The Intellectual Koan

A monk asked, "All things are said to be reducible to the One, but where is the One to be reduced?" Chao-chou answered, "When I was in the district of Ch'ing I had a robe that weighed seven chin."

D.T. Suzuki offers the above as an example of the koan exercise in his essay The Reason of Unreason: the Koan Exercise, and says:

The worst enemy of Zen experience, at least in the beginning, is the intellect, which consists and insists in discriminating subject from object. The discriminating intellect, therefore, must be cut short if Zen consciousness is to unfold itself, and the koan is constructed entirely to serve this end...A psychological impasse is the necessary antecedent of satori, and we at once notice that there is no room in the koan to insert an intellectual interpretation. The wall against which the Yogin has been beating( in trying with his intellect to 'solve' the koan) hitherto to no purpose breaks down, and an entirely new vista of consciousness opens before him.

Well if the discipline does yield the desired results, then there is no questioning its usefulness, but I suspect the koan is perhaps too removed from Western consciousness to be an especially fruitful discipline here- taking my own self as a symptom rather than a case in isolation. Rather than feel compelled to attack with my mind the koan, thus hopefully yielding the results, it simply doesn't especially interest me, and not having supplied the necessary mental tension there arise no results.
What is essentially being aspired to here is the movement from the finite to the infinite, from the centre of the intellect bound self to the living state of consciousness which actually produces the manifestations of intellect, from the abstraction of a word sustained sense of being to the organic centre of actual life. However, thought is a manifestation of the mind and perhaps through the very route of thought itself a different but related path can be cut leading to the same desired inner destination. And this is the point in what probably appears a strange, pointless post recently like Another Trapdoor, where was written:

This shouldn't be written.

Well, what is so interesting about that? Like the koan a rational explanation is the enemy for there the intellect finds a place of rest, a meaning, and it moves on very much as it already was, and so 'explanation' is very double-edged, but here perhaps necessary, given how unusual this form of thought actually is. What I presume is most likely happens with this line is that the reader sees "This shouldn't be written", and moves immediately along the normal logical path the mind works on, and for a brief moment wonders why it shouldn't be written, doesn't know, finds it a bit strange, pointless and inelegant, an odd essay in humour perhaps; and moves on to read something else. But am I trying to claim there is something extraordinary about such a simple line?

The line is not preceded by something like, "All humans are scum and deserve to die", then followed by- "This shouldn't be written." No, all we have is "This shouldn't be written."
'So you're saying "This shouldn't be written" shouldn't be written? Why not?'
No, that's not what is written. Such a reader isn't looking at the line with enough directness, but jumping aboard the normal logical routes to the imagined intellectual destination. But here we just have "This shouldn't be written", not "This shouldn't be written shouldn't be written." But here is the point and the problem in explication for me- I cannot do the work for the reader. It's a thought that has no linguistic flaws, is perfectly ordinary, and yet the mind cannot find rest in it. It defies the normal logical path, but is not an illogical line.
"Do you mean 'This' shouldn't be written, as in the word 'this'? No, you're not looking directly enough. All we have is the line "This shouldn't be written."
"Well what does the "'This' in the line refer to?" "Ah, now we're getting somewhere. 'This' refers to the line 'This shouldn't be written"...
And because the train of thought is itself the enemy to the direct existential perception, the isolated line again:

This shouldn't be written.

An earlier similar thought produced repeated below, later examined with reluctance here:

This is a translation.