Koans of the Way of Reality: Dongshan's "How Dirty is the Water?"
Vision quests, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences are all, as Daido Roshi puts it, just experiences. They do not entail nor preclude clarity, the direct realization of the nature of the self. More often, they are detours along the way. These experiences are attractive, entertaining, and self-aggrandizing. We want them. We collect them. We carry them around as medals, thinking that they are a sign of our deepening insights. We should not delude ourselves. Enlightenment is so incredibly simple that our thoughts cannot grasp it.