Hi Tommy

I’ve been pondering what you wrote – “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Being a Zen Koan I suspect were not to answer it but sit in it. The first thing I notice is the same frustration, what’s the point. A strong indication that I’m sitting in the temporal measuring mind and that the desire for ‘enlightenment’ was/is a quest to avoid pain cover up fear and anxiety.

Is it possible to sit in the Koan without desire without a goal or even answers?
“Attending completely, listening with all your heart, with all your brain, with all your senses? If you are so completely attending there is nothing more. That is meditation.” – Krishnamurti

Meditation isn’t practice, isn’t concentration, isn’t focus, isn’t silence, isn’t stillness, isn’t passive, isn’t a goal… all such thoughts and measuring restrict attending?

“There is something beyond words, beyond all thought which time has not touched, which is the origin of all things. This is the origin of all things and therefore the most sacred, most holy, timeless.” – Krishnamurti

Sitting in the Koan, all things are an arising from and a return to… movement arising from and returning to stillness, language and measurement/judgment arising from and returning to silence, time arising and returning to the eternal now… Stillness, silence, eternity not a something to attain, but attend to…

Movement creates Life, Stillness Love… to be still yet still moving that is everything.

In the temporal measuring sphere of the left side of the brain we do not have words for something that is both stillness and movement, time and eternal (eternal that is not a measurement of time). As we drift to the right side of the brain, eyes ‘see’ the stillness in movement, movement in stillness… ears ‘hear’ the silence in language/thought/measurement… Self senses the eternal in the temporal, temporal in the enteral…

We return… chop wood, carry water… same temporal needs, but not the same doings…  Bitter sweet, the heart opens?

“These are just words, but if you live without fear, if you have understood knowledge, you have gone beyond sorrow, therefore you have this quality of love and compassion with its intelligence, and having laid the foundation then meditation is something marvelous, something that thought can never understand. Then only there is that which is timeless, most holy.” – Krishnamurti

Can we live without fear when it has defined our experience? Without such fear what role does belief, desire, right practice, knowledge, guru’s…. have? Do our beliefs, goals and desires reenforcing fear?

In the eternal fear has nowhere to take root…  The question arises Do we dare to ‘see’ Life as it Is? Is it possible to answer Yes without belief? Compassion bitter sweet…

Chop wood, carry water, engage in life… I don’t know Tommy I have my moments of  staring into space unable to sleep.

I try to notice when I’m in my temporal, measuring judging, dualistic self and then remind myself of the return from which all arose, even if for only a moment. (LOL till I ‘measure’ the moment as a measurement of time, sending me right back into it. no wonder the Buddha laughs)

Allan Watts viewed the temporal sphere of experience as a playground (game) for the self/ego and eternal Home. Perhaps the trick is the realization that the two arn’t separate states of being.