Romancing The Koan And The Great Big Pearl In The Mind

A koan I asked myself while scanning holes in the frozen food section earlier this week:

“If an automobile driver can manage to survive a whiteout on a perilous road, is it possible for the soul to survive a mind-out at the time of death?”

The koan deals with navigation. When all our familiar reference points disappear in the outer and inner world, it is difficult to navigate the terrain. There is nothing to grasp onto. There is nothing to analyze. Where do we turn? What is up and down? What is a turn in a place without curves? Where is up and down in a directionless space of weightlessness?

This koan didn’t actually just come to me out of the blue near froZEN pizzas and froZEN novelties. It was formulated around a dream I had earlier in the day. In the dream, my mind was trying to navigate a “whiter than white” space my mind took to be my room. I stumbled out of my non-existent white bed, stumbled into a hallway that was equally as white, made a beeline for an apartment door I assumed existed behind the blinding white, opened the door, and then descended in the white space for light years. It felt like I was inside a snowflake that was dreaming about being a “Darryl,” or it felt like I was inside the mind of an elegant pearl. Either way, the dream was kind of bewildering.

The nameless character in Ben Okri’s fabular novel, “Astonishing The Gods,” encountered a similar space when he was crossing a protean bridge that changed its colors and elemental constitution once every so often. The crossing of the bridge was a test and a riddle and a koan.

“All around emptiness bristled like a snow-drift. The white winds whipped the last spaces on the highest mountain and all he could see below was the pure whiteness of oblivion. The universe had collapsed on itself and he stood on a tiny patch of earth that had turned white like a frosted mirror. And in his ears, he heard the happy wailings of the devouring wind.”

The devouring wind…the wind that kept me up on sunday night. But that is behind me now. I don’t hold any grudges with nature.

This can all be summed up by John Daido Loori, a modern Zen master. John Daido Loori has a cool book out called, “Cave of Tigers: The Living Zen Practice of Dharma Combat”. The book itself is a collection of sometimes witty, sometimes asinine, and sometimes profound conversations Mr. Loori had with his zen students during “dokusan”. “Dokusan” refers to the meeting that takes place between student and master after zazen. The student comes to dokusan with his or her answer to the koan. In an introduction to chapter four—“Pearls, Perils, and the Path”—Mr. Loori says:

“We should understand right from the onset that, in terms of our spiritual journey, the path is itself a peril when we give it edges. When we realize that it has no edges, it fills the universe and is one bright pearl.”