Eureka!

We were in the kitchen early in the morning when the phone rang.

“Hello?” my sister answered.

“Oh! Hello!” my father replied. “I was expecting the answering machine. I had a great idea in my sleep and I wanted to remind myself about it by leaving a message on the machine.”

I was hoping he’d call back and leave a message so that I could hear his great idea, but he didn’t. I’m not sure if he wrote it down or if it was lost forever, but it got me thinking.

You know how you have those great ideas? Those things that come to you out of the blue and they’re, like, genius? They always seem to come when you’re in the shower or picking something out of the garbage disposal or in the middle of the night. It’s like when you’re NOT thinking, that’s when those things come to you.

And then I thought about sesshin- and about how it was kind of a full seven days of not thinking. I thought about how those things that just came up for me during sesshin, those were truths about me, actual insights into myself, instead of my own theories or explanations about who I am.

And I wondered if that’s what that ‘Eureka’ feeling is about. I wonder if those ‘Eureka’ thoughts feel like that because they are the truth. That in those moments, we are actually seeing this world as it is. And that’s why it feels so beautiful and powerful, and important. Because this life pretty amazing, in all its complexities and things that are unexplainable. But we tend to only see the world as it is when we’re not trying so hard to see it, when we’re busy doing something else, or when we are relaxed. And I guess that’s what zazen is about- creating that same state of mind in which the truth… can show itself to us and we… can see it.