I Know What I See!

Here is an old Buddhist story about a prince who was very handsome. Every morning, when he woke up, he would look at himself in the mirror and exclaim, "Ah! How beautiful!"
One day he woke up and picked up the mirror the wrong way. Because he was looking at the unpolished back of the mirror, he couldn't see his face. He ran out of his palace into the streets yelling, "My head is gone! My head is gone!" He went completely crazy, looking everywhere for his missing head.
Finally one of his friends found him and grabbed him. "Why are you running around like this?" his friend said. "Your head isn't missing."
"NO, no, my head is gone. It's gone," cried the prince. They took him back to the palace, but no matter what they said, they couldn't calm him down. Because they didn't have straitjackets in those days, they tied him to a pillar. Because he was screaming so much, they put a gag on him.
He kept struggling, but you can only struggle so long, and when he finally calmed down a little, his friend hit him in the face.
"My head is there, after all!" the prince shouted. He was beside himself with joy. For the next few days, he went around telling everybody how wonderful and miraculous it was that he had found his head. His friends just looked at him in disbelief. But it took a long time for him to stop being so exuberant about the fact that he had found the head that had been there all along.

Here Today

I was going through a hard time once. Each day was hard. Every night was hard. There was bad stuff coming and nothing I could do would change it. It would be worse soon. Three times a week I would go to the Zen center on my way home. I would bow and enter the meditation hall and at the sound of the gong I sat down on my pillow facing the wall. I crossed my legs, settled my body, took a few deep breathes and began to count my breaths. One to ten, one to ten. Then the emotion would rise up like a huge wave. I could see it and feel it. I sat there and counted the breath as it swamped me.
Just be with it. let it arise. feel it. let the breath help you to stay in the moment. feel the body sensations associated with all this. feel where the pain is. count the next breath. here comes another wave. breath. here comes the anger wave. breath. it burns and hurts. breath. here comes the loss. breath. I am drowning in it. breath. here comes the regret. here comes something so hurtful it have no name for it. breath. Meditation gong.

One of the bedrock concepts in Zen is impermanence. All fine until it stops being a concept and become an experiential reality. So much has been written about it and I have read so much about that I had almost fooled myself into believing that I had some intimate knowledge of it. The fact is that it pervades all and the direct experience of it is nothing like the written concept. It is in fact so unusual that for I time I did not recognize what had happened.

Now to clarify it.