Zen tradition asks the fundamental question: “If you don’t have any option left, you have tried everything and nothing seems to work, what will you do?”
It is a very confrontational question that bothers many a Zen practitioner.
Since the Enlightenment we have made reason absolute and placed it on the throne of omnipotence. Everything that cannot be proven or is not objective, is suspicious and has to be dismissed. In that way we think we have created a controllable and makeable world that gives us certainty and safety.
In our days however, we discover in a painful way the limits of our reasoning power. Where we are confronted with the essential questions regarding our existence we not only discover its limits but also the powerlessness of reason itself. Each one of us has experienced once that reason and every sensibleness has let us down and that we – after a frantic trial to find a solution – failed.
Courage to do the impossible.
The philosopher Sjestov asks himself the question if we - while listening to the words of the Bible for example: “knock and the door will be answered”- have knocked hard enough and if we have lived through our inner distress enough to knock on the door, where in our experience there is no door to knock on? When desperate and in agony of doubt we cry out our distress, there lies – yes exactly there – the call for the “courage to do the impossible”.
Elie Wiesel – who survived Auschwitz – wrote: “From the bottom of extreme distress arises the purest faith.” Courage and boldness won’t be paralysed or limited by reason, but are capable of breaking through the wall of the impossible. On which Sjestov remarks: “That is why the determining factor of live is audacity. Life in its entirety is a creative audacity and therefore an eternal mystery, that can never be reduced to something that is finished or … understandable. Audacity is only audacity because we have no guarantees and yet go forward courageously … only through faith.”
When you have no option left, no place to go to, then stay exactly there as that is the place where courage to do the impossible originates and our freedom creates “possibility.”
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