The title of this entry is a basic hwadu in Korean Seon (Jap=Zen) Buddhism. I realize this blog is Quaker but this question came to me today. It was prompted by Meister Eckhart's statement that I read before Meeting "Whoever has three things is beloved of God: the first is riddance of possessions; the second, of friends; and the third is riddance of self." (Meister Eckhard (from Whom God Hid Nothing. David O'Neal, ed.). It makes me think of Jesus' statement. Jesus told us, according to the author of John's gospel, and reflected in the other gospels in a different context "Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." (John 12:25 see also Mark 8:35 with parallels in Matthew and Luke).
What does it mean to hate one's life? I take it more to be disdain or disinterest, or Eckhart's central virtue, detachment. Jesus is contrasting love of life, attachment to life, and its contrary which is not hate so much as disinterest, detachment. This is guesswork as I wasn't there and the Greek we have is at best a translation of the Aramaic and the English is a translation of the Greek. Detachment rather than hate rings true to me, and I would think to Eckhart.
So who am I, and who is it that must die. Here I make a distinction between the true self and the false self. When working in prisons I dealt with men who had developed a shell of protection. These shells were made up of traditional ego defenses. cynicism, anger and other social pathology (and yes I even felt there was evil in some cases). The self present to the world, the false self, the protective shell with all its spikes and spines had to be peeled away to allow the true self to emerge. Unfortunately this rarely happened; the environment worked against it.
So what does that have to do with who I am? I am not that of which I
am disinterested. That is the false self and is that which must fall away. The true self is what
Buddhists say is our Buddha nature, and it is what George Fox told us to
answer (address) as that of God in everyone (each of us). It is the soul described as by Juan de Yepes Álvarez in his poem "The Dark Night of the Soul." As for me, in Meeting yesterday I had the image of a nut with the soft fruit inside, or of an egg that must crack to allow the emergence of the new born.
