When we’re sitting with a koan, at some point there can be a shift, when we start to feel something positive about the koan – a sense of hope, promise, contained in the koan – a sense that it contains something immensely good about life that we can’t quite yet see, but can come to see. It can be almost as if we start to fall in love with it.
We may not yet know how we would “present” the koan to the teacher, or even talk about it. But that no longer matters. What matters is some new discovery we sense the koan is inviting us toward. It can be very nice to sense this, even without some Damascene revelation – although in time, that may come too, who knows.