"Pot Luck" Time...What Step Will You Bring?

It’s “Pot Luck” time.  “Pot Luck”, not as in bringing food, but instead, bringing a Step with you instead.

What Step(s) comes to you when sitting with this koan?  This is what you’ll bring to the group for discussion.  

Koan: A monk asked Tung Shan, “When cold and heat come, how can we avoid them?
Shan said, “Why don’t you go to the place where there is no cold or heat?
The monk said, “What is the place where there is no cold or heat?
Tung Shan said, “When it’s cold, the cold kills you; when it’s hot, the heat kills you.”

Remember that gave we played when we were kids, where something was hidden in a room? One person was “It” (that would be you) looking for the hidden piece.  Getting nearer to it brought the shouts of “You’re getting warm.” The closer you got, the warmer you would become.  Very close brought, “You’re getting very very hot!”

And the opposite was true.  As you moved away from the hidden piece, “You’re getting cooler,” was the call. “You’re freezing,” meant you were nowhere close to finding the prize.

This searching game was where the koan took me.  A silly kid’s game.

Then Step 4 appeared, to be in the thick of things, going through my past. The heat intensifies.  No time for shortcuts, I’ve got to endure this heat, knowing that it’s the heat that’s needed to cook the ingredients. Think of Step 4 as gathering the ingredients for a stew and turning up the heat.  If I don’t look at my past in an honest fashion, the stew isn’t going to be very nourishing for Step 5.  There nothing more satisfying than a bowl of hot stew.

Some can’t stand the heat of Step 4 and leave the fellowship, only to remain in the cold – going back to the old ways that we know may lead to a cold corpse, your own corpse.

“What is the place where there is no cold or heat?” Not being afraid of the past nor wishing to shut the door on it.

One of our “regulars” was could not attend this month because he was in the hospital. He had been carrying this koan around with him before the hospital experience:  “I was thinking of the koan in terms of attachment and aversion.  Go to the place where there is no hot or cold?  In other words let go of your desire to be cool when your environment gets hot.  And vice versa.  And I was relating that to "practicing these principles in all our affairs."

After his hospital experience:  I found myself going to a place of non-perception.   That is what seemed to happen to me. It wasn't just that I lost consciousness (which I did).  But in the (probably) nano-seconds of return, I found myself seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing.  And then consciousness would return.  These episodes repeated quite a number of times, and each time I went thru that "seeing, yet not seeing; hearing, yet not hearing," experience.

See, our regular friend who  wasn’t with us, was really with us, koan and all.

Bill K.