ApresZen

Philadelphia, PA
6 February 2007

Sitting last night was a bit easier than usual. Not sure what to make of that. Probably not much. But I did notice that I needed to expend less effort just sitting with the koan John offered. The koan went something like this:

10,000 feet below the ocean there is a stone.
Try to lift it without wetting your hands.

I immediately found myself in touch with my stone-ness in some surprising way. Perhaps it was the sense of isolation that allowed me to create some connections to the stone. I also found myself enjoying the "sinking feeling" of dropping down to the ocean floor. Actually, John mentioned something about dropping down in his talk afterwards, but I forget what it was.

In his brief talk John spoke quite a bit about meditation. He said, Meditation is about being human in the deepest way. I am not at all sure what he meant by that. Why is meditation the "deepest way"? I wonder why any mindful action couldn't also be the deepest way.

Later John said something else that caught my attention. He was speaking about the power of using koans in meditation, saying because of them, we don't have to use our own effort. Maybe that was why I experienced such a relative lack of effort this go around. Maybe I was letting the koan do the heavy lifting for a change.

Toward the end of his talk, John then said something else that also caught my attention. He said, The vastness of meditation allows us to be at ease with whatever we are experiencing. Without judgment. This informed me that I still have a ways to go on the blissful enlightenment path! I have not gotten to the point in my meditations where I experience them as "vast". Not all that constricting to be sure, but not vast either.

Finally, I want to capture here an image that came to me during the mediation. At some point well into the meditation session I began to see the koan in terms of a relationship between the ocean and the stone. The sense I had was what I can only term as some sort of loving indifference. It was loving in that neither one was doing any harm - in fact I might say that they were informing each other. The ocean is everywhere that the stone is not. And the stone exists as an absence of ocean-ness on its own floor. I guess more to the point I had the sense that each was touching the other in some sort of "loving" way. Odd thought, but there it is. Yet, at the same time I was completely aware of how indifferent one is to the other. Neither focusing on outcome, nor attempting to control the other. Letting each other be, I guess is one way to look at it.

The dry hands in the koan was mostly a distraction in the moment, so I paid little attention to that part of it. Except that I did notice that the roundedness of the stone made it just as impossible for me to get a "handle" on it, as it would be to dip my hands into the ocean and keep them dry. What other parts of my life am I trying to "get a handle on"? Where am I judging these parts, and so not allowing them to show me a way to hold them without handling them?

Well that is it for now. Hope you keep your hands dry.