You know you need to take another learning step somehow here in the face of this note.   Naturally you would like to ask “How?” or “What learning step?”  These predictable mediocre questions have to cease.  You must simply take a leap into the learning step without knowing “how”, without knowing what it is.

You are attending a weekend Zen Session somewhere in Japan . In the session, you are not just sitting rigidly facing the wall in imitation of Bodhi Dharma.  Instead, you are attending a Rinzai Sect situation in a hall where you are trying to come to an enlightened understanding of a Koan, which is a recorded transaction between an ancient Master and some student or visitor.  Your brain whirls around and around in circles as you try to “get” the real essence of the Koan.  You try to figure out what is the real connection between the Zen Institution, the Koan and your own Enlightenment.  Then, suddenly, you find yourself back in front of your computer screen reading this note.   You remain unenlightened and go on to the next note.

Awakening cannot be described or known ahead of time or it would not be awakening.  It is therefore an ultimate mystery, a journey in the unknown; a walk in the Void.   This note is therefore not about what you think it is about.

You are standing on an open desert plain, rather barren with a few rocks and shrubs here and there, facing some rough mountains on the horizon.  You are heading toward these mountains, but you do not know how long it will take to walk there.  You have paused to take-in the full panorama of lonely desolation all around you.  You sense that this open emptiness is energetically charged with some awesome meaning beyond Zen, beyond Krishnamurti, beyond the Carlos Castaneda books.  You sense that the whole thing has something to do with your own direct experiencing of your own consciousness, which now appears to you as a tiny bubble of you and the scene floating in an infinitely incongruous circumstance you cannot call “the universe” or any other known Big entity.  You swoon.  When you wake up, you are just reading this note, but you have some missing time.

How many times do you have to be told that your consciousness is not what you think it is?  And how many times do you have to be told that this note is not what you think it is?

A strange insect lands on the back of your hand.  At first you are nervous that it will bite or sting you in the endless battle between the Human Kingdom and the Insect Kingdom .  But suddenly you realize that something truly vast and strange is contained within that insect.  So you let it stay there.  You commune with it.  You put your mind into its mind and let it put its mind into your mind.   You let it become an ally in your quest for greater magical awareness.  And then you find, yet again, that you are simply reading this note in the surrounding simplicity of your normal situation.  The magic of the insect melts away and you are just your ordinary neurotic self again with your usual problems of your life.

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