What was your face before your mother was born?

Readers slightly familiar with Zen will recognize the question in the title of this post. It is a koan- the koan is a question the Zen student is asked by his teacher which has no logical answer. Almost everyone, I am sure has come across the classic "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"

The attempt to answer the question in the koan can take years or seconds- in the practice of Zen it matters not how long one must work with a koan because there is no absolute correct answer, and when finally answered, it is more of a by-product of the changed thinking produced in the attempt to find an answer. It is that changed thinking that is the real goal.

But I think of this particular question today because it is pointed directly at why it is that one takes up any spiritual discipline at all, which to me is to come in direct contact with one's true self. How does it do that?

It is our habit to define ourselves by what we do, the tasks at hand, whatever they might be, that become the organizing principle of our lives. Child-rearing, meal preparation, decorating a home, leading a Fortune 500 company, whatever it might be, we know ourselves by our labor at that task. But, what happens when that task is completed, the child grows up and leaves home, the home is decorated, etc?

What usually happens is a period of emptiness, depression, disorientation, restlessness, boredom. What to do, now? The great problem for we who possess a self-aware frontal cortex is that somehow, at some level, we are always working to solve the problem of our own existence. What is my purpose, my calling, to what am I directed?

But if asked, 'What was your face before your mother was born?", we are forced to consider ourselves in the absence of the self defining task. Before mother was born, there was no career, no home, no child to raise, no bank account to worry about; there is not even a 'self' to consider. There is only the emptiness of what is.

And if continued attention is given to this question, without trying to leap to a 'logical' answer, the mind begins to devote itself to the empty moment. What is there, now, at this very moment? A paradox emerges- the vastness of the present, which we would demolish with 'something to do', and the swiftness of the past and the mysterious path it has followed until finally becoming the here and now.

Why is this important? I think it is important because it brings us to a fuller attention to what is right now, not what we are anxious about, or regret, or hope for, or are angry about. And it also implies the possibility of a new understanding of the self as it is, and is becoming, not as what it does.

And so, I challenge the reader now to entertain this question, and to refrain from leaping to an answer- What was your face before your mother was born?