Spiritual self-sufficiency . . . involves building up a strong sense of self. But building oneself up — becoming the whole universe — really consists of what Dogen calls "forgetting the self." So we could say that the egoless state is really a vast ego state. It's a state where the ego is the whole universe. It's as if we become a point that has no dimension, but that point is the center of an all-encompassing circle.

Bernard Glassman, Rick Fields, Instructions to the Cook