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life, response is needed, not reaction: you have to act out of nowhere, with no conclusions inside. With no center you have to act -- you have to act into the unknown from the unknown.
And this is what Goso Hoyen used to say when people asked him what Zen is like. This story he would tell.
Zen is exactly like burglary: it is an art, it is not a science; it is feminine, it is not male; it is not aggressive, it is receptive; it is not a well-planned methodology; it is a spontaneity. It has nothing to do with theories, hypotheses, doctrines, scriptures; it has something to do with only one thing -- that is, awareness.
What happened in that moment when the boy was inside the chest? In such a danger you cannot be sleepy, in such a danger your consciousness becomes very sharp, has to. Life is at stake, you are totally awake -- that's how one should be totally awake each moment. And when you are totally awake, this shift happens: from the left hemisphere the energy moves to the right hemisphere. Whenever you are alert, you become intuitive; flashes come to you, flashes from the unknown, out of the blue. You may not follow them -- then you will miss much.
In fact all the great discoveries in science come from the right hemisphere also, not from the left. You must have heard about Madam Curie, the only woman who got a Nobel Prize. She had been working hard for three years on a certain mathematical problem but could not solve it. She worked hard. argued from this way and that, but there was no way. One night. tired. exhausted. she fell asleep -- and while she was falling asleep then too she was trying to solve the problem. In the night she awoke. walked, wrote the answer on some paper. came back. and went to sleep. In the morning she found the answer there on the table but she could not believe who had done it. Nobody could do it! The servant -- you could not expect him to do it; he did not know anything about mathematics. She remembered well that last night she had tried her best and could not do it. What had happened? Then she tried to remember -- because the handwriting was hers. She tried to remember...and then a faint remembrance came: as
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