author: broken koan
content: "One afternoon a student said \"Roshi, I don't really understand what's going\
  \ on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia\
  \ got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened\
  \ when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened,\
  \ but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense,\
  \ and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?\"\r\
  \n\r\n\"Well you see,\" Roshi replied, \"for most people, and especially for most\
  \ educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated,\
  \ through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking\
  \ and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a\
  \ psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because\
  \ we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in\
  \ general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms\
  \ and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid.\
  \ So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic\
  \ like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will,\
  \ in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our\
  \ goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce\
  \ our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind\
  \ of analytical discourse.\"\r\n\r\nAnd the student was enlightened."
id: da74a480-d76e-43dd-9796-08555aeb6a61