Relationship to thought has fundamentally changed. Thought is like a web that vanishes for a moment or longer. Thought and desire and body are all similar. Sometimes useful, sometimes just stuff, they emerge perhaps from the same space. What is here other than being here? Putting it that way the answer seems so obvious. Yet the censor checks in and says it can’t be answered. It’s not that nothing is real, it’s just that thoughts are real as thoughts and nothing more. Desire is real only as desire. No thoughts, sensations or desires are guides to ultimate reality. This is where we are.

Thoughts are a medicine and a poison. We drink and drink and drink thought. Drunk by it, poisoned by it, consumed by it. Like alcoholics we need a programme to recover from it. An antidote perhaps. It strikes me that that is the role of the huatou, or koan if you prefer. But what is the sudden awakening?