An old koan rises from my past

So, yesterday there I am re-reading my long ignored copy of “Zen in the Art of Archery.” I turn a page and find a rent receipt from August 1968 stuck in the book.

College days. Beginning of my junior year at San Jose State. Had recently gotten back from Europe, where I’d spent the second semester taking classes in Zadar, Yugoslavia. I’d rented an apartment with a couple of other hippie potheads. That explains the reference to three cleaning deposits.

I idly turn the receipt over. Find some handwriting. Mine. I read: “There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.”

Well, fuck me! I think, sitting there in my meditation sanctum, a rarely-used tiled shower stall where I retire every morning with a big cup of coffee to read and contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos. Plus the all-too-familiar ramblings of my own mind, which usually drown out the mysteries.

I’m pissed. Who the hell do I think I am, writing such Zen-ish crap at the age of nineteen just so I could drive myself even crazier at fifty-seven? What irks me, seriously, so much that I feel a few tears starting to form, is that this sentence precisely captures my present existential dilemma.

“There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.” That’s it in a nutshell. That’s the koan I’ve been wrestling with for the past thirty-eight years, and I’d completely forgotten that I’d given it to myself on the back of a rent receipt in 1968.

I wondered whether I’d copied down that line from Eugen Herrigel’s classic description of how he set out to learn archery while he was living in Japan and ended up learning Zen. I’ve scanned through every page, including his concluding treatise on “The Method of Zen.”

Can’t find it. Nor does the sentence pop up on a Google search. I could have read the line somewhere else. Or, as seems likely, I was using the receipt as a bookmark and used the back of it to write down an idea that came to me.

Regardless of the source, this line encapsulates my personal koan. It wasn’t given to me by a Zen master. I gave it to myself. I believe each of us has a koan of this sort, a deep down in the gut paradox that simultaneously drives us crazy and is the lifeline that we cling to for sanity.

That’s where my tears came from. From 19 (and even before) to 57, this koan has been tearing me philosophically, spiritually, and mystically to pieces. Also, keeping me from falling apart. In seventeen words it sums up the essence of everything that I’ve been writing, reading, and pondering for almost four decades.

Sitting on my meditation cushions, it blew me away that with GPS exactitude my extensive inner journeying from 1968-2006 seemingly has brought me around with pinpoint precision to the identical philosophical position from which I started.

Blooming buzzing confusion.

And yet…

There’s that word. Seemingly. I clutch onto it. It’s something to hold onto. Hope that what appears to be going around in circles actually is some sort of spiral. An upward spiral, I wish. But even downward would be better than circularity. I want to get somewhere. Heaven is best, but I’d prefer Hell to nowhere.

“There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.” Oh yeah, Brian, you got that right. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the finger pointing at the moon isn’t the moon. I’m sure I knew that back in 1968 too, but there are lots of ways of knowing.

Thinking knowing. Feeling knowing. Perceiving knowing. And the Zen sort Herrigel writes about: knowing that isn’t knowing because it isn’t something apart from you that you can know. It is you.

Not this, not that. None of the above, because it isn’t above or below. Somewhere else. Not dark, not light. Something else.

Herrigel asks the Master how the target is hit without the archer’s taking aim. He gets this reply:

“You are under an illusion,” said the Master after awhile, “if you imagine that even a rough understanding of these dark connections would help you. These are processes which are beyond the reach of understanding. Do not forget that even in Nature there are correspondences which cannot be understood, and yet are so real that we have grown accustomed to them, just as if they could not be any different.

“I will give you a puzzle which I have often puzzled over. The spider dances her web without knowing that there are flies who will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam, gets caught in the net without knowing what lies in store. But through both of them ‘It’ dances, and inside and outside are united in this dance. So, too, the archer hits the target without having aimed—more I cannot say.”

Wu.

Comments

[Cyn]

Hey Bri, I like Herrigel's words of wisdom about "knowing". I think that was part of my dilemma with RSSB. I was not convinced that I could know completely about the Ultimate reality, when in the end it was still ME (in my body) doing the knowing. Even though you supposedly shed the body during meditation, you only completely detach after death.

I will have to give some thought to my personal koan. I find it amazing that you were so self-aware at age 19! It took me much longer to get to that state.

All the best, Cyn

[Brian]

Well, Cyn, I wish I was truly self-aware at 19 . I don't know. Maybe I was. Maybe I've gone downhill on the self-awareness mountain since then. But I doubt it.

I was intensely introspective then, as I am now. I was more into "dark" existentialism in my late teens, probably because I was in a decidedly schizoid state of mind.

For about a year I felt like I was standing outside of myself watching me do things. Quite disconcerting. It was hard to be spontaneous or feel relaxed when I was looking upon myself as an object, rather than subjectively.

On the plus side, perhaps, I was able to look upon myself in a decidedly detached fashion. I could disassemble my thoughts and emotions, examine them disinterestedly, and comment on my findings.

So I was "self-aware" in the sense that I could stand back from myself and analyze what was happening in my head. However, now I don't consider that to be true self-awareness.

My goal now is to be simply aware. Not a duplicate awareness: aware of being aware. Just aware. Simpler. Sweeter. A lot more genuinely Zen-ish. And also, harder.

[tao]

Brian,
How very interesting !.... I had the exact same semi-OOB experience during that time myself, and it was disconcerting especially since people around me were not having that at all. It generally lasted quite a long time and I guess I eventually integrated somehow. I wonder if there is any connection? Mine occured around 1967 thru 1968 approximately. I also can definitely relate to the Zen-ness of being simply "just aware". And true, it is hard, especially when one has been down/up such a long and winding road.

[Edward]

may I point out the blank in your picture? how many years between writing and reading? Check in with the "knowing" occasionally and go back to spider/fly living. Empty somewhere so that it can be full, not so much that time passed, just the not-cognizant Brian being.

Talking about zen too much is like looking for fish tracks in the mud.

[Pete]

Hello Brian and Cyn, Was googling "personal koan" when I found this page. Hi Brian your recollections have a very familiar "ring". I found my personal koan in the last 2-3 years yet I first asked it to myself around 40 years ago, thats 1967. Its been governing my life, without my realizing for all that time. Now I know this, it is just a start, where I go from here is still a big question, but I am finding that when I am ready the teacher arrives. And by teacher I don't just mean a person. It can easily be a thing, an event or an opportunity, like finding this site.

Regards Pete

[tao]

Brian,

Since Pete brought it up again, I would like to add that I don't really agree with your quasi-koan: “There will be light when there is no darkness and through darkness we cannot find the light.”

I myself would tend to say that... Only through the darkness, can the light be truly known. The light and the dark are both faces of the ineffable.