koan = 10.5 x 4

Posted on | February 6, 2010 | No Comments

One of the rather bizarre classes I took during college was called ‘Spiritual Care and Healing‘. No, it wasn’t a religious class, but it was certainly a spiritual one.

In it, I learned things like drawing with your eyes closed, writing with your non-dominant hand, journaling for health, imagining white blood cells as members of elite death-squad, the chronicle of Andrew Weil, meditating on raisins, and this Zenic Buddistic maxim called Koan.

Sounds like a bunch of quacks, i am sure, but I actually enjoyed the class. It was very interactive, and full of activities. I sometimes partnered with this nice girl, who later became the wife of my ex-roommate. Oh, awesomeness!!

But also, from those daily journals that I wrote; from the incoherent rambles, quips, and frets, I was diagnoses with something! No, not insanity… I was diagnosed with something more significant: I need the sun! Yes, I was diagnosed that I need the sun, to thrive, and to be happy. I was diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I was living in a basement, and I was working in a basement, and it was during a dark Autumn in Indiana, and I was unknowingly depressed! No wonder, I used to hate the rains. I was very impressed that I was diagnosed by Madam Professor only from my writings. I was impressed that she connected the dots, and I was impressed that she could read my handwriting.

See, the class was not all quacks!

This thing about Koan, though, tickles…

I was told that Koans are these hard dialog puzzles. Enigmas of some sort. They are so hard such that the answers can be perceived irrelevant; so friggin hard, sometimes there are too many answers to consider. Or ain’t no none at all.

These could be silly questions like ‘does a dog have Buddha Nature?‘, to which an apt answer can be given: ‘who cares??‘

But there are real hard ones, like ‘why bad things happen to good people‘, or ‘why good things happen to bad people‘, or ‘why mommy and daddy could ever decide to live together‘, or ‘why the tsunami in Haiti‘, or ‘why miscarriages happen‘, or ‘why was I born ugly‘, or ‘why the HIV.‘ Well, you get the idea..

Pick one, and meditate on it for a second. And then a minute. And then an hour. Strange, huh, somehow you get sucked in to the question, and it’s hard to pull yourself out. Each time a candidate answer lurks, and then a better one, and then a better one still, and then you’d realize that the first answer was probably better.

But sometimes you have no choice, though, especially if you are experiencing one. Your life can be a koan. In fact, your life is a koan. Many people try to answer these questions. People even make careers out of them. Even a shrink need another. But a wise man, who has gone to the galaxies said that the answer could simply be: 42.

I sometimes ponder about this koan of mine, for a while, for a long time. Typically, I’d get quite far, but then I’d think, maybe it really is just 42. 42 is just so much easier.

Now, if you have some time, would you help me with this koan: “why would a blogger blogs ?”

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