Sudoku koan

Today's word from dictionary.com is:

koan \KOH-ahn\, noun:
A nonsensical or paradoxical question to a student for which an answer is demanded, the stress of meditation on the question often being illuminating.
Koan is Japanese, ko "public" and -an, "matter for thought." It enters English through Zen Buddhism before achieving a more general sense.

Maybe the only way I'm going to essay my announced analogy between Sudoku and religion is to exploit the stress of just throwing caution to the wind and publicly meditate the question. It'll either be illuminating, or not.
    What would a Sudoku koan be, though? Maybe the following question is nonsensical enough:

What is puzzling about the analogy between Sudoku puzzling and puzzling over religion?

At any rate, after my announcement eight days ago, the idea of an "elaborate analogy" between Sudoku and religion has at times seemed elusive. (Maybe that's why I've been procrastinating.)

The heady feeling that comes from the numbers quickly snapping into place on a Sudoku board resembles the confident, in-control feeling that accompanies one's sense that one has seen to the bottom of religion and there's nothing there.
    But that's just the dessert. The main course of the analogy is that Sukoku puzzling and religion puzzling both involve combinations of strategies of elimination that lead to forced moves.

In Sudoku, the simplest forced move is the gimmes that are usually offered in the easier puzzles. For example, you look across the middle array of three 9-cell squares and see:

   5  |     9|   1
 7   6|      | 9   8
   9  | 8 5  |   2

[Let's stipulate that each of the nine 9-cell squares is a quadrant, in its general sense of "major part," even when there are not four major parts.] Without looking at any other part of the board, you can see that the middle cell in the third quadrant must contain a 5, because each of the three quadrants must contain a 5, but each row can have only one, and there's nowhere else for the 5 to go but in the middle row of the third quadrant:

   5  |     9|   1
 7   6|      | 9 5 8
   9  | 8 5  |   2

    Ticking off the "gimmes" in a puzzle is like being able to immediately dismiss religious statements that are obviously wishful and without substance. "I prayed that we'd land safely." Praying or not praying will have no effect on the landing. "Everything happens according to God's plan." There is no such plan.

But in the case of the 8 in the array:

      |     3|   9
      |   2  | 8
 6 8  |      | 3

Either of two cells (x) could host it:

      | x x 3|   9
      |   2  | 8
 6 8  |      | 3

...until we look at the quadrant immediately below it:

 - - -|     9| - - -
 - - -|      | - - -
 - - -| 8 5  | - - -

The 8 in the first column of that quadrant forces the 8 in the quadrant above into the second column:

      |   8 3|   9
      |   2  | 8
 6 8  |      | 3

    Sudoku strategy must widen itself in that way to account for constraints at all levels.

My "Sudoku breakthrough" reminded me that I had been able to see to the bottom of religion in much the same way I had become able to solve more difficult Sudoku puzzles: by looking at various levels of the religion question in combination:
    Lack of evidence for it. I've seen no objective confirmation that any miracle has occurred. No one has demonstrated that a prayer was answered. Etc.
    Its absurdity. The most absurd belief of religion is probably the one that "sinners" will be subjected to unspeakable torments that will last forever and ever.
    Its irrelevance to morality. Religious people come in all varieties of good and bad, the same as atheists.
    Its logical contradictions. Each of the three Abrahamic religions consider adherents of the other two to be unbelievers, or infidels.
    Naturalistic explanations for it. The belief in a Day of Judgment satisfies the wish that good people will be rewarded and bad people punished. For example. Evolutionary investigations into the roots of religion are fascinating, and I've only begun to familiarize myself with them.
    I may be forgetting a level that I considered at some point over the past years, but the result in any case was that my conclusion about religion was a forced move. What Gertrude Stein said of Oakland applies even more accurately to religion: There's no there there. In a state of religion, people inhabit a vast vacuity of their own (or, more often, someone else's) imagining.

In the scheme of things, though, Sudoku puzzling is like puzzling over religion in that both are really just trivial pastimes, diversions. There are other, productive ways to spend one's time, as I realized the other day, when Sudoku puzzling had made me stale and I reminded myself to get back to reading a good book.

Mecca is where "the sacred there" is

In the context of pilgrimages, my reference yesterday to going on vacation could have been misleading. Going on a pilgrimage is not the same as going on vacation. And staying home to kick back in an easy chair is not the same as experiencing home as a destination worthy of pilgrimage—that is, as a "shrine or sacred place" (to quote The American Heritage Dictionary's definition of "pilgrim").

Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, that there was "no there there." But there's "there" and there's "there." The "there" that shrines have is a sacred presence. But I think it can be anywhere that we can bring the appropriate consciousness to.

I have for years often experienced the mundane as sacred, enjoyed routine tasks like making the bed or folding the clothes as sacramental. These mundane places and routines are ever present at home. The only journey we need undertake to reach them is spiritual, a road to mindfulness and awe. Awe-mindedness.

Home is for me the still point of which T.S. Eliot wrote:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
        [from "Burnt Norton," the first of his Four Quartets]

Home is the sweet spot where the dance of life can be engaged everyday, the dance by which Zorba the Greek celebrated and expressed life's sacred awe.