I love this Zen saying, though it’s difficult for me to grasp

I've been reading, and enjoying, Zen literature since my college days about 56 years ago. That explains how I was able to write a blog post in 2005 called "The Supreme Doctrine," thirty-six years overdue. 

“The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought” is one of my favorite books. When I checked it out from the San Jose Public Library while I was a San Jose State University student, I couldn’t bear to return it.

It’s now thirty-six years overdue. I’m pretty sure I paid the library the $1.65 replacement cost. That’s a heck of a lot cheaper than 5 cents a day, times 365 days, times 36 years, which is what I would have owed by now.

This is the only library book I’ve ever kept permanently. I brought it on our Maui vacation (where my wife and I are now) because I haven’t re-read it for a long time, and I was curious to see if what attracted me so strongly to “The Supreme Doctrine” when I was twenty-one still was a spiritual magnet for me at the age of fifty-six.

It is.

Now, at the age of 76, I'm still attracted to Zen. Currently I'm making my through a lengthy series of guided meditations by Zen Master Henry Shukman via his "The Way" app on my iPhone. It takes about nine months to traverse Shukman's Way and I'm enjoying the journey.

A few days ago I was listening to a guided meditation and was struck so powerfully by something Shukman said that I had to pause the app, grab a pen, and write down his words.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out.

Wow. I wasn't sure what to make of this saying. I just knew that it appealed to me, a lot. The context of Shukman's guided meditation was, I recall, about how the "self" isn't something to be discarded. Rather, it is to be clearly understood. 

In an introductory video to this stage of The Way, Shukman told a story about how he was sitting on a tropical beach, watching sunlight sparkle on dancing waves, when he suddenly felt there was no difference between the sparkling sunlight and his awareness of the ocean scene. 

In other words, he'd had a nondual experience where the usual sharp distinction between an observing subject and an observed object markedly diminishes, maybe even disappearing entirely. So that is one approach to looking upon the saying I like so much. 

Which for me is a fresh way of looking upon mindfulness. 

Let your self... These words point to relaxed ease. No need for effort or control. Simply let your self, however you view "self," do something that seems to be amazingly easy.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness… "Seems" is the operative word, because most of us have a conception of our selfhood that goes beyond awareness — though I suspect Shukman would say that a conception has to be part of awareness or it doesn't exist for us. So in that case, the whole of our awareness is the same as our self. Thoughts, emotions, perceptions, all that stuff is synonymous with our self. Which is always changing, since awareness is always changing.

Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out. Ah, with nothing left out. Those four words are the most difficult for me to grasp. For one thing, how do I know that I haven't left out part of the whole of my awareness? 

The only way I know something exists is to be aware of it. As noted above, what I'm not aware of doesn't exist for me. I can know that I've left something out of my grocery shopping if it was on my list and didn't make it into the bags that I carried into our kitchen this afternoon. But I don't have a list of the contents of my awareness.

So that's makes me wonder if it is even possible to leave something out of the whole of my awareness. In that case, whatever I'm aware of is the whole of my awareness. If I miss a fly on the wall, that's left out of my awareness. But this doesn't matter. What matters from a Zen standpoint is that my self has become the whole of my awareness.

And that I don't consciously exclude something I'm aware of. Like, I'm angry, but since I view myself as a spiritual person who doesn't get angry (I'm speaking hypothetically here, obviously), I'm going to leave out my anger, or minimize it, from my awareness.

Again, we get into tricky philosophical ground here, because as I've been saying, it's difficult for me to envision how I could leave something out of my awareness. That strikes me as being akin to being told by someone, "Don't think of an elephant!" When I try, I'm still thinking of an elephant, albeit the absence of one.

My suspicion, and I could be totally wrong here, is that when Shukman says with nothing left out, he's pointing toward the sort of nonjudgmental awareness that is a hallmark of mindfulness. Life is full of both pain and pleasure, lies and truthfulness, sorrow and joy — many pairs of opposites. It's natural to focus on the positive and exclude the negative, but this doesn't lead to wholeness.

Anyway, I enjoy repeating Let your self become the whole of your awareness with nothing left out a few times as I'm lying in bed, heading off to sleep. Maybe someday the meaning of those words will become clearer to me. However, if this doesn't happen, I still enjoy what Zen Master Shukman said.