One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on.
I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia
got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got
enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans
and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans
don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me
what's going on?"
"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most
educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily
mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways
of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in
each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the
world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties.
It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or
method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that
we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic
like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given
student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the
condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking
in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency
on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."
And the student was enlightened.
The end...Bill!
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