In the philosophy of the Tao, it is said, it's always being said, this is, you read
 this in every art book about Chinese art, that in Chinese painting, man is always seen
 as in nature, rather than dominating it. You get a painting entitled "Poet Drinking by
 Moonlight" and you see a great landscape and after some search with a magnifying glass,
 at last you see the poet stuck away in a corner somewhere drinking wine. Whereas if we painted
 the subject "Poet Drinking by Moonlight," the poet would be the most obvious thing in
 the picture. There he would be, dominating the whole thing, the landscape off somewhere
 behind him. But all the Chinese painters put man, I mean, the painters of the great classical
 tradition, there are Chinese painters who specialize in family portraits and do these
 very formal paintings of someone's ancestor sitting on a throne. It's quite a different
 category. But the Taoist-inspired painters, the Zen-inspired painters, have this view
 of man as an integral part of nature, something in it just as everything else is in it, flowers
 and birds, and not their ascent into this world commissioned by some sort of supernatural
 being to come into this world and farm it and dominate it. The whole conception of nature
 is as a self-regulating, self-governing, indeed democratic organism. But it has a totality.
 It all goes together, and this totality is the Tao.
 When we speak in Taoism of following the course of nature, following the way, what it means
 is more like this. Doing things in accordance with the grain. It doesn't mean you don't
 cut wood, but it means that you cut wood along the lines where wood is most easy to cut.
 And you interact with other people along lines which are the most genial. And this, then,
 is the great fundamental principle, which is called wu-wei, not to force anything. I
 