Hi Everyone – thoughts on the Lost Donkey Story (Speaking of Traps Thomas mentioned… its started as a short comment and got away from me. I wasn’t planning on sharing it but maybe someone finds it helpful.)

This morning I found myself sitting with Chapter 25 of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which for some reason left me feeling lonely. And something in that stirred a chain of associations as it echoed for me Krishnamurti’s reflections on loneliness and aloneness, which in turn brought to mind the Hermit of Meditations on the Tarot and his “Perfect Night.” And somehow all of that circled back to the old Nasreddin tale of the Lost Donkey. Four very different traditions, Taoist, psychological, Christian‑Hermetic, and Sufi, all pointing toward the same paradox of what it means to stand truly, profoundly alone but not lonely (lost had Nasreddin been on the donkey?).

LOA TZU – Mystery
There is something that contains everything. Before heaven and earth it is.
Oh, it is still, unbodied, all on its own, unchanging, all pervading, ever moving.
So it can act as the mother of all things.
Not knowing its real name, we only call it the Way.
If it must be named, lets its name be Great.
Greatness means going on, going on means going far, and going far means turning back.

This ‘turning back’ to the source, to one’s own center, is the action I think the Nasreddin story captures.

The Nasreddin story about the missing donkey carries a deeper paradox that shows up across many spiritual traditions. His neighbors see only loss, but Nasreddin gives thanks because he wasn’t riding it when it disappeared. In that simple twist, the story points to a truth echoed by both Krishnamurti and the Hermit of Meditations on the Tarot.

For Krishnamurti, the donkey might represent the “ego‑vehicle”, the bundle of memories, roles, and psychological habits we ride through life. When this donkey wanders off, most of us feel the shock of loneliness, as if we ourselves have gone missing. But Krishnamurti insists that if we can stay with that sense of isolation without running from it, something shifts. Loneliness dissolves, and what remains is aloneness, a state of freedom in which we realize we were never the donkey’s rider to begin with.

The Hermit in Meditations on the Tarot stands in a similar place, though described in mystical rather than psychological terms. He is the one who has already stepped off the donkey. Walking on foot, carrying only a staff and a lantern, he enters the “Perfect Night”, the inner darkness where all external lights fade and the soul’s own light becomes visible. His aloneness is not a wound but a capacity. Because he is no longer carried by anything external, he cannot be lost when the world goes dark… “He is a hermit in his inner life, whatever his outer life may be”… he has “turned back.”

Seen this way, Nasreddin’s gratitude makes perfect sense. The neighbors see poverty; he sees freedom. They see a man without a donkey; he sees a man who is no longer dependent on one. Loneliness is the fear of the person who realizes the donkey is gone and doesn’t know how to walk. Aloneness, the Perfect Night, is the joy of the person who discovers that without the donkey blocking the sky, the stars finally come into view.

In all three teachings, the same paradox shines through: If you are not riding the ego, you cannot be lost when the ego dissolves.

What all these stories and teachings seem to agree on is that the path runs straight through the tension we so often try to avoid… the ache of loneliness on one side and the quiet strength of aloneness on the other. We don’t bypass that tension; we inhabit it. And in doing so, something subtle shifts. The loneliness that once felt like a void begins to reveal itself as a doorway, a place where the noise of the world fades just enough for us to hear the faint music beneath things.

It’s easy to forget this… “we don’t notice the harmony because we’ve forgotten we’re part of the orchestra”. Loneliness is what we feel when we think we’ve been excluded from the music. Aloneness is what we discover when we realize the music was always inside us, waiting for a moment of stillness to be heard.

So perhaps the work is simply to stay with that tension, not rushing to escape loneliness, not clinging to aloneness, but letting both soften us until the inner lantern, the Hermit’s light, the Tao’s quiet presence, or Nasreddin’s unexpected gratitude begins to glow on its own. In that glow, the path becomes visible again, and we find ourselves walking, not lost, not carried, but quietly in tune with the larger harmony we had forgotten.

I’ll be candid its possible all these words are a attempt to convince myself… yet my mind returned to stillness and I don’t feel lonely…

LOL that reminded me of something Richard Wagamese wrote

I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the hard times are the friction that shaves off the worn and tired bits. The more I travel head-on, the more I am shaped, and the things that no longer work or are unnecessary drop away. It’s a good way to travel. I believe eventually I will wear away all resistance, until all that’s left of me is light.”

The “unnecessary bits” dropping away, the donkeys we no longer need to ride. 🙂 I should have just let Richard do the talking.

