Yes very true...
Thusness (old posts):
Be the big question mark and ride on the cloud of unknowing,
without arbitary thought, experience the immediate! At that moment
whatever it is, it is entire. 
....
(unrelated notes on 'spiritual inquiry', just for sharing:)
A mind full of schemes is not lack of answers so questions are
asked but no answers expected. The purpose is to lead us to the
unfathomably deep and rest in the place empty of known. To be
alive, we need to experience the wonder that arises out of silence.
This is the path of the traceless. 
....
A.H.Almaas: "Well the first thing about inquiry, is to recognise
that we don't know basic things about ourselves and reality. To
have the humility to NOT KNOW. And also to have the courage. It's
very scary to say 'I don't know who I am; what I am', or to know
what is going on now. First that's the opening is the humility to
acknowledge we don't know. In science they call it doubt or
scepticism. But here it is not really doubt or scepticism. The
doubt and scepticism turns into an emotional thing. What here is
just an openness. 'I don't really know'. After that, is the love to
find out. The heart-felt appreciation of 'What is the truth of us?
What I am? What am I? What is humanity? What is reality? What is
God?', from a loving and also curious place. So that's the general
inquiry about knowing about spiritual nature. There are many things
that will help us - steadfastness; courageous; an openness and
curiosity that brings in questions."
More on Koans, by Zen Teacher Steve Hagen:
INTRODUCTION TO THE IRON FLUTE
Not What You Think
by Steve Hagen
Click here to download PDF version
When I first began practicing Zen under Dainin Katagiri Roshi, he
asked me to comment on a Zen koan. I told him, in all honesty, that
I found the koan puzzling. Immediately his face wrinkled up as if
he had bitten into a lemon. “Not puzzle!” he shouted. He quickly
made it clear to me that Zen teachings are not puzzles to which we
students are expected to come up with clever answers.
People often think of koans as riddles or problems that
need to be solved. But this is not the case at all. With every
koan, the point is not to arrive at an answer through our ordinary,
conceptualizing minds. Rather, the point is to see for
ourselves that our concepts can never provide us with a satisfying
answer. (This is not that satisfaction cannot be found. It can—but
not through any concept or explanation.)
Unlike school exams, koans are not a matter of coming
up with the right answer and thereby winning an endorsement or
gaining the teacher’s approval. There is a great deal more at play
in these exchanges between Zen teachers and their students. Indeed,
if it were merely a matter of coming up with the right answer, you
could simply look it up in one of several volumes that claim to
provide answers to koans. But in an exchange with a true teacher,
this isn’t going to do you much good. If you don’t understand the
heart of a koan, it will be quite obvious the moment you’re asked a
follow-up question—one that’s not in one of the books.
No concept, no idea, no piece of intellection will ever
give you “the answer.” Whether we’re talking about life or koans
(the same thing, really), there are no pat answers or
solutions.
For this reason, koans have often been labeled
anti-intellectual, or irrational, or as invitations for us to
abandon ourselves to our impulses or our irrational minds. Indeed,
some people unfamiliar with Zen think that Zen practice is about
acting strange and silly, or making outlandish statements, or
forgetting everything and just letting the flowers bloom. Some
scholars and writers have even claimed that the purpose of koans is
to break down and destroy the intellect. None of this, however, is
true.
Though koans do reach beyond reason, they’re not a call
to destroy or deny the intellect. They simply point out that
Reality is not to be captured in a thought, or a phrase, or an
explanation. Reality is the direct seeing of the world as
it is, not as our intellects map it, describe it, or conceive
it.
It’s not that human intellect is bad or that we must
get rid of it; but we must bring ourselves back to the fact that
the intellect can only construct models of Reality, never Reality
itself. Our problem, however, is that we get taken in by our mental
constructions, mistaking them for Reality. The fact is that Reality
cannot be constructed, nor does it need to be. It’s already
here—and we’re all inseparable from it. If we could only
see this, we’d be freed from a great and painful burden.
We’d no longer be confused or cowed by human life.
Another common misunderstanding of koans is that they
are exercises of wit in which the teacher asks the question, and
the student must immediately come back with an adroit response. In
this erroneous view, koans are a jousting game in which teacher and
student strike and counter-strike, each trying to best the other.
Though some teacher/student exchanges may give this appearance, to
use the model of a debate or contest is to miss the point
entirely.
