Daishin Morgan, Rev. Master

Zazen is acceptance. We can’t accept while we remain as a self-conscious self, a separate self. I think you’ve all probably been sitting long enough to know how persistent thoughts are…. What we need is to recognise that our thinking is the primary expression of our self: who we believe ourselves to be — what it is that we think we are.

In our tradition we have a different model. It’s one that begins with enlightenment. And this is where the heart of acceptance comes in.

Acceptance is acceptance of the presence of ‘this’. Acceptance is selfless, because if you make a self, if you get into, “well, how can I accept?” you lose it, because that question, as the grammar demonstrates, comes from ‘I’. We open the depth of zazen by being willing to let go of that ‘I’ as an axis around which everything must revolve.

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