Zen Roshi, Lola McDowell Lee, recounts the tale of the Persian teacher who asked a disciple to place a bag of gold in the middle of a bridge. He is to find a poor man to cross the bridge. The man successfully crossed the bridge where there is a bag of gold which he desperately needs. But he missed the gold. He had been too afraid to open his eyes and never saw it. Our problem is we think know our faults. But we close our eyes to them. You seekers who want freedom… freedom from what? Do you ever watch how you make your choices? Otherwise, how will you ever change? In the Upanishads it says we are like some spiders who spin a web, which comes from inside us. And then when they are finished with the web, the swallow the web and put it back inside us. A father put his five sons to a test. He asked them: “What is the most important thing about man? If you don’t answer correctly, you’ll fall dead.” Four of the five all studied the ones before them, but still fell dead. The fifth said the most important to realize is that we don’t learn. He lived. You meditate for a while. You feel good about yourself so you take a break. Then you start to feel bad about yourself again, and start over. It is hard to change. We don’t learn easily. Lola recounts the tale in the Mahabharata of the Pandava Brothers. As Gurdjieff says, we are trapped in our habit patterns. The key is to realize you are repeating automatically. In order to stop, just watch yourself. Don’t think about it. Just watch. And look to change. Notice how you are when you are alone. Then when you realize someone is watching, see how quickly you change. Why? We need to move into the Unconditioned. From the. Known, the Conditioned, to the Unknown, the Unconditioned. That’s why we use a Koan. It’s like a pebble dropped in us to exhaust our thinking, to move out of the Known into the Unknown. The Koan stays in us and continues to work on our psyches. There are three movements: the first, the Known to the Known, is thinking.Second is the Known to the Unknown, which represents a moment of consciousness. And the third is the Unknown to the Unknown, which is supra-consciousness. The other seed in us is Prajna, or wisdom. It is through Prajna that we move to the Unconditioned. Prajna is disrupted. Moving from the grasping to the no-grasping, and Emptiness, Non-Discrimination. A koan from Pang: How does the ocean, which has no muscles or bones, hold up a 10,000 pound ship? Nov 6, 1988
