The State That Won’t Stay

I wrote, not long ago, about kensho in a frozen arena. About the StagLord, and the forty deaths, and the moment the fight became a dance. I ended that piece feeling like I had learned something permanent. The Reed Devil fell, and I walked out of the fields believing the answer had taken root in my hands.

What I did not write: two weeks later, I lost it.

I put the game down for a while. Work. Life. The usual gravity. When I came back, I picked a fight I had no business losing… a mid-tier boss, nothing legendary, the kind of encounter the me of the Reed Devil would have read like an open book. He killed me in ninety seconds. Then again. Then again.

The hands had forgotten. Or rather… the hands remembered, but I kept getting in their way. I was thinking about mushin. Which is, of course, the one guaranteed method of never entering it. The moment you reach for no-mind, you are all mind. It slips through the reaching like water through a closed fist.

The Zen tradition knows this problem intimately. Kensho fades. That first glimpse of clarity is real, but it is a glimpse… a flash of lightning that shows you the landscape and then leaves you in the dark again, holding only the memory of what you saw. The masters warn about this. There is even a name for the trap: clinging to the experience, trying to recreate the flash instead of walking the landscape it revealed. Students spend years chasing the memory of their first awakening. Chasing it backwards.

I was doing exactly that. Trying to summon the Icemoor feeling on command. Treating presence like a technique I had unlocked, a skill point spent, permanent and portable.

Presence is a practice. (I keep relearning this, in games and everywhere else.)

The insight from the StagLord was never mine to keep. It was mine to return to. There is a difference, and the difference is everything. A possession sits in your inventory. A practice has to be renewed every single time you pick up the controller… every session, every fight, sometimes every attempt. The state that won’t stay was never supposed to stay. Staying isn’t what states do.

So I did the only thing there is to do. I stopped trying to be the player who beat the Reed Devil. I let myself be the player standing in front of this boss, clumsy and rusty and present. Shoshin again… beginner’s mind, except this time the beginning was a return.

He fell on the fourth attempt after that. I did not find the old feeling. I simply stopped looking for it.

The masters say that after enlightenment, you chop wood and carry water. Nobody mentions that you also, occasionally, get bodied by a mid-tier boss and have to start over. Maybe that is the same teaching.

The koan doesn’t stay answered. You just get faster at sitting back down with it.