A tip on Meditating with Koans: First of all, don't try too hard!

I recently read something which I thought was such a good analogy for meditation. Although the article itself is about dreaming, it can equally be used for meditation. So I paraphrased it just a little ….

“Meditation is similar to what happens when you step from a brightly lit room into the night sky.

At first you can’t see a thing, because it’s pitch black.

But then, if you patiently keep your eyes open, all sorts of things start to appear.

Things that were always there, but you just couldn’t see before because your eyes were too constricted.

Meditation shows you how to keep your inner eyes open, your mind’s eye, and to aclimatise to inner darkness. And once you learn how to do that, all sorts of hidden treasures, those treasures that are hidden in the dark recesses of your mind, are brought into the light of awareness. It’s like working with a hightly distilled form of consciousness.”

I find Zen Koans are also very useful to activate this state of mind, your mind’s inner eye. Over the past week or two I have been working quite a bit again with the koan “What is this?” If you already know something about Koans, you will know that there is no right or wrong answer to a koan question. It’s not an analytical mental exercise. What is a koan, you ask? A koan is a story, statement or question, given by a Zen master to a student or novice as a teaching. However, the Zen master doesn’t strictly speaking teach the student anything directly by giving him a koan. There is no direct teaching. By meditating on a koan, the student works on it alone. You use koans to figure it out for yourself. So you could say there is no direct teaching, and there is no right answer. Huh? :)

A koan is a very gentle practice, and it reminds me of the yoga term “ahimsa” which means non-violence, because we use no force in meditation practice. Meditation with a koan is a very gentle, non-judgmental practice. We only observe. No fighting with our mind, no trying to control, no disliking or negating or brushing aside thoughts, feelings or experiences arising. Meditating with koans is a way of being with things with a curiosity because we know that we don’t know “what it is”.

I use this koan quite a lot during my day – not only while sitting in formal meditation on a cushion, but also when I am trying to work out a stubborn emotional tangle, for example, or find myself feeling annoyed or bored. Or even happy. “What is this?” is a question that really taps into our awareness of the moment, without slipping into intellectual enquiry. You’re not asking yourself “What is this thought or sound or sensation or external object. You’re asking yourself “What is this that is feeling, thinking, sensing”. If you need to put it into context, you’re asking yourself a question, but the question itself or the answer is not as important as the action of the questioning itself. The importance is not to be found in the words but in the question mark.

To say something is like something else is not the point. Although the answer to the question can still be cultivated. The point is turning the light of enquiry upon yourself and your entire, whole experience in this present moment. Opening yourself to the experience as if you have no idea what might happen.

We are therefore not anticipating or forcing an answer. And so it is important not to try too hard to find an answer. With this koan, we only sit and watch what arises. Gently. Softly. Without reacting. Don’t try to make your meditation good or better or different. Don’t struggle. Nothing that comes up in meditation is wrong. You don’t need to have a special state of mind. Just let your mind play with the koan.

Everyone wants something perfect in meditation, some perfect state of mind. But this is not right. Wanting to achieve a special state of mind in meditation is like making your life something it is not. The practice of meditation is like watching your life unfold. To become awake to our life as it happens. It is personal. There is no right or wrong. Something will always come up in your mind when you meditate. Mostly it will be something different to what you want to arise. But we don’t try to second guess our practice. We just watch our mind unfold.

We don’t even try to understand what arises. Usually we want to understand things that arise in our minds. So we start to think about it, perhaps push it into a box. Analyse it. Label it. Like we try do with so much else in our lives. But if we do that in meditation, we are still making our life something it isn’t. Instead we just take the koan, let the words roll around on our tongue for a moment, to taste the idea of it, and then let the koan sink away from our mind, into our body. We feel the koan with our entire body. We let the koan into our heart. In Zen we say : “Ask the question with the pores of your skin, with the marrow in your bones.” In other words, give ourselves up wholeheartedly to the questioning.

This process of enquiry is intense, because you are not really concentrating on the words themselves – they are not special or religious words, like a mantra, and the process is not designed to stop your mind thinking. The words are just a way to access our mind and its possibilities, to discover what and how our mind moves when we think. By meditating in this way, we allow a certain kind of spaciousness to develop inside us, and also in our lives. We stop forcing answers when it's not necessary. We stop labelling things and putting it in boxes. We stop "knowing" things before we have looked properly. If we practice this regularly, we see quite clearly that our minds are so flexible, and we have so-o many more choices than we first thought!

We are then really awake to our life.

A Zen saying reads: Great questioning, great awakening. Little questioning, little awakening. No questioning, no awakening.