In the second week of Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara’s retreat, “To Forget the Self,” she expounds on the second slogan of Zen Master Dogen from the Genjokoan: To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self, Enkyo Roshi says, is to forget the idea of the self: its story and its inclination toward avoiding and clinging to various phenomena. We forget the self when we shift our attention to the present, to the constantly shifting flow of moment-to-moment reality. In that presence, when our internal monologue drops away, we forget the self and are free to feel the flow of life around us.
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