Koans also have a reputation for being paradoxical,
enigmatic, and inscrutable—and, thus, Zen itself has gotten a
reputation for being the same. But koans themselves are not
paradoxes at all. Rather, they direct our attention to the sense of
contradiction or paradox that naturally arises in any conception of
the world. Koans help us to see that these apparent
contradictions in fact occur only within our minds, not within the
world itself.
Rather than serving up an idea or conceptual framework
that will supposedly save us, koans help us to recognize how we
constantly do indeed reach for prefabricated explanations and
answers. They also help us to see that this never gets us anywhere.
Indeed, it is this very grasping for conceptual solutions and
explanations that causes us so many problems. Yet even as we grasp
at concepts, we overlook the supreme treasure that is right at
hand—Reality itself.
The term koan is generally translated as
“public case.” But what, exactly, makes a koan public? Simply this:
every koan is a finger pointing to Reality, to what is right
now, right here. Reality is totally and immediately
available to everyone all the time. It doesn’t have to be
transmitted to you by a teacher. In fact, it can’t be. You can’t
get it from a book, either. Nobody can hand it to you. It’s already
right here. We’re inseparable from it. There’s nothing in
our experience more public that Truth or Reality itself.
The koans presented in this volume were collected in
the eighteenth century C.E by Genro, a Soto Zen master. This may
seem somewhat unusual, since koans are thought to be more widely
used by Rinzai Zen teachers. The Soto school generally does not use
koans in one-to-one teacher/student interactions. This is probably
due to Dogen Zenji, who transmitted Soto Zen from China to Japan in
the thirteenth century C.E. Though he used koans as teaching
stories, he frowned on their regular use as hoops for students to
jump through. He found such graduated training to be wide of the
mark and short on delivery.
Dogen defined the term ko as “sameness” or
“ultimate equality.” According to Dogen, every thing, thought, or
emotion we encounter or experience is an equal and necessary
component of Reality. Nothing is superfluous. Nothing is left out.
In fact, nothing can be left out. Whether we recognize it
or not, we’re always dealing with Totality, which is utterly beyond
our concepts of part or whole, equal or unequal.
The term an, according to Dogen, means that
everything within Totality has its own natural territory or sphere.
For Dogen, then, a true koan is an authentic expression of the
merging of difference and unity, the thoroughgoing interpenetration
of the Whole and its “parts.”
Related to the matter of Totality is non-duality. Our
conceptualizing minds are highly dualistic. They keep themselves
busy thinking, analyzing, controlling, and scheming. To such a
mind, everything is either good or bad, right or wrong, friend or
foe, this or that—or else off our personal radar altogether. But
koans point beyond all this, to the immediate and first-hand
non-duality of Reality. Koans are expressions of immediate
awareness—before we categorize, label, arrange, or
evaluate everything.
Koans also point to the freedom of non-attachment—a
major theme in Zen. Non-attachment is the recognition that thoughts
of “this is right and that is wrong,” “this we should do and that
we shouldn’t do,” “it ought to be like this,” or “this is what I
want, and that is what I don’t want,” only serve to make our lives
complicated, contradictory, confusing, and ultimately unbearable.
Such thinking fills our hearts and minds with longing and
loathing—all of which drives us to anger, frustration, and despair.
Koans cut through such confusion and draw our attention to things
as they are, before we make judgments about them and create
contradictions for ourselves.
Non-attachment is not the same as detachment.
Detachment presumes the realness of the objects of our longing and
loathing, then counsels us to turn away from them. It’s an attempt
to escape from Reality. But there is no escape from Reality.
Non-attachment, on the other hand, is to see the
emptiness, the non-particularity, of every thing or thought we
encounter.
Koans speak of genuineness and ordinariness—actual,
True, Reality—without any need for explanation, embellishment, or
improvement. They remind us that we don’t need to push the river,
or add legs to the snake.
Reality is always right there, out in the
open—a public case. Dealing with it is forever a matter of calming
down, focussing, and noticing how we spend the greater portion of
our time explaining everything to ourselves. Koans—like
meditation—are a practical way of watching our own minds, paying
careful attention to what is really going on, and perceiving
Reality directly, free of our ideas about it, explanations for it,
and habitual responses to it.
In short, koans are serious business. They’re about
life and death, about all our deepest questions and concerns—the
ones that are most immediate, urgent, and unavoidable. Life isn’t a
matter of pleasing the teacher or getting the right answer or
passing a test. Koans direct us to be present with what is going on
now, and to notice how our minds respond to
this.
Once this is seen, there’s no wasting
of the day, or yourself, or the world. What binds you drops away,
and you will let it go.
STEVE HAGEN
©2000