So, lately I have been interested in the concept of getting lost. It all started when a friend of mine and I were skyping and I was lecturing her on having no direction in her life. She said that some people just wander, and I responded that she was not wandering, she was steering away. Then I got this idea, that she was only lost because she thought there was somewhere to be. Do any of us really know where we are going?
Zen seems to me like a path with no goal, but the path. You can only be lost by thinking you know where you are going. Life I guess is like that too. My second deepest fear growing up, was, and is, getting lost. This plays out in dreams where I cannot get home, or anyplace familiar. It plays out in the rage born of fear in getting misplaced in my car. It gnaws like a hungry animal at my insides when I am disoriented in life. And yet, when I look at it all, the found I want to be is a complete mirage. I want to believe that there is a better place to be, and that I need to get there. That there is a right and a wrong and a good and bad, and that I know them and can steer to them. I want to hope there is a right job for me, and a dream girl/soul mate, and that the decisions I make are correct and I am steering toward something of virtue and superiority, even if only by my standards. But as we? Aren't we happier if we acknowledge that we are lost, and there is no getting found, accept to find ourselves in this moment. There is no path, no direction, but walking in the dark and accepting the stumbles, wet and stones. I don't know. That sounds good, but how does it feel? Maybe I will make a game about that. Because I want to know how it feels to be lost and to let go and fall into lost. And frankly, after all these years, its terrifying.
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Author(s)“A Course on Koans” is the delusion-riddled work of Chris Kufu (“Wind in the Void”) Wilson, who began practicing Zen in 1967. He regards Taizan Maezumi, Robert Aitken, and David Weinstein as his root teachers. Each of them pecked at his shell until he “completed” the never-ending koan curriculum of the Harada-Yasutani lineage. Get posts as they are published:
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April 2019
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