Among other things, a personality suited for Zen is one that is never easily disappointed or depressed; that in the face of countless ups and downs it still manages to have a great deal of respect and gratitude toward the teachings of the Buddha and the Zen masters. It is also a heaven soaring personality whose faith in the Buddha's teachings never diminishes.
On your journey to intuit your true nature, you will have lots of fake enlightenments—too many to count. It’s somewhat like getting excited at finding gold but only to discover later that you’ve only found fool’s gold (iron pyrite). If you’ve seen only fool’s gold and not real gold it will be difficult for you to let go of your belief even though you worked many months or maybe years to find this fool’s gold. But you have to let go of it. You are far from finding El Dorado. In some of the Buddha’s discourses he teaches that there are ten false enlightenments for each one of the five constituents (skandha) making a total of fifty false enlightenments!
Most important, a personality suited for Zen must have a strong inclination towards intuition where the new is discovered or where a great breakthrough is made which might at first seemed impossible. Zen’s method is not through the analysis of the various parts or their possible connection with each other as if trying to construct an accurate picture of Zen’s mystery. In fact, the parts have very little to do with the kind of intuition that Zen demands.
What Zen hides—its great mystery—you must intuit. There is no other way to comprehend Zen. Intuition, is like looking at an out of focus picture such that you want to know what it is. Sometimes you can almost make out what the picture is, but still you are unable to recognize it. At other times, it almost seems that the more you look at this out of focus picture it becomes even more blurry! After many years of looking at this out of focus picture, one day, without thinking about it, you see what the picture is. You know now what all the strange sections are part of, whereas before you didn't. It’s so easy to see what the picture is even though others can't. With directly intuiting your true nature, the teachings of Buddhism and Zen make perfect sense whereas before they didn't.
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