Those souls which have awakened, have from the dawn of time sought ways to clear the path for those yet gestating in the womb of biological necessity. Our creaturely needs are a running scale of binomial satisfaction presided over by "The Ghost in the Machine".
What we find in religion is at its best a soup of metaphor and legend charged with clues to the irreducible mystery of being. "I am that which I am", "All sins forgiven but to sin against the Holy Ghost", "The Buddha's Pure Land": on and on these simple truths posses a facticity that belies their place in the folk narratives of religion. All of these cultural relics can be thought of as koans, and to solve one is to enter into the garden from which they all spontaneously spring forth.
One of my personal favorites is "The Ten Bulls". "The Ten Bulls" is an inspired allegory that when unwrapped reveals the "I am", the "Holy Ghost", "The Buddha's Pure Land", and onward 'till dawn. Another personal favorite is "The Chocolate Buddha Box". There is no shortage of koan-like artifacts of religious lore. The path to Enlightenment is strewn with them. This is the breadcrumb path of "Handsel and Gretel" strewn with diamonds to guide one through the darkness of the forest: homeward.
Enlightenment is the inevitable denouement of the yearning of the first life that is everywhere all life: where all births are virgin births.
