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Annoyance comments on The First Koan: Drinking the Hot Iron Ball - Less Wrong
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Okay.
There's a particular Far Side panel that many people find funny: it has no caption or title, but is often referred to as the Midvale School for the Gifted cartoon.
If you look at the door, you can see that the hinges and tension spring are on the outside, there's a handle, and a panel that reads 'PULL'. Noticing any one of these things should be enough to convince someone that they should pull the door to get it open.
Enlightenment is the state you enter when you realize that you've been a fool and have been pushing as hard as you can trying to get the door open, when all along it was clearly a pull door.
Intelligence is the capacity to question your initial assumption that the door required a push upon detecting that circumstances didn't match your expectations. Wisdom is the capacity to notice the contrary circumstances in the first place.
That doesn't read like a description of lived experience at all, let alone the specific experience I asked about.
The student probably believes that he is very clever.
Only when he seriously considers the possibility that he is a fool, undermining his preconception, will he be able to recognize what he's doing wrong and determine the correct course of action.
The task is to recognize that the correct answer to the question might not be within our preconceived ideas about what the solution will be. If you assume that either yes or no is the answer, you exclude out of hand the possibility that neither might be.
Recognizing that you've excluded potential solutions without cause is the enlightenment.