I took advantage of outside meditation times at the Genjo Koan sesshin to practice skygazing. Lying down is one of the four meditation postures. Combining open awareness, earthbound relaxation and gazing at large and impersonal sky forces, lets us clearly see the perpetual cause and effect activities of air, heat, wind, water.
That day the sky was filled with a complicated, dark and light cloud phantasmagoria, in infinite directions. There was so much activity and in the course of relaxing the physical body, which initially felt solid on the grassy ground, I was touched by the sky’s effulgence, expansive and continually shifting. Layer upon layer, body upon body of cloud seen at Earth level, pushing and shoving, dissolving and reforming, shifting and sweeping this way and that, veils. When fully letting go into intimate involvement, there was no cloud to be seen, but rather the whole sky moving as one dynamic being.
What instruction, what a display of causes and conditions, and no self, no cloud to be seen, no sky, no one seeing . . . this is how koans work . . . full involvement. Where at one and the same time all the separate forms that fill our senses, our minds and our hearts work together, leaping into spontaneous complete activity. The Genjo koan, the koan of everyday life? Always in motion.
