Koan

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It was the following summer, and Hegel being home from college, I went to his house to give him my answer. I was really quite proud of it and curious to see if it was correct. His mother told me he was out on Pickerel Point. So I went to the place which was a narrow thickly wooded peninsula in Song Lake. A dirt and root tangled path led along the shore that wove in and out of tiny little tree-canopied coves. My nemesis Hegel was sitting at one of these inlets, his pants rolled up to his knees, his feet in the lapping water, his shock of thick, black, short hair and his face mottled by spots of sunlight filtering through the leafy arches of the wood - reading a book. After some small talk I pulled out my paper and gave him my answer to the problem. He looked at it for a little while and smiled. Finally he said, "This is an ancient Chinese symbol and nobody knows what it means for certain. It was a joke - you IDIOT".

Point of fact, that while this 'joke' was not the catalyst that would later change my life, it did introduce me to the process of critical analysis, and the existence of Taoism, that would later become the means to save me from self-destructive propensities, and a method to psychoanalyze myself and change my life. The koan is a puzzle, often nonsensical, used in the tradition of Zen Buddhism to possibly incite the individual to transcend the limitations of rational logic. In this case for this particular result, this problem as a kind of a koan, would not have worked except that I was an 'idiot'. Sometimes the best results concerning change of consciousness is just by accident.

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