The old Zen story goes something like this: The Zen master and a student were walking through the woods when they noticed ducks flying above them.
“What do you see?” the Zen master asked the student.
“Ducks,” replied the student.
“Where did they go?” asked the Zen master.
“They flew away,” replied the student.
The Zen Master grabbed the student’s nose and twisted it, and as the student screamed in pain, the Zen Master said, “When did the ducks fly?”
One interpretation of this Zen koan is that there are no individual ducks in Reality, only collective “ducks” exist, and one duck is no different from another; And they’ve never gone away, they always have been.
The student could only see the ducks within the framework of existence and time, while the Zen master could see their eternal nature. . . therefore, they could never fly far. The part that the student thought he flew away is the individual part that we see when we separate from the rest of humanity.
The student, in her mind, struggled with the duality of existence; I’m here now, but one day I’ll be dead and gone, and then what? Whereas the Zen master sees neither endings nor beginnings, only the constant flow of existence within time, a flow that is irrelevant. Nothing really matters or changes, although within the limited vision of the student, everything is constantly changing.
This ongoing struggle and conflict for the student is the basis of the student’s suffering and life confusion that prevents him from the freedom that exists beyond his structured thinking. However, he cannot get out of the patterns he has formed from his experience; she can’t get out of her prison. If she could, she would see that ducks could never fly.
Likewise, we imprison ourselves as well. Death for us is the total end of everything we hold dear, and we fear death. Our religions help little, and even with tremendous faith, it still makes us uncomfortable to leave behind everything we have accumulated; our relationships, our achievements, and our property, but we can’t take any of this with us, and we see ourselves as individuals, facing this end-of-life dilemma alone.
This is a terrible misunderstanding. We are never an individual, except in basic conventional terms that allow us to function within existence, but when we move beyond existence and into the true Reality that is the basis of all existence, there is no differentiation, we are all truly one. We can experience this reality; It’s not hard to do, just give up everything that seems important to you. It is not that you leave your family, but that you abandon your attachment to them, and embrace them with a real love that encompasses all humanity.
Beware of insurance policies, beliefs, and religions that guarantee our little separate selves a survival after death, and instead have the courage to look in another direction. Break the void of loss of worldly activities and enter a world that cannot be imagined: that of the true Reality. All that we are and all that we have will disappear when death separates our illusions from this Reality, and if we can distance ourselves from our attachments before this happens, before recycling, then we will not have to return to these same types of attachments in another. lifetime; we will be free to continue.
The Zen master, in a nutshell, was trying to tell his student about these things, but the student was not yet ready to listen. He had not yet emptied his mind of all the confusion and illusions that kept it in the vortex, he had not yet discovered true meditation, where the student was no longer a student, but was nothing more than a duck, which could never fly. . . .
