You begin to understand what is divine through your efforts to be present. Presence is Consciousness.

Since sustained or continuous presence is only achieved with effort, you eventually recognize that being present, being truly awake, is the rarest and highest of all experiences.

It is an experience that can so easily be undervalued, but when experienced deeply enough shows you what is real and what is not real.

Without presence you really have nothing except your physical energy and your possessions. With presence you have your Self, your Higher Self.

The Higher Self is your real Self.

It is your Divine Nature. It is the part in you that is immortal and survives death.

So in Zen, a duality between a higher self and a lower self is not made. Because if you believe in the higher self, this is a simple trick of the lower self. If you believe that there is no really lower self, there is only the higher self but that somehow or other the higher self has to shine through, the very fact that you think it has to shine through still gives validity to the existence of a lower self.

If you think you have a lower self, or an ego to get rid of, then you fight against it, nothing strengthens the delusion that it exists more than that. So this tremendous schizophrenia in Humans beings, of thinking that they are rider and horse, soul in command of body, or will in command of passions – wrestling with them; all that kind of split thinking simply aggravates the problem, and we get more and more split.

And so we have all sorts of people engaged in an interior conflict which they will never resolve. Because the true self either you know it, or you don’t. If you do know it, then you know it’s the only one and the other so called lower self just ceases to be a problem. It becomes something like a mirage, and you don’t go around hitting at mirages with a stick, or trying to put reigns on them. You just know that they are mirages and walk straight through them.