I used to do a hand-wrist-arm mental exercise with honors students at a local university (asking where one ends and another begins). Many of them would "get" what I was pointing to (the fact that the boundaries that define those "things" are imaginary and that the imaginary distinctions create the illusion of separateness), but one night a particular student, after staring at "his" hand/wrist/arm for several minutes, suddenly got a funny look on his face. He looked down at his body for a moment and then looked around the room slowly before saying softly with amazement, "OMG, it's ALL imaginary!" The student sitting beside him asked, "What do you mean 'it's all imaginary'?" The student was still wide-eyed and said, "Everything is connected." At that point, someone who hadn't seen what was happening asked me a question, and while I was answering it, the teacher, who had invited me to speak, said that it was time for a break. The students got up and started milling around, and when I got free to look for the guy who had had the breakthrough, he was gone. Afterwards, I often wondered how deep his realization had penetrated, and what effect, if any, it had had upon him.
Something similar happened in Hawaii about sixty years ago. A Zen Master was giving a talk to a group of people in a classroom. He drew a big circle on a chalkboard and put a dot in the center of it. He said something like, "Most people are like this dot; they think they're separate from the world," and he traced the larger circle with the chalk in his hand. As he did this, one lady sitting in the back of the room suddenly had a huge enlightenment experience. Ha ha! THIS often surprises Itself in the most unusual ways!
In most cases "stable sameness" (a term coined by Chilton Pearce to describe the psychological inertia of the consensus trance) closes the momentary "crack in the cosmic egg," and people forget what they've glimpsed.
It's all (in the words of SN) so "perfectly so." ;D
Something similar happened in Hawaii about sixty years ago. A Zen Master was giving a talk to a group of people in a classroom. He drew a big circle on a chalkboard and put a dot in the center of it. He said something like, "Most people are like this dot; they think they're separate from the world," and he traced the larger circle with the chalk in his hand. As he did this, one lady sitting in the back of the room suddenly had a huge enlightenment experience. Ha ha! THIS often surprises Itself in the most unusual ways!
In most cases "stable sameness" (a term coined by Chilton Pearce to describe the psychological inertia of the consensus trance) closes the momentary "crack in the cosmic egg," and people forget what they've glimpsed.
It's all (in the words of SN) so "perfectly so." ;D
