Go and sit in your room
A desert father is asked for a word. He gives the shortest possible instruction and no explanation.
By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · · Nondual
Chapter 11 of 12 in The masters were funny
Before the desert, Abba Moses was a bandit, by tradition a violent one. This is a man who had every reason to believe that a life gets changed by dramatic events.
A brother in the Egyptian desert comes to him and asks for a word, which is what you asked an elder for when you wanted the teaching. Moses says: go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
His advice is a room. The exchange ends there. It is fourth century, collected in the sayings of the desert fathers, and it is funny in the same dry way a good koan is funny, because the man came a long way across sand for a sentence that sends him back to the room he already lives in.
The cell teaches by removing the alternatives. There is no new teacher and no new technique to compare with the last one. Whatever comes up has to be met with nothing to change the subject to. Anybody who has done a silent retreat, or a lockdown, knows the first week is mostly the mind offering increasingly good reasons to be somewhere else.
I read this next to the Zen line about the ordinary mind, and next to the Advaita insistence that nothing has to be added. Different centuries and a different God, with the same refusal to send anyone shopping.
A room can also be where somebody rots. The desert tradition had elders, a community, and a very tough set of practices around that instruction, and it is not the same as a man alone in a flat with his phone, telling himself he is in a cell.