Zen intuition and instinct

Zen Master Yuanwu proclaims:

 "If you can give up your former knowledge and understanding, thus making your heart open, not keeping anything at all on your mind, so you experience a clear empty solidity where speech and thought do not apply, you will directly merge with the fundamental source, sinking into the infinite, spontaneously attaining inherent wisdom that has no attainment." (Zen Essence, p37)

The world as it is presented to us is too contextually real, too substantial, too consuming‑ we cannot see past the barrier of facts and words presented in the barrage of society's digressions; we cannot see beyond the mist of given interpretations; which is to say, we see only what we believe we will see, and only the way we are told to see, and because of this we are mostly blind; we see nothing but what we think we shall see, and then we call that form of conceptual myopia ...vision.

It is only at the point where the mind comes undone- realizing perfectly that it does not understand what it thought it did, and therefore the way it had always seen the world is wholly wrong- that thought can end, the heart can open fully to lead us forth, and we can forge on towards a better day.

Cioran offers another quick jab: "...when the knowledge of the mistake of living becomes common property and unanimous truth, where shall we seek resources in order to engender or even to sketch out an action, the simulacrum of a gesture? By what art survive our lucid instincts and our perspicacious hearts?" (Decay, p91)

How shall our hearts, instincts, and intuitions survive? But that is too easy. We must only go mad to the world of reason, or we will never be sane in unreason. We must lose the mind in order for the heart to expand, it is a very simple equation.

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These excerpts on following the heart and aimless wandering are taken from unpublished chapters of THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas