Since we human beings are continually arranging the bits and pieces of what we experience in order to fashion ‘a whole universe’, we must take care to look upon this welter of living beings and physical objects as ‘sometime’ things. Things do not go about hindering each other’s existence any more than moments of time get in each other’s way.
- Dogen

At last night's sangha meeting, someone asked me, "Why do Zen people use koans? Why can't we just talk about things the way they really are?"

A good question. The answer is that koan practice - like all Zen practice - lets us experience "things the way they really are." What we perceive as reality is a story created by the linear mind. That aspect of mind is essential for discerning the red light from the green, and  your pants from mine, but when applied to the nature of our lives, it separates us. Instead of experiencing our lives, we invent and attach to a concept, an idea, a story about our lives.

Koans can never be understood by linear thinking. We have to swallow the koan whole, and be swallowed whole by the koan. We have to become the koan. And when that happens, there is no mystery, nothing hidden, nothing separate.

No matter how much time we spend sitting on a cushion, if we're making a story or concept of it, if we're looking to attain something or understand something, we're not practicing Zen. A search for "truth" or "meaning" is as materialistic as a quest for money or fame. If, in zazen, we "see emptiness," as a narcissistic and deluded person I used to know once put it, we're not seeing anything at all, because we're reducing shunyata - emptiness - to just another idea, an objectified concept. There is emptiness, over there, and over here is the person "seeing emptiness."

When we wake up, there is no "over there" and no "over here." No attachment to concepts or stories, and no one to attach to them. Only the perfection of the entire universe, with nothing separate or excluded.