Wherein One Be Where You Are: Fitness Witness
Channel: Returner Trilobite
Date: 2016-07-15

You're not all bad, but enough irreducible rascality to make you a blast and a pleasure-pain.

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After listening to over 100 hours of your lectures and reading over a dozen of your books, I’m convinced you're one of the greatest tricksters of the 20th century.

You reveal little by little many of the ways Zen masters, Yoga teachers, Tao sages, and other “professors of spiritual enlightenment” sort of trick one into realizing that they’re full of it, and that I had the answers all along.

Simply saying “You are God and Everything!” to one’s face will elicit a blank expression and a “You okay, bro?”. A Master, etc., sees a student coming to him with feathers in one hand and tar in the other, and his job is to grab his students hands and slap them together, then tell him to pick off the feathers until the student runs around and around in a game of futility wherein he loses all hope and resigns himself to utter failure and in that despair gains a flash of enlightenment.

But until that happens the Zen master continues to put on magnanimous airs (an upaya of its own) and make a monkey of the student because he can be made a monkey of, to pickpocket the student’s watch and sell it to him over and over until he stops falling for it.

But by revealing these sorts of “magi tricks”, you have set yourself up as the greatest magician of all, using the original definition as something like "deceiver". Disguising yourself as just one talking a big lot of fascinating nonsense. Perhaps ultimately that’s all you are.

Your very own upaya has been no teaching at all, but to tell all that seeking enlightenment is a fool’s errand, a vicious circle, because that is to search for an ox while riding on one. If you were alive right now seeing me chase my own tail “trying not to try” and “trying to accord with the Tao” which just pushes it away, you would laugh and say “Told you so!” Or perhaps that’s what you wanted all along, to show it all and thereby spoil the whole affair… so that one has no choice but to accept total defeat and with which to somehow win.

The ultimate koan is to give me all the answers, so that to even figure out that which is there to figure out is itself enlightenment.