The Self is a Superposition

Who are you?

No, really, who?

Are you the version of you that shows up to work, answering emails with fake cheer?

Are you the one who cries on the floor at night, wondering if anyone sees the real you?

Are you the healer, the fighter, the scared child, the teacher, the ghost?

Yes. All of them. And none of them.

Zen says there’s no fixed self, just a constantly shifting swirl of causes and conditions. You’re not a solid thing. You’re a process. A momentary arrangement of breath, thought, memory, karma, and sunlight. Every time you look in the mirror, you’re seeing something that no longer exists.

Sound familiar?

In quantum physics, there’s a concept called superposition. A particle doesn’t exist in one single state until it’s observed. Before that? It exists in all possible states at once. A cloud of potential. A shimmering maybe.

That’s you.

You’re not just one thing. You’re every version of yourself, overlapping. Alive and uncertain. Until a moment, an encounter, a thought, a choice, collapses the field and you become something specific. Just for now.

But don’t get too comfortable. Because the moment you try to cling to that identity, that’s when it slips. The moment you say, “This is who I am,” the universe laughs and shifts you again.

Zen teaches us not to chase the self, but to witness it.

Not to lock it in place, but to bow as it moves.

You don’t need to figure out who you are.

You need to let yourself become.

Over and over.

So sit with the tension.

Sit with the fluidity.

Sit with the flickering cloud of all your possible selves.

And when you breathe in, notice who you are.

And when you breathe out, let it go.

The self is a superposition.

And the breath is how we collapse the wave.