Hi Thomas
I’m reminded of Joseph Campbell, who liked to joke that scholars such as himself could talk about Zen precisely because they weren’t Zen masters — a real master would just sit, or laugh, or whack you with a stick and be done with it.

My own comments on the stories were made with a very un‑Zen intention as I was playing with different ways of communicating an idea. Sadly, many people I know would dismiss the stories outright. It’s funny sad how even when we’re only observers in a story, we rush to fill the gap with opinions as if our opinions will shape characters… and in the process miss something we might learn about ourselves or might address the problem the story points to.

After all my words, I was left with – “We don’t notice the harmony because we’ve forgotten we’re part of the orchestra.”

I enjoyed the Key to happiness story and Imagining the next scene where the rich man, slowly realizes that having been shown his key to happiness was the diamonds, that he’d promised to give away all his diamonds for that key. There is I think, a quiet truth tucked in that moment.

A little Sufi story that seems appropriate for an age where headlines appear before the truth does.

One afternoon, the villagers saw Nasir, a man they all quietly agreed was “a bit of a fool,” standing in the marketplace holding a broken clay pot upside down over his head. People gathered quickly.

“What are you doing?” someone asked.
Nasir smiled. “I’m keeping the rain off.”
“But it’s not raining,” another villager said.
Nasir nodded. “Yes. And look how well it’s working.”

The crowd burst into laughter… “Poor Nasir,” they whispered. “Always doing something foolish.”

Just then, the town’s scholar walked by. He frowned at the scene.
“Nasir, why do you embarrass yourself like this? Everyone is laughing at you.”

Nasir lowered the pot, looked at the scholar kindly, and held up the broken pot.
“This pot is useless for carrying water,” he said, “but it’s perfect for showing how trapped we are by what we think we know…”
a whole pot (ego) can only hold what it already contains: opinions, assumptions, fixed ideas. A broken pot, though… it can’t hold anything. It lets everything pass through. And because it holds nothing, it sees everything.

Nasir placed the pot gently on the ground. Then he walked away, leaving the crowd staring at the pot…

Eventually the villagers went home some feeling sorry for Nasir, they were still waiting for the “rain” to justify his actions. And the scholar… the scholar went home to write a thesis on why Nasir was wrong, missing the point entirely

Hi Everyone – more thoughts

Reading today’s CAC (Center for Action and Contemplation) meditation, perhaps in synchronicity, I was struck by how closely it echoes the themes we’ve been circling here: form and formlessness, objective and subjective knowing, the horizontal and vertical dimensions of experience – cross (How a Hermeticist might think of it).

The meditation points out that Genesis begins not with one creation story, but two, and they contradict each other. One is orderly, transcendent, structured; the other is earthy, improvisational, full of trial and error. One speaks in the language of cosmic form; the other in the language of human intimacy. Taken literally, they can’t both be “true.” But taken symbolically, they reveal something deeper: reality is not one-dimensional.

It reminded me of our conversation about how the mind wants certainty, a single right answer, a clean form to hold onto. Yet the spiritual traditions themselves often refuse to give us that. They offer multiple perspectives, sometimes conflicting, as if to train us to see beyond the literal. The “contradiction” becomes the teaching.

Zen does this too. A koan isn’t meant to resolve into one correct interpretation. It’s meant to open the vertical dimension, the formless ground beneath the forms. In that sense, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 function almost like a biblical koan. They invite us to hold two truths at once: the transcendent and the immanent, the cosmic and the personal, the objective and the subjective.

Maybe that’s why the meditation says the Bible does us a favor by beginning with two stories. It signals from the start that spiritual truth isn’t a single line of logic but a tapestry of voices. And perhaps the same is true in our own lives: the story we present outwardly and the story we feel inwardly are not rivals but reflections. Together they point to something larger than either one alone. Both are needed if we hope to see the whole.

…..

Something I’m noticing in myself, especially in today’s (0 -1) digital world is how much of the wisdom traditions seem aimed at undoing this either/or way of thinking. So much of modern life trains us to choose: objective or subjective, form or formless, mind or heart. But the traditions keep pointing us toward the AND.

Which makes me wonder: what is it within us that resists the AND so strongly?

Maybe it’s because “AND” asks us to hold tension. It asks us to stand in a space where two truths coexist without collapsing one into the other. That’s uncomfortable for the part of us that wants clarity, safety, and control. The binary feels simpler. Cleaner. Less risky.

But the AND is where life actually happens… The AND is where paradox becomes insight… The AND is where form and formlessness meet.

