There’s a poem which says: “When two Zen masters meet each other on the road they need no introduction. Thieves recognize one another instantaneously.”
When a person doesn’t react to life on the one hand, or try to dominate it on the other, but when the internal world of one’s own organism and the external world of other people and other things move together as if they were (and indeed are) one and the same motion, that is Zen. So you could say in a very, very simple way that the real concern of Zen is to realize—not merely to think, but to know in your bones—that the inside world inside your skin and the outside world outside your skin (going out as far as anything can go into galaxies beyond galaxies) is all one world, and all one being; one Self—and you’re it. And once you know that, then you have completely abolished all the problems that arise as a result of feeling that you’re a stranger in the world, that you’re set down in the middle of a hostile and alien domain of nature or people who are not you. This whole sense of estrangement, foreignness to the world, is overcome in Zen.
That’s the whole method of Zen: to make people become perfect egotists, and so explode the illusion of the separate ego.
The moment a group of people starts making comments on its own behavior, it is setting up a situation within the group which is analogous—say, in a TV studio—to turning the camera on the monitor.
When the community says to a person, “You must be free,” or when we are in a family relationship in which the members of the family are saying to each other, “You must love me. It’s your duty to love me”—what a bunch of rot! Supposing one day you get up and you say to your wife, “Darling, do you really love me?” and she replies, “Well, I’m trying my very best to do so,” is that the answer you wanted? No! You wanted her to say, “Darling, I can’t help loving you. I love you so much I could eat you.” You don’t want her to try to love you. But yet, that is what you put on people in almost any marriage ceremony: that you shall love this person. “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God.” “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This is a double bind. And anybody who lives under the dominance of a double bind lives in a state of chronic frustration, because he is devoting his whole life to solving a meaningless, nonsensical problem.
There is nothing you can do to be genuine. The more you do, the phonier you are. But at the opposite extreme, there is nothing you can not do—that is to say, you cannot give up trying to be genuine. You can’t relax, you know, and be completely passive, and say, “Well, let’s forget about it. Let’s think about practical matters and forget all these spiritual concerns.” The moment you do that, your abandonment of trying is itself an insidious form of trying.
The reason why you want to stop grasping is that it’s a new form of grasping. You feel that you will beat the game by being unattached. See, it’s horrible to grieve when somebody you love dies. So maybe, by being unattached to that person, I can avoid grief. Pretty cold, isn’t it? Maybe, you see, by not having an ego, when life comes and bangs on me, if there’s nobody there, it’ll be alright. So that’s why I want non-ego state. That’s phony. All this is a new way of safeguarding and protecting the ego.
What does this situation mean? When you find yourself in that kind of a trap, what’s the meaning of the trap? Why, that’s very simple: if there’s nothing you can do, and also nothing you cannot do about a given situation, it means that “you” are phony. That, in other words, what we call a “separate ego” isn’t there. Of course it can’t do anything, because it is not an agent. And by virtue of the fact that it can’t do anything, equally, it can’t not do anything. It’s completely phony.