Koan
One day a woman was walking down the street and turned the corner. On the corner was a little park. Although it was small, it was peaceful with a few well-placed shade trees and benches.
She sat down under a huge umbrella of a tree. Nearby, within talking distance, was a man sitting on another bench. He was, at least by some accounts, an extraordinary man although he looked very normal. You’d hardly even look at him twice, unless, that is, you happened to look into his eyes.
One of the things that made him extraordinary was his secret. He had a secret.
His secret was SO secret that he could actually say it out loud and it would still be a secret. He could talk about it all day and it would remain a secret. In fact, he could go on for days, weeks, months, even years and it would still be a secret. Now, that’s a pretty amazing secret.
It wasn’t some secret complex scientific formula, undecipherable technical jargon, or anything like that. It was a secret that was explained with plain, everyday words, all of which were completely understandable and comprehensible. You’d hear him talk and find yourself thinking, “That makes perfect sense.” In fact you could listen to him talk for days, weeks, months, even years and it would all make sense. But in the end, you wouldn’t know the secret – even though that’s all he talked about.
Not to waste anytime, here is his secret: He had the secret to life. Not only that, he was willing to share it.
But he also had a problem. Even if he told people he had the secret to life, they wouldn’t believe him. After all, how could someone truly, really have the secret to life?
So, he was stuck in this odd dimension of the universe that gags and strangles the genuine teachers of deep inner understandings. People always thought the mystery schools were hidden away somewhere. Not so. They could be on the world’s busiest street and they would be completely invisible. Nobody takes that kind of teacher seriously. They don’t believe them. Why? Because it isn’t in the form they expect. In fact, it often doesn’t have a form.
The woman was a Seeker, constantly on a quest to find a teacher who could bring her to the deepest inner experiences. But over time she had become jaded and skeptical, having ran into a lot of charlatans, and also a lot of sincere teachers who simply didn’t have the depth she needed or the skills to teach her what she wanted to know. To make it worse, she didn’t know how to recognize the thing she was seeking. That’s a problem. A big problem.
The man sat there on his bench, aware of the woman’s quest and problem. He could tell at a glance. “Everyone is suffering from her problem, at least to some extent or another,” he thought to himself with a weary sigh. He’d seen it a million billion times.
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What should he do?
