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just go ahead.
Certainly it needs guts and courage because you are moving in a dark and unknown space. You don't have with you even a lamp -- no companion, you don't have any map. And meditation demands that you go with the speed of light, so fast that the journey of thousands of lives is completed in a single moment.
Hakuin says:
MY NATIVE PLACE IS CLOSE TO THE SEASHORE, BARELY A FEW HUNDRED PACES FROM THE BEACH. SUPPOSE A MAN OF MY VILLAGE IS CONCERNED BECAUSE HE DOES NOT KNOW THE FLAVOR OF SEA, AND WANTS TO GO AND TASTE IT FOR HIMSELF. IF HE TURNS BACK AFTER HAVING TAKEN ONLY A FEW STEPS, OR EVEN IF HE RETURNS AFTER HAVING TAKEN A HUNDRED STEPS, IN EITHER CASE WHEN WILL HE EVER KNOW THE OCEAN'S BITTER, SALTY TASTE?
You have to go to the ocean; one hundred feet or two hundred feet, that is not the question. You have to go all the way.
BUT, THOUGH A MAN COMES FROM AS FAR AS THE MOUNTAINS OF KOSHU OR SHINSHU, HIDA OR MINO, IF HE GOES STRAIGHT AHEAD WITHOUT STOPPING, WITHIN A FEW DAYS HE WILL REACH THE SHORE, AND, THE MOMENT HE DIPS THE TIP OF ONE FINGER INTO THE SEA AND LICKS IT, HE WILL INSTANTLY KNOW THE TASTE OF THE WATERS OF THE DISTANT OCEANS AND THE NEARBY SEAS, AND OF THE SOUTHERN BEACHES AND THE NORTHERN SHORES, IN FACT OF ALL THE SEA WATER IN THE WORLD.
But the question is of going to the sea, not just going in a lukewarm way: "Today a few steps and then we will see tomorrow." But tomorrow you will have to take these few steps again. And if this becomes your habit -- "A few steps today and then we will see tomorrow" -- if this becomes your pattern then you will never reach. Always you will be going on those few steps, and then the decision that, "It is enough, now we will see tomorrow."
For the meditator there is no tomorrow.
Future is not the concern of meditation. Future is the concern of the mind; mind cannot live without future. If suddenly all future disappears, mind will be at a loss what to do. Future is the space in which mind goes on weaving imaginations, projects, ideas: what one is going to become, what one is going to achieve. All ambitions are laid out in the future. But if the future
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