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Though it was my suggestion to work with this question, I'm a little hesitant to share because I wonder whether anyone might relate to what I've come up with. I do recognize though, that most things worthwhile to share, aren't easy to. :)

Zen asked during last workshop, whether we had discussed the lojong slogan 'Treat all dharmas as dreams' yet, and I honestly couldn't remember. It seemed to me as though we have long been working with that slogan *within* all the other topics we have discussed... even this one.

Life as koan, koan as dream, dream as koan, life as dream... There is this open-though-still-embedded picture that begins to inform the way one is seeing everything, when sitting with an impossible-to-answer question, which btw seems to be a central feature of a koan, that it is impossible to 'get at' using the kind of problem-solving techniques we usually rely on.

Like dreams, koans have 'their own logic', someone reminded me of recently. What's more is that its a logic that is 'direct'. One might say the same of art, or mathmatical formulas.

Hm.. so the personal part...

Objectively, the picture of "my life" seems at some sort of 'impossible crossroad' where I *must* do things I have no *way* to do. It has 'been this way' for a long time, and were I to describe the circumstances most people would agree that the situation is quite a mess. :)

So anyway, Steven gave a koan (on audio) a few weeks ago... one I worked with on the way to San Francisco actually, having to do with a needle's eye. I didn't need to stretch at all to see 'my' situation there. There is 'what I need to do'... this impossibly large thing, and there is 'what I have to work with'... this impossibly small thing.

Ordinary logic's answer? "No way! You are stuck."

But as I sit with the picture, holding it open as 'saying something' 'teaching something' 'answering something' (this would be the dharmas-as-dream part) there is something in me that begins to question the absoluteness of the answer... to just keep shining a light there... something that begins to open up... very much like revisiting a dream that seemed to say some obvious/solid/limited thing, but upon closer look said a million things from many directions ...

And what is opens up is the only variable: Me. 

So then seeing this variable (who is seeing the variable), then seems to unravel/work on the absoluteness of the "No way" answer... along with everything else. Everything shifts, but 'I' still don't know what that means. 'I' can't do anything with that. 

For some nonsensical reason though, there comes a weird 'surity'... and a joy/release... of being let off a hook I didn't know I was on... to 'solve' this. Which seems to carry into last week's koan beautifully... a sense of placing oneself in the openness of the sky which has been there all along.

Hm... When trying to describe these things of course one begins to sound like they are being coded, which isn't my intention, so a more specific koan moment from a dream this week (in which there were many koan moments), may be a further picture of the process:

I am at my children's school, in a hurry. There are just a few minutes before there will be long delays to get out with them, actually through a fence which doesn't even look large enough to get through. I am rushing but running into various obstacles of people not available, wet floors, that kind of thing.

At some point I 'just see' that I don't even need to sign them out (though they are there with me) because I never signed them in. The whole thing is solved, and already was, and I was going through motions I didn't need to go through and it didn't matter whether anyone helped me or not.

It was a moment that flipped, in a way. And wouldn't seem significant to anyone but me. But... there was a kind of confidence and permission about it... a logic deeper than the one I was using. It is then confidence that factors into the other layers... something I couldn't accomplish by 'working on it' using traditional means.

Also, working with all these things, settles into a sort of question today:

"Whatever question is going on will always seem as important as this one."