The most central part of the koans is the core, the always-on permanent steady state. It must be adaptive for both social and solo work. It must express the heart congruently with the full range of affect. It must silence maladaptive discursive thought without clouding the mind. It must inspire and motivate without disconnecting from reality.
My solution is “Faith Tongues [heart symbol] Dreams”.
Working backwards, Dreams stands for visualizing my dreams of advancing the Kingdom of God. Just as the Gramscians of the Frankfurt School wish to transform all of society into their vision of godless Communist utopia, so a Kingdom Christian wishes both to fulfill the original Adamic mandate by building human civilization, and bring that civilization under submission to Christ.
This comprehensive mission at all times provides direction and clarity, from the grand strategic level to the immediate tactical situation. Moreover, it provides joy, because one is seeing the world not as it is, but as it could be transformed, an image of Heaven and a reminder of promised life.
The heart symbol channels one’s congruent deep affect. I wear a medallion over my heart that symbolizes my Christian commitment. Affect is channeled to prevent repression and buildup.
Tongues stands for the tongues stream in the inner monolgue. One of the functions of tongues is to silence maladaptive discursive thought when needed. However, tongues that merely performs this function is dry and empty, because it lacks involvement of anything but the discursive faculty. Tongues must be given form and content. The form is the channeled heart affect, and the content is the visualized dreams.
Faith is a a prerequisite for the mustard seed who wishes to move mountains, or the PUA who wishes to mount an amore. It involves an irrational (but not a-rational) degree of confidence that the dreams will realize, and that the koanic structure works.
Returning to dreams, note that it is a different way of seeing the world, and thus an alternative to judgment. In fact, it is the polar opposite of judgment, because it sees the world’s potential rather than its actuality.
Thus it works in tandem with the Monkey Judgment Iris, which I renamed Monkey Dreams Iris. To some degree, the spiritual and intellectual judgment iris can also be controlled with the combination of these two.
In practice, this means changing the dreams visualization from including or excluding the person you’re talking with, based on the appropriate monkey inclusion/rejection response. This provides an appropriate dynamic emotional response range without compromising core integrity.