Unanswerable

Unanswerable: 

there is a Zen koan asking us to reveal our original face before we were born, or even before the birth of our parents and grandparents - unanswerable, yet we ask by means of exploration, who are we, truly, before the birth of this existence? It's important to drop any pure intellectual approach here, abandoning any concepts we bring to this inquiry. Simply asking ourselves the koan, allowing it to work through us and eventually leading to a revelation, that's the critical point of any self-inquiry or use of a koan. My own approach was offered by Douglas Harding of the Headless Way and it's directly pointing at the source which allows all experience, concepts and identity to be shown. Show me your original face is the question - and the answer is seen, not told, remembered and experienced at once. 

unanswerable by words.

yet deeply known.

and always present too

 what's being asked of us is to show reality and that's always, only, this very moment, nothing else can ever be pointed to, not described in any true sense, nor offered as a valid experience. We only know right now. Our original face is being shown, ironically, by the absence of our present face, or at least that's what our own pointing reveals to us, that any attempt to view our own eyes without aid of a mirror, or looking at a photo, will always end in vain. But of course that's just eyes and ears, our facial descriptions, and not our original face at all. 

we see it in two ways,

one is through absence, finding that we're unable to locate, to actually pinpoint within our view, the face we've always believed we knew, our very identity vanished by a single look. This particular koan, at least by Headless Way, shows that we are nothing like we've long assumed, nothing at all really, empty of a single source that could ever hold our true identity. 

our original face is emptiness.

and yet,

the second point to see is that emptiness is more truly viewed as capacity, and it's here that our original face is realized through the immediacy of all that's ever shown. Who we are is reality, and that's why the koan always remains unanswerable, revealing us as motion, shifting, current only in the same sense as a river's present flow. We are never the same through any repeated view, always a different revelation shown. We are emptiness, but not without the very essence that somehow shapes and lends itself as every aspect of the world. 

our original face is capacity.

as well as everything it ever holds. 

seamless.

and in this way, our inquiry, this koan that asks of us to reveal who and what we really are - remains unanswerable...

yet always plainly in our view. 

~

Peace, Eric