Yeshua's Primary Question - Part 2

From Rex Spear

The second domain of Wisdom questioning is a non-cognitive enterprise. This arena confronts, confuses, and even frustrates our normal, rational thinking systems. While it is non-rational in that sense, it certainly is not pre-rational nor irrational. In fact, the purpose of this type of questioning is to move us into a trans-rational ethos. The quintessential form of this type of questioning is the Zen koan. Classically, a koan has been painted as a bizarre and often semi-violent exchange between master and student, with the most renowned koan in the West being the perplexing “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”. Yet to see the koan as simply a ridiculous oddity undermines the effectiveness of this tool. In his wonderful book Bring Me the Rhinoceros, Zen teacher John Tarrant introduces koans with the statement, “An impossible question means a journey”. An inner journey is exactly what a koan tries to initiate. As a further description, he states that:

Koans are not intended to prescribe a particular kind of happiness or right way to live. They don’t teach you to assemble or make something that didn’t exist before. Many psychological and spiritual approaches rely on an engineering metaphor and hope to make your mind more predictable and controllable. Koans go the other way. They encourage you to make an ally of the unpredictability of the mind and to approach your life more as a work of art. The surprise they offer is the one that art offers: inside unpredictability you will find not chaos, but beauty.

The Wisdom tool of koans offers an initiation to a deeper knowing that goes beyond yet includes even our highest rational thinking.