Bring Me the Rhinoceros (eBook)

From the Introduction: An Impossible Question Means A Journey

This book offers an unusual path into happiness. It doesn't encourage you to strive for things or manipulate people or change yourself into an improved, more polished version of you. Instead, it suggests a way to approach happiness indirectly by unbuilding, unmaking, tossing overboard, and generally subverting unhappiness. And even this indirect approach is not based on a plan. It's hard to plan for something that takes you beyond what you can imagine, which is what this method is designed to do. The method described in this book is based on Zen koans ('ko-an') and has been in use for a long time in East Asia, though in the United States, Europe, and Australia it is just getting established. The goal of the Zen koan is enlightenment, which is a profound change of heart. This change of heart makes the world seem like a different place, with it comes a freedom of mind and an awareness of the joy and kindness underlying daily life.

Koans are not intended to prescribe a particular kind of happiness or right way to live. They don't teach you to assemble or make something that didn't exist before. Many psychological and spiritual approaches rely on an engineering metaphor and hope to make your mind more predictable and controllable. Koans go the other way. They encourage you to make an ally of the unpredictability of the mind and to approach your life more as a work of art. The surprise they offer is the one that art offers: inside unpredictability you will find not chaos, but beauty. Koans light up a life that may have been dormant in you, they hold out the possibility of transformation even if you are trying to address unclear or apparently insoluble problems.

To begin with, here are seven things to notice about koans: Koans show you that you can depend on creative moves. Usually people think of a creative leap as something like one, two, three, four . . . six. With koans a creative leap is more like one, two, three, four . . . rhinoceros. What if happiness were a creative activity, like writing a poem? You cannot know where the next line of a poem will come from and you can't force it, yet there is a discipline that helps. When you attend in the right way, the poem's next line really does arrive out of nowhere. In the same way, through a koan, happiness can arrive out of nowhere.

Koans encourage doubt and curiosity. Koans don't ask you to believe anything offensive to reason. You can have any religion and use koans. You can have no religion and use koans. Koans don't take away painful beliefs and put positive beliefs in their place. Koans just take away the painful beliefs and so provide freedom. What you do with that freedom is up to you.

Koans rely on uncertainty as a path to happiness. If you set off after happiness thinking that you know what you need, you will always end up with something that meets that need. The problem here is that when you are unhappy, it is as if you are in prison, and in that narrow cell you think of happiness with an inmate's mind. You might imagine a more comfy cell, consider painting the walls a nicer color—,rose, perhaps—,and getting a new sofa. Koans don't support the interior decoration project, they demolish the walls.

Koans will undermine your reasons and your explanations. If you have a reason for happiness, then that happiness can be taken away. The person you love could leave, the job could stop being interesting. If you have a reason for loving life, what happens if that reason fails? With koans you may find that life and love are so strong and vivid that they...