When you try Zen meditation once, even experiment or lark, you mystically begin, magically and really, the wiping away of what you later would think a "crime" or a social mishap or a mistake in utterance. Where then from do the dark paths come? The pure land is near since it produced your biology. Finding it is your identity. Looking for it is less existence's precondition than de-mystifying the successful chain that linked you as biology to this stage. The fairness you receive when you do not understand or you do not believe is the ancient gift to cognizants. The cognizant asks, and in the asking, gets. When you are a cognizant, you are a beneficiary of the congruency of blood and pain that rose to complement the ocean from which the parts came. With this fairness rests a responsibility that, at your option, lets you ignore the window, the wonderful, guiltless, ephemeral window materialized by your simple unattached glare into the unknown. When you hear a truth, your nature takes over and builds you a grateful heart through which you speak. You find yourself treasuring it, revering it. Your blessings fold into themselves through the open window as you increasingly sustain it. You grow and your other side one day forgives the forgivee who remains ever ignorant of your state except through his own silent pathways. You might say that the universe at its height gives money to you because you are pretty, when the universe instead acknowledges your sojourn that allied as one the ends of the same chain that links you to this and the spiritual world. -- Hakuin Zenji, as interpreted by James Patton in answer to the question "Why is land and matter?" (2006)