“to zen” is to know something without knowing it, to do something without knowing how. It is similar to intuition, but far deeper. It engages the soul’s capacity for the impossible: touching the sun with the eye, hearing silence, traversing infinite distances of time and space in a single thought. In the moment of zenning, everything is reversed: The object is already achieved, and time marches backward to the moment of action. Through the unity of opposites and all elements, a door is opened to every place and time. Achievement is already a fact; the goal, the journey and the question are a single point. The self, an independent entity, yields its boundaries and sinks into the reality of its object – while remaining aware. Nothingness flirts with being and understands it. The mirror communes with the light ray, though its feather touch admits no possession, no indwelling even for an instant. The painter holds his brush and the painting appears; then he begins to draw it on canvas. In this mode, being is knowing. Your friend’s sigh is your own exhalation. It is that it is not and then becomes. It transcends the bounds of our finite reality while never becoming other than what we are: Humility and greatness in the same instant.
When you find yourself confronted by an impossible moment, zen it. The mind cannot, nor the body or the heart, but the soul possesses this capacity – easily, effortlessly, if we let go the reins and allow it. There is a mode of living which is impossible, which we cannot realize until we abandon the possible. Then infinity is a simple matter, even if to mortal eyes the scope of our limitations has not changed. Humanity was meant to live in spirit. The world of the body and its senses and memories is an animal heritage. To leave it requires a mode of being that has nothing to do with it, while including it intimately, completely. “We” are the mirror turned toward the sun; while We are the light and the glory and the radiant Truth. The mirror is not the sun, the sun is not the mirror. Forgo the duality, that the sun may walk upon earth without ever touching it. Then the impossibility of our possibilities can show by what Hand of greatness humanity was fashioned.