To the sound of the bowl – 05/30/22 – 5:38 PM

I feel very deeply, not in an emotional sense, a closeness to the sacred inner fire,
The one where souls are born in incandescent sheaves,
to that principle according to which everything is in everything, all the time
and whose formulation seems incomprehensible but nevertheless bursts forth, limpid, to my eyes.

Everything is a sign, everything is service, everything is presence.
And nothing ever lies : the truth of the mapping of the moment (time/ space / actors coordinates)

Thus, there can be no destination, as such, since there is nothing to guess, there is only a reading of what is, of what cannot lie.

The masterful orchestration is condensed into each note, of each instrument; this is also where the secret of the therapeutic virtues of conscious touch and intention lies.

Everything is in everything, all the time,
Everything is given, now,
Everything is given to you, now,

All that is needed is for the micro-event to encounter an open consciousness.

Consciousness opens for the first time thanks to this major or insignificant event. In this last category fall the stories of Zen, of awakening as a result of a stone striking a bamboo.

Let us note here that ther is no such thing as an unimportant phenomenon when it opens consciousness.

This is how the bowl will cultivate attention.
It is learning to read, learning to read oneself, holding the book of the worlds.

We say « everything is a sign, » but there is no sign, no reflection.
Only the Real that bursts forth at every moment.

This is known when it encounters an open consciousness.
On a land of immature consciousness, reality is the same, but not read, not received.

It is confronted, analyzed, clumsily plagiarized, to artificially maintain itself in the jar of the mind, and is only real in name, because reality has no name, it has neither the time nor the interest for all this hubbub.

All this makes sense without the machinery of concepts being triggered.

It is immediately normal for prophets in monotheistic lands to say that God speaks to them. Speaking, reporting through narration, is how it is done.

It is normal, then, to speak of Spirit, Logos, Universe, Reality, God, Source, Principle, but this is not what the sitting is about.

There is no wrong way of hitting the bowl with the mallet.
The sound does not lie.
This sound is, literally.
The one who hits it, the one who initiates this sound, is the sound that is heard.

The master hears and instantly reads the disciple’s state by the sound of the bowl, by the step he uses to cross the dojo, by the timbre of his voice, by the jolts of energy that precede the words.

He reads all this without judging; he welcomes the Real through the disciple.

The disciple is also the master who reads within him, and the master is the disciple who strikes the bowl.

At this level of listening, they are not two minds. (FU-NI)

For the one whose consciousness opens to welcome the Real in its eternal explosion of wisdom, all that remains is to join hands, in response, in echo, in expression/listening to this reality.

Existence can be dotted with the sounds of pebbles ricocheting against bamboo.
Or it can be nothing more than a shower of marvelous pebbles, a permanent rain in the bamboo of consciousness.

He who reads the world in this way no longer has a book to read, whatever it may be.
To open the book, however, is also to read the world.
To let the pipes of reality sink into the heart and listen to the teachings flow.

©FJ June 2025
Recueils / Participation/