Koans and the Matrix

In continuing to work on descriptions of balance and Clarity, an interesting thought experiment developed in an imagined conversation. Also playing in was a koan that I've carried around for a few years. With koans like this one, the ones that have struck a chord without bringing any more particular response from me, I have often circled around them, coming to different interpretations and points of insight. The more you get to know certain koans, the more you get out of them.

The one I'm speaking of struck me as fairly brief, as if there were one point to it, although that single point seems to mean different things depending on how you relate to it. "Standing at the top of a hundred-foot pole, what is your next step?" It is something like that. In relation to trying to describe six points of psychological balance, my next conceptual step with this koan is to remove the pole. This sort of process is like following the trajectory of an arrow. First there is a hundred-foot pole and the impossibility of taking a next step. Then there is no pole. Next, no you. So no one, and what's more, standing at the top of nothing.

This begs the question, is there a next step? (And I'm assuming that, if you could actually focus in on the koan enough to include only the pole, the hundred feet, and your next step, then the world around your predicament is already out of focus enough to consider it so insignificant that it was already as if the world wasn't there back when you were facing the dilemma of which next step to take. And, since there are lots of ways to relate to this koan, feel free to pick it up and see what happens for you that might be different than this description from me.)

Everything that you could possibly bring up around/within this spaciousness is your associational matrix. Being able to return to or rest in this spaciousness is what I would consider to be the quintessential experience at the level of Clarity. Being unencumbered by anything and yet taking some step gives rise to the feelings of inspiration and engagement. There being no need for "you" here opens one's self to the experience/reality of anatta. And this place or point may help one see what Dogen might have meant at times by "thinking nonthinking" or imagining nonimagining. Everything other than this spaciousness involves imagining, and imagining this spaciousness without adding more content from one's associational matrix is imagining nonimagining.

From right here where nothing is excluded a priori because no a priori thinking exists here, what step is not possible? While that question may be interesting in some way, the full-bodied answer to, "What is your next step?," is so much more fascinating. While we don't always think of this sort of spaciousness, it is as if this question is constantly posed and as if everything we do is our answer. Whether you ask yourself the question or not, we are watching and interacting with how you answer. Because everything comes "through" this no-self spaciousness, nothing that any of us do is not our true selves.

There is one single quality-feeling that encompasses all of what is written here, and that quality is exemplary of Clarity, included in inspiration. (With whom was the conversation that sparked this in me?)