Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
This koan points out that if you have a problem, you might not need to expand the pool of the known. Instead it might be possible to deal with problems that seem to be insoluble without translating them into something you can already understand. Taking such a course would mean accepting and even embracing being in the dark.
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
It was simple, I stopped knowing what I couldn’t do or live up to.”
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
what does that mean, to dislike? Dislike could mean that you are feeling a strain between how things really are and your story about how things are. Since maps are always fictions, and always smaller than the territory, such a divergence happens every day. When it does, you might let go of your fiction or revise it. Usually this is not what happens
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With any of these thoughts the room became small and fearful. There was a sense of strain, of needing to change others, of the hopelessness of that task, of picking and choosing. Wanting to change myself also led to this strain. This was the with condition—with wrinkles, with delusions of control. But when I wanted no one to be different, the room
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IT IS NATURAL to look for the things you want outside of where you are now. That is the whole point of a journey. Yet this moment is all anyone has. So if freedom, love, beauty, grace, and whatever else is desirable are to appear, they must appear in a now. It would be nice if they appeared in the now you have now. And if they are to appear and end
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There was no pattern to my mind, and I could not begin to control my thoughts. I had done everything right and this was the result. I had failed. A tiny thought appeared, “Then this must be right.” I just let my mind be whatever it wished to be, and immediately it calmed down. I had the sense of standing on the brink of a vast chasm and that I must
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He reflected for a moment. “There isn’t a reason. She’s just worn out.”
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
When you can’t see the light in your own kitchen, could it be because you are making things small, measuring your life in coffee spoons?
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
It seemed very funny that I had struggled so long to find a place in the universe when I couldn’t fall out of the universe. It was as if a wave were struggling to understand what the sea was. I began laughing.
John Tarrant • Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life
This koan has always encouraged me to trust the difficulties I run up against and the slowness with which I work with them. It is as if an impasse has its own journey built into it, a journey that belongs only to that impasse and which is a unique path to freedom. Each step in the dark turns out in the end to have been on course after all.