Koan practice

One of the most famous Zen koans is "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" It's so well known the people don't really take it seriously, but in fact I find it to be one of the more difficult koans to grapple with. It takes real effort, and is well deserving of its prominence within the 'effort school' of Zen.

An answer I came up with while meditating on it is: "A picture of my grandmother after my grandfather died."

That ended up being literally a vertigo-inducing answer. What the koan was really pointing me toward was the question of contingency, and the realization that my existence is not contingent on my grandparents. That's actually quite scary. It's a realization that pulls out from under you a foundational element of your concept of self. It begs the question: What is my existence if it's not contingent on them?

Quite often, spiritual practice doesn't bring you peace, but exactly the opposite. It deprives you of concepts which seem stable, and leaves you with nothing in their place except the hard task of making peace with a non-conceptual answer.