You must work as if your hair were on fire. I remember my friends and I bandying that old Zen expression back and forth trying to instill a sense of the importance of self-discovery in one another. Try as we might, we couldn’t act a convincing version of a spiritual seeker with their hair on fire.
Here is another expression, this one by Foyan (from Instant Zen): “There is a genuine expedient that is very good, though only experienced seekers will be able to focus doubt on it.” Right there is all you need to know – focus doubt. Drill down to the core of uncertainty within your sense of self – focus doubt. Again, though, you can’t just run onto the field (with your hair on fire!) chanting, “Focus doubt! Focus doubt!”
Perhaps though, on one particular day you wake up and a phrase keeps rising in your mind, like a gnat buzzing around your brain, until you decide to get up and attack it. Its importance becomes obvious. There is no need to imagine Foyan’s meaning. You know, and you dig a little deeper.
You dig, you take action, and you discover for yourself.
Richard Rose said, “The only meditation is what you devise for yourself” (Peace of Mind in Spite of Success lecture tape, Akron). Franklin Merrell- Wolff speaks similarly:
In no case have I had any results that were worth the effort so long as I did not supply at least a self-devised modification of my own. Apparently the modification is suggested intuitively. Often I got results by a method diametrically opposite to that suggested by a given authority. At least, so far as my private experience is concerned, the successful method always had to be in some measure an original creation. (Experience and Philosophy)
Of course, you can not force yourself to devise your own method because an authority said you should. You will. You will if do the basic spiritual work: ask why, question assumptions, question authority.
Mr. Rose spent a good bit of time in his talks attacking social institutions and norms. In fact, I tired of his criticisms. Yet he was pointing out the Law of Paradoxical Immanence in All Things Relative (The Albigen Papers, seventh paper) in its most obvious manifestation. Compare what we hear in the news that that heard in another country. Question the all-knowing stance of a doctor. Watch what people do as opposed to what they say. “Things may often be, or appear to be, the opposite of that which they were originally.”
You see that everyone is wading through a morass of uncertainty and confusion.
There is a multitude of expressions to inspire us to escape this morass, yet only some will apply at any given time. Every expression is tainted with the mind of its originator. There is no step by step map, but the compass is self-honesty. What propels us is hope and fear. When we arrive, we find that we did what the core of our self was called to do. Only in retrospect, do we lay claim to focusing doubt or flaming hair.