Zen, the mystics, the hermeticists — they all seem to be training the mind to tolerate that space. To let the horizontal (the world of facts, roles, stories) and the vertical (the world of presence, meaning, depth) intersect without forcing them into a single dimension.

Maybe the resistance isn’t a flaw but a doorway. The moment we feel the urge to choose sides … objective or subjective, literal or symbolic is the moment the practice begins?

For anyone looking to restore some wonder and hope for humanity I invite you to view Itchy Boots latest Youtube video – KYRGYZSTAN S8, EP110. The last half took my breath away and I found myself happily laughing!

Hi Anita — thanks for being such a good mirror. I’ve also struggled with fear, doubt, uncertainty, and shame.

I think many of us recognize that inner shakiness, even if we hide it well. And you’re right: when the ground inside feels unstable, rigid rules or black‑and‑white answers can feel like a lifeline. They offer the appearance of solid footing.

Your reflection points to a paradox: the more we insist on being right and certain, the less we trust our own capacity to meet the moment. Fear steps in and tries to build a fortress out of absolutes.

From a Zen perspective, self‑trust isn’t confidence in our thoughts, our judgments, or even our abilities. It’s more like trusting the ground beneath all of that (the canvas, the roots) the part of us that can remain present even when the mind is unsure. The part that doesn’t need guarantees. In that sense, self‑trust feels less like “I know what to do” and more like “I can stay here with this without collapsing.” It’s the willingness to let the moment unfold without rushing to secure it. Not easy, especially because it isn’t something we can force; it’s something we allow.

Maybe that’s why certainty is so seductive: it promises safety. But presence offers something deeper. Presence says, “Even if I don’t know, I’m still here.”

For a long time, in my religious upbringing, I felt shame for not being certain. Today I know doubt as being an important attribute of faith. Without doubt and uncertainty we do not grow.

Hi Everyone: As I am also trying to see my own experience, the following is probably going to be more head than heart.

Alessa, your point about everyone having different needs and values feels important. Zen stories often leave space for exactly that kind of multiplicity. They don’t hand us a moral verdict; they invite us to notice the movements of our own mind as we try to assign one. In that sense, “Who is to say what is right or wrong?” becomes less a philosophical claim and more a mirror: why am I so quick to want the answer to be one way or the other? What in me wants certainty, and what in me resists it?

As for the monk’s hidden love, I agree, only he could know why he concealed it. And perhaps that’s part of the koan: we see only the surface of another person’s struggle, never the full terrain.

Anita, your question about objective versus subjective right and wrong touches something subtle. I don’t read Alessa as denying the existence of right and wrong so much as pointing to the difficulty of applying them cleanly to human experience. Even in Zen, where precepts exist, they aren’t commandments handed down to control behavior, though it’s easy to fall into that trap. They’re more like tools for clearing the dust from the mirror. Their purpose is to illuminate, not to shame.

That’s why I agree with you about shame needing to be used sparingly, if at all. Most shame is already present long before anyone “applies” it. When it’s undeserved, it obscures awakening. When it’s deserved, if that word even fits, it tends to arise naturally, like the monk’s blush in the story. Not as punishment, but as recognition: Ah… I see what I was clinging to… I suspect we all have known that moment.

To be candid, my own decidedly un‑Zen intention in engaging with this koan was to address something I see so often in the world: our rush toward judgment and certainty the moment a story is told. The koan felt like an invitation to pause and look beneath that first reflex.

In daily life, rules matter; communities need form. But as observers, we’re also offered a chance to notice how quickly we leap to conclusions, how readily we assume we know what happened, who is at fault, and what the “lesson” must be. That movement is worth noticing as I thing it reveals our own illusions and shadows.

As for embodying form, I’m not sure any of us can answer that cleanly. Zen doesn’t treat form and formlessness as opposites but as interdependent… like yin and yang moving across the same canvas we tend to forget. Zazen has form: posture, breath, stillness. Yet its purpose is to dissolve the very constructs that keep us from presence. In that way, form becomes the means by which formlessness is revealed.

Hermann Hesse once wrote of trees whose deep roots rest in the Eternal Now (the blank canvas), a realm not measured, while their branches and leaves live in the shifting weather of the temporal world. That image feels close to what I mean. The roots are like formlessness, grounded in what simply is. The branches are form, reaching into experience, shaped by wind and season. When we notice both, the stillness below and the movement above, we become more transparent TO the moment itself. Not merely present in time, but presence meeting the moment directly.