Sand and Pearls

Indeed.  “Nothing” happened.  “[the] I can’t have it.”

Rinzai is about torturing the mind until it gives up control.  At other times in my life I couldn’t understand the use of koans.  So we are grasping at a paradox.  So what?  Isn’t Buddhism about opening the grasping fist of consciousness; about not grasping, chasing, striving, attaching, desiring?

Koan practice seemed to me to be a paradox about paradox.  Metaparadox.

Nish explained.  Indeed it is.  Koan tortures the mind into surrender.  With that “long dark night of the soul” when I was nineteen, pacing all night the beach in Fairfield – that night which culminated in kenshō — I had had an experience I could at that time neither describe, understand nor use.  I had tortured my mind until, quite simply, it gave up, and Self melted away, just for a moment, into pure perception without object, subject or verb.  What Wilber calls One Taste.

Even though I didn’t understand it at the time, having now deliberately engineered the experience again through meditation and Nish’s skilful teaching, I see why I held the experience with such gratitude all my life – why I followed Zen to find it again, whilst barely understanding why.

The Self knew it had seen its True Face and somehow longed for it – despite fighting against its own annihilation.

Until now,  I had had only one person; one teacher  who was ever able to meet me where I was and climb with me.  I travelled a very long way on what he gave me.

Now, ten years on, once again I have been met where I am by a teacher; a teacher who was willing to get down in the dirt and wrestle with my mind; this time, until it surrendered.

Ah.

So.