Why practice Zen?
In essence, the core, the heart of our being, is the same as God or Buddha. Because we are in this human form, we do not manifest this totally and, so, we are not totally God or Buddha.
When you embrace your lover, do you think about pollution or even Enlightenment? Your lover probably would shove you away if you were thinking about something else while you embraced. You like to talk about the problems of the world, even though you've forgotten the fundamental union of the embrace of God...
Frequently my students hear such things as this and say 'Well, does this mean I'm God?' But this is only natural because you have no background in Mahayana teachings. So it will be necessary for you to hear these things many times before you understand.
So we find ourselves wishing to experience God or the Absolute. The reason that kind of desire occurs is because we realize intuitively that, in our human form, we represent only a limited aspect of the Absolute Nature and we want to experience that in its totality.
A further example is that it is very common for men to desire women and women to desire men, and this is only natural because men as men experience some kind of lack of unity and women as women experience some kind of lack of unity. On the other hand, if we experience perfect unity, then we would not be experiencing ourselves as men or women. So, we are left with the fact that, when we appear in the phenomenal world, in this human form, we are imperfect.
At the same time, that which is our essence, which we all have, we represent in our own individual manifestations, although we do not manifest this totally. It is impossible for us to manifest it totally in human form. At the same time we manifest some small percentage of it. And so we can say that that is our true nature, our true character.