Without hyperbole, indoctrination, or the need for years of training in a monastery, the kiteflier takes the line and instantaneously becomes one with the kite.

This is the Tao of kites, the irreducible arrangement of opposing forces that connect the flier to nature—the source of all that is.

Fly High, Land Gently!

If you are already full of ideas and opinions, how will an enlightened thought enter this crowded space?

This is not a theoretical puzzle. Great art cannot be expressed from memory or conceptual machinations—although such art may have a following, and even win awards. It is up to you, the artist, to know the difference between advertising and art fueled from divine fire.

Test the limitations of your mind the next time you are confronted with something you don’t agree with—you could be blind to the very thing you are seeking.

As the Zen saying goes: the tighter you squeeze, the less you have. 

We’ve all heard this old chestnut: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

We’ve also learned the importance of asking the right question instead of chasing red herrings.

I like what Alan Watts had to say in this regard: to paraphrase, maybe a chicken is an egg’s way of making more eggs. 

Things are, as poets and physicists remind us, not as they appear to be.

When things don’t seem to be going your way, you may get entangled in the maya and lose sight of awareness, which is the arbiter of meaning and value.

When you sense yourself drifting from seeing things as they are, this is an opportunity—as both a test of character and how well your philosophy holds up when confronting the density of the world. 

When you do hear the truth, there is nothing more to say.

The word chair, or a painting of a chair isn’t the chair. The artist Mark Rothko painted his floating abstracts of vertically aligned rectangles large enough so the viewer could step in and feel engulfed, to have a transcendental moment.

Is art the truth itself or the doorway?

As the Japanese Zen priest, Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, said: “When I raise the hand thus, there is Zen. But when I assert that I have raised the hand, Zen is no more there.”

That moment is gone. When you call attention to the moment with thinking, the truth of it is already gone.

What relevance does this have to me? An insight leads to understanding, and understanding is the goal.

Don’t doubt your courage to feel the truth from wherever it might come.