On Zen and Individual Agency

or where you have it and where you don't

D.T. Suzuki with a kitten

Gaurav Sharma @gsharm1

@foodofthegods3 If sense of individual agency is illusory then how does accountability work?

I was inspired to address the above inquiry directed at me, in the context of Zen and its intrinsically held notion of the absence of individual selfhood and the implied individual agency; but since I felt like I could not fit the response in a string of tweets, here is an answer in the form of an essay.

Here is my tweet that this tweet was a response to:

雲水 @foodofthegods3

Zen is a joke played at the expense of people too stupid to realize they cannot heal what made them ill with exactly that which made them ill—namely the misassumed exertion of effort by a fundamentally illusory sense of individual agency.

—

You should first know that the sense of "illusory" I am using here relates to the human tendency to forget and confuse the limits of our thought and those of the real world.

We employ language and our conceptual faculties, of whom our self-identity is an epiphenomenon, to enable social convenience: to be better able to do things together with other people. To be able to play the social games and drama which constitute our daily lives when living within shared cultures.

A very central part of our social convenience is our sense of identity, of being individual agents that are responsible for their actions. It's also important for the sake of ensuring that people play the game by shared rules; if they don't, we hold them accountable, and either don't let them play the game with us, or punish them in hopes they will begin to play by our rules. But all of this is done on the stage of society, of the culture under whose hypnosis we all are conditioned to be in our upbringing, as a precondition for our ability to play the particular kinds of games we appreciate in our cultures.

It is all something entirely of the nature of a drama, an act, whose reality exists on a level teleo-semiotically unrelated to the reality of the "real" world—the world of nature and the physical universe.¹

Nature is not preoccupied with morality (how people ought to behave within the domain of the cultural drama); nature only cares about being and expansion (and this is saying too much). Our natural way of being is always one with the spontaneous way of nature, but all forms of cultural conditioning choose certain parts or possible tendencies of it that are deemed undesirable, and whose existences it tries to hide or asphyxiate.

Indeed, in nature there are no true differences between things: everything is an interconnected process of energy flowing into itself manifesting in extremely various patterns, all as a fundamentally unified process. And as such nature does not recognize the notion of an individual being with individual agency; only us human beings, with our discriminating intellects, pay attention to reality in this manner, differentiating between discrete things with distinct qualities. Through being so aware of our conditioned (abstract and conventional) selves, as well as through being so hyperimmersed within the cultural ecology, we ingrain the rule of our particular kind of a cultural game that we are responsible for what we do, and begin thinking it applies to ourselves as we truly are, as parts of the continuum of nature.

But we are so deeply immersed in this faculty of ours that we forget its purpose is solely to serve our own convenience, and that its apparent division of the world into discrete entities and parts only takes place in our minds. We take it to be a truth-conveying vehicle capable of accurately discerning universal features of reality, whereas it is only its own interconnected and multidimensional matrix of abstract conceptualization, whose rules of symbolic syntax and meaning (that we share together with those we communicate with) enable the fact that we can work, or talk about and generally enjoy things, together—and only that. (We like to think we are attaining all manner of lofty metaphysical, epistemic or scientific goals through our mental strivings, but from the standpoint of Zen they are all mistaken because they operate on the misplaced assumption of subjective individual agents observing an objective world. Of course science eventually arrives at the recognition of the unity of these two, and as such it arrives at the same point as Zen does—but this is the topic of another essay.)

As I explained earlier, an epiphenomenon of (or a conceptual class belonging to) this whole matrix is that of our sense of identity—the ego, the persona. We develop our egos as we are conditioned to accept the particular cultural rules in our cultural environment in our upbringing; in every social interaction you build up a notion of yourself as an individual being participating in the cultural drama: you have a name, a certain set of tendencies people pay attention to, and in different social settings, different levels of accountability. These constitute the abstraction that is your conventional self, which exists in the mind of you and the people around you, enabling them to address you when they want to and vice versa.

In Zen, we are not bothered with the contents of the conventional mind. We can be interested in them, as we might be interested in anything else as well—Zen breeds or liberates curiosity—but we are primarily seeking to transcend them. To transcend them simply means to reacquire the primal level of consciousness that is untouched by cultural conditioning, which does not yet differentiate the world into discrete parts or see polar opposites as being dichotomous (self and the world being the most central example related to this particular inquiry).

When one transcends the contents of the conventional mind, one sees how relative and abstract they are; one does not lose one's ability to utilize them and participate in cultural games; in fact it becomes more worth it to participate in them as they are no longer so dreadful and arduous as one no longer takes them to be anything more than what they are. This is the mature goal of Zen; to enable us to reclaim the childlike consciousness undiscriminating between things that was taken from us in our cultural conditioning, yet while simultaneously being able to discriminate between things skillfully within the domains of the human world where that is useful and tasteful.

—

Thus, to give some kind of an answer to the inquiry: We have individual agency within the human social conventional domains where this is a part of the intrinsic contents of the mental matrix we employ to be able to convene; in the kinds of social games whose rules need to be enforced so people play along them. We do not, however, have individual agency within the larger scheme of things, where we are simply patterns occurring in the seamless and universal flow of reality; because there we do not exist as individuals, because it transcends conceptualization and thus the capacity to differentiate, as well as because it is simply a unified flow of energy. And Zen is preoccupied primarily with being aware of this domain of reality, while recognizing the relativity of all the contents of the socially conditioned mental matrices we use to ease our lives (but get fooled by through excess immersion in them).

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

1. I mean this to say that these two domains of reality—one taking place in our socially conditioned minds, and one in the physical world—are unrelated in that they do not share the same goals or rules, though we imagine the world follows the rules we come up with to describe it. However it is true that they are intervowen in the sense that most of the concepts we use refer to patterns in the real world in some way, and owe their existence to reality.