A true Zen master could brush the teeth of a hippopotamus without ever thinking of the words "Zen" or "hippopotamus" or "teeth" or "brush," immediately after being challenged to do that.

If you think that would be easy, try it sometime. If necessary, a toy hippo may be substituted without essentially lessening the magnitude of the challenge.

(Artwork by Alyssa Few)

A volcanic geode starts out as a bubble of gas in molten rock. Later the rock cools and solidifies, leaving a cavity. Later still, water seeps in through cracks in the surrounding rock, bearing dissolved minerals which crystallize within the cavity. Even later still, the surrounding rock erodes away, but since the wall of the cavity has been reinforced by the crystals, the geode might survive long enough for some rockhound to find it and bring its gemmed interior to light.

In the cognitive restructuring classes I taught in prisons before I retired, one of the "mind traps" we covered was boredom. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of that in prisons, and inmates are even more likely than the rest of us to attribute boredom to external causes… to being in prison, for instance.

To call that attribution into question, I'd sometimes use a geode as a visual aid, at first only showing the dull outer half of its shell. I'd ask the class, “Is this rock boring?” Blank stares, usually. “How about if you stared at this rock for about five minutes? Would it be boring then?” Some nods then, but at least one person would usually say something like, “That would depend on who you were.”

“Exactly,” I'd say, turning the geode around then to expose its interior. “A geologist might find it worthwhile to study this rock for hours, and even some non-geologists might. Here, take a look and pass it around...

"Next question. Is prison boring?”

Most of them could figure out the “right” answer to that question, given the lead-in. It would depend on who they were, or on who they wanted to become… on how much they wanted to take advantage of whatever opportunities for personal betterment even the worst prisons offer.

Who knows? Maybe some of them believed it, too.

We build other kinds of prisons for ourselves, out of addictions, toxic relationships, material possessions, overly rigid belief systems, etc. I imagine the kind of enlightenment which is the ultimate goal of Zen takes a long time, maybe a lifetime (or even many lifetimes), for most of us. I say I imagine it does, because I can only be sure about my own experience in this lifetime, and I don't claim to be enlightened in that way. But I will say I've felt a fair amount of heat over the years, not to mention some pressure, leakage, and erosion.

Maybe the same has been true for you?

-- Scrolling Stone