Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening

The strangest thing here is the sense that the moment has been just waiting for us to notice it. What took you so long? it seems to ask. I’ve been here waiting for you all this time. . . .

It may be better not to get too attached to specific forms of practice. The

In Zen, there are said to be two kinds of power: jiriki and tariki. Jiriki is “self-power,” meaning the power that we have to help ourselves along the path of practice. Tariki is “other-power,” meaning forces at work around us that help us on the path of growth through meditation.

The great Indian sage Yogananda, sometimes dubbed the twentieth century’s first “superstar guru,” was one of the first teachers of yoga and meditation in America. He once said that life is a movie, and that a person’s true

seat. And the struts hold the floorboards,

This kind of experience is a single, decisive shift, which changes us forever. That’s the promise.

This is meditation—a clear, deep stillness that can meet our most profound spiritual yearnings exactly and fully. No special buildings. No rituals, priests, doctrines, or dogmas. No machineries of institutional power. Just you, your own space, and a commitment to be quiet and still for a while. Yet you emerge from it feeling spiritually fulfilled.

Over time, koans can become a means for entering the territory of awakening. “The sound of one hand”—some Zen masters say you won’t find that sound until you “hear it with your eyes and see it with your ears.” What on earth do they mean? Perhaps they mean that only the eyes and ears of the heart can apprehend what the koan is trying to share.

So although it is possible to “leap out of the skin-bag”—and what that means we will come to shortly—it may not be possible to do so deliberately. We can’t actually make it happen. The best we can do is set up conditions that make it more likely. As the Zen teacher Robert Aitken Roshi puts it, “Enlightenment is an accident, and practice makes us ac