Starting anew and beginning again, as with this blog and my resolution to post regularly, fit well with S. Suzuki's notion of the beginner's Mind. It is strange that despite my readings in Buddhism and philosophy I had not yet read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind until seeing the 40th anniversary edition and buying it. As I begin my book project on identity construction in biography and on the internet, this notion of beginner's mind and its emergence for many Americans in the early 1970's world of discovering eastern thought appears at a fortuitous time.
The Buddhist notion of no-self and the illusion of a changing core identity is one of the notions that emerges from that world view that is most unlike any western notion of the individual. Uniqueness is part of their changing world, but the illusion of the ego is not. In this Shambhala 2010 anniversary edition, the presentation of the transcriptions of Suzuki's dharma talks brings out much that I will need to work with as I explore the world of self-creation: for him and the practice, "when we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door,..." (14).
As I outline and work through setting up this project of the coming years- and it will take that long, in all probability- this view will confront theories of biography and self-development that have been strengths and limits in the west: I plan to focus on biographers at times of technological change, such as Thomas Carlyle; historians of our mind and media as personified by Marchall McLuhan, and finally the illusions of Facebook and even blogs such as this one: we must, after all, take it to the "meta" level to reflect the kind of awareness that Suzuki stimulated in the simple, everyday message he conveyed to us to just sit. We can become aware in that way of awareness itself.
