and more interesting. If this koan has chosen you, or called to you, it naturally belongs with certain other questions, deep questions, which then become yours. What happens to me when I die? What happens to me when those I love die? When someone has died are they alive in my mind or dead? In what way are they still alive and in what way not? And

If you have a reason for happiness, then that happiness can be taken away. The person you love could leave, the job could stop being interesting. If you have a reason for loving life, what happens if that reason fails? With koans you may find that life and love are so strong and vivid that they can’t be explained or justified. Koans open a

When you are not afraid to forget who you are, life in the kitchen, or life in the office, might contain huge and overwhelming happiness. Everything you look at, the door, the walls meeting in the corner of the room, the light shining on the cell phone, might be so alive that it looks back. Other people might not be who you thought they were.

DESIRE BURNS at the core of life, and it’s usually complicated. “If you love me then I don’t love you,” as Carmen sings.

There is a saying that everything we do is in the service of the self, and there isn’t one—a self, that is.

If children can have a natural clarity, you might too, even if you remember no operatic enlightenment experience. There might be no good reason for this clarity; it could be something that just is the case, like a tree, like life. All you would need to do is to notice that things are clear, or to throw overboard the idea that things are not already

The cypress tree koan might shift your stories about who you are and the limit those stories put on your happiness. You might notice that you get no merit from your good deeds, since they are done for their own sake. Also you are not a victim since no matter how terrible your past and how close you might be to despair, the moment of the cypress

They sit on a bench and watch. He can see that the children like finding Easter eggs. The children don’t have opinions about affairs, and they don’t think about what should be happening. They do want their father not to abandon them for the sake of his fiction that his wife should be someone other than who she is. His opinions about his wife are

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.