But our self-image is nothing other than the sum total of those particular things about universal human nature we’ve chosen to emphasize in our own lives. Some teachings like to differentiate between “self” spelled with a little s and “Self” with a big S, but this just obscures the problem with unnecessary complications. No matter how you spell it, self is an illusion.

IF YOUR ZAZEN PRACTICE IS REASONABLE, if you’re not doing too much or striving too hard to reach some goal, your demons are unlikely to appear in the form of hallucinations or massive attacks of fear and panic. But mark my words: your demons will appear. To experience such phenomena is a sign that your practice is maturing. The key is to not get sucked into it and to not push it away. Don’t get frightened by the scary experiences and don’t get seduced by the seductive ones. Keep your head. Finding a real teacher will help.

The fear I felt that night in the temple was the fear of knowing myself and the fear of what I was about to discover—that there was no me. Self is an illusion. The doctrine of no-self is such common currency in Buddhist circles that pretty much everyone who’s read a few books with “Buddha” or “Zen” in the title figures they have it down pat. I did too, before that night. But I only understood it intellectually—and that