I’m going to talk about the Wheel of Koans at Happy Hour today. I have no idea what I’ll say. But this is a new category on my Blog. The Wheel of Koans is a play on the Wheel of Samsara/Nirvana; the Wheel of Fortune and the Wheel that spins in Jeopardy. The Koan is a Zen puzzle that the master gives to the disciple to crack his logical head like a walnut.

Black walnuts are hard to crack. We just got buckets of them gathered in our back yard and put in the shed to dry. My daughter wants a crack at them Christmas. But when you crack the walnut, you get this brown stain all over your hand, as it you are washing our all your sin.

Zen Koans,—but spiritual puzzles in general—since Koans are not just the property of Zen, Renzi Zen to be truthful, and I find them everywhere, as if God has dropped them from his Walnut Tree into our lives so we can see if we can crack them and find the sweet meat of Self Realization inside.

My ten minutes limitation worked okay for me. Was it okay for you? Kind of like the limitations on Twitter or on a HiKu. Simplicity is best. A master dancer or artist or athlete reduces their action to the simplest action. All irrelevant movement are illuminated through practice. Even factories practice reducing assembly line movement to simple action. Simple is best in all areas of life.

width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/BjiqAQN9rBc” frameborder=”0″ gesture=”media” allowfullscreen>So ten minutes is good because I don’t have look at the clock and see I’ve got five more minutes to talk. The Talk should be simple and express itself completely in a simple and direct way. Meaning is best when it is simple. That is my goal and my practice.

Zen is very simple. Everything is simple in Zen; the architecture, the gardens, the art, and the teaching. There is nothing simpler than a Zen Koan. And our double-binds are simple.

A double-bind is a dilemma in which we find that every choice just spins the double-bind. You think you are choosing an end to the pain, you are not. Ground Hog Day movie. Remember that? Our DBs (double-binds) are our walnuts, a hard dirty nut to crack.

We all have DBs in our life, but we usually don’t recognize them because we blame them on other people or ourselves. Someone is always to blame for the walnut koan that we swallow and can’t cough up. That’s why we can’t crack the koan.

The only nutcracker for the koan is INSIGHT. A sudden gestalt SEEING of the whole dilemma from both ends. The Whole or gestalt includes both me and the Other that we believe is binding us into a double-bind. All struggle just spins the feed back loop of the double-bind.