Attribution

Important note: All the posts on this blog were written by Bob Harwood (AKA 'zendancer') on the forum spiritualteachers.proboards.com. I have merely reposted a collection of them in blog format for the convenience of seekers. Some very small mods were made on occasion to make posts readable outside of the forum setting they were made in.

I once experimented with a well-known informal koan.

I asked people of different ages to answer the riddle. Children could see the answer almost instantly; teen-agers were a little slower but half of them could get the answer within five minutes; only a few thirty-year olds could see the answer within ten minutes; and sixty-year olds were almost never able to see the answer. When told the answer, the sixty-years olds would slap their heads in disgust and say, "Oh, of course. Why didn't I see this?" LOL. This experiment simply illustrated how habits of mind gradually obscure the obvious as we age.