The Beautiful Paradox

http://thecleaver.blogspot.com/2009/05/beautiful-paradox.html

A kōan is a question, statement or story, that on the surface, defies logic. It operates by confounding customary discursive thinking, forcing the intelligent student to use other faculties of awareness to shed light onto the seemingly bizarre linguistic conundrum presented. Only by bringing deeper, non-dualistic consciousness to the matter, can the gem of gnosis be uncovered.
The kōan is a teaching device that has become synonymous with the Zen Buddhist tradition. Though its roots are much older, there is a unique simplicity and a lasting effectiveness in the Zen expression of this mind quake that is hugely relevant and instructive today.
Famous kōans include:- (1) A Zen Master said to his student, “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one clapping?” (2) A student asked Zen Master Wenyan, “What is the Buddha?” Wenyan replied, “Dried dung.” (3) A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”
Take your average matrix dwelling noodle and present them with a kōan - and they won’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Whether they’re a senior vascular surgeon or a trainee burger flipper, any data that falls outside of their habituated mental operating system is tagged as an irregularity and consigned to the furnace of the extraneous. From their perspective, data that threatens to compromise the foundations of their living database is not granted an audience. Understandable. So, if the Control System can manage to prep someone’s core database parameters from an early age, the rest of the process of perpetual self-limitation will take care of itself.

They’re Not Here, This Isn’t Happening
It was only when I first walked barefoot through a beautiful wheat field, my feet pressing into the warm cereal grass, that I realized that the crop circle I stood inside was a kōan.
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The Projection Room
It is in the contemplation of the irrational presence of crop circles, so incongruous in contemporary industrial Britain, that their teaching slowly begins to dawn on you. This process is best accelerated by actually setting foot inside one, feeling it, smelling it, allowing it to dwell within your felt moment-by-moment experience of consciousness.
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The Burning Of Sodom
The dehumanizing abasement of television relentlessly conditions new levels of obedience into the proletariat - siphoning out the integrity and consciousness of all who watch and are being watched. Billions worship the screen, kneeling to bring forth the burnt offerings of their own emotional turpitude. This is pandemic self-harming; whole nations slicing into their viscera to momentarily escape the agony of a deeply inauthentic life.
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The End Of The Fourth Age
The end of the fourth age is here. Thank goodness. The shift is happening now, inside and out. It can be detected by observing the ripples in the pond: synchronicities increasing, matter becoming less dense, time compressing. There is nothing to be scared of. Quite natural and necessary for transformation. Nevertheless, it would be indefensible for the integral warrior to avoid indulging in the negative vortex of Control System debauchery, only to cosset himself in the intractable optimism of New Age tomfoolery.
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Paradox seeks to transcend duality. No time. Just being. Being aware of all, yet without any knowledge whatsoever. Being everywhere and existing nowhere. Exquisite harmonic wholeness.

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