Zen story: Stop carrying rocks in your head, but carrying a stone in your pocket, is ok

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The old Zen master posed this simple question to his students: "When is a stone a rock?" to test their understanding of the Zen mind. And no one, of course, knew his answer, so the master replied, "When the stone remains in your thinking, and grows worsely, solid, and bigger, from there becoming a rock, against your progress to conscious thinking, and being." The master then went on to explain this a bit further to his students. "It is said that our thoughts grow into heavy weights, such as rocks, for us, when we attach other snowballing thoughts, and emotions, to them." "Thoughts come, and go." "Think them, and let them go, without letting them create anything weighty in your mind, by you holding onto them, and to the ideas, and emotions, behind them." "None of us are seeing the world for the first time, but when you place rocks in your head, you cannot see the world at all, through these rocks, and you forget about that freshness of vision, when you did see things for the first time." "Ok," the old Zen master went on. "I will leave you then with this reverse koan." "When is a rock a stone?" "Think over this one, and report back to me tomorrow about your ideas regarding this koan." The next day, the students were still none the wiser about the master's reverse koan. The master smiled widely, and simply said. "Whenever you disinflate your thoughts to leave them as they were, your rock becomes a stone again, and carrying a small stone around with you can act as a reminder to you of this." "See, I carry this small stone in my own pocket to remind me never to allow my thoughts to become heavier than this, and weigh me down with their increased weight, by them becoming rocks in my head, and not mere reminders in my pocket." And with that the master went over to tend his garden, in his monastery. Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com Good thoughts, like water, can even move past the rocks in your mind, when you allow them to do so, and when you do not get fixated on the rocks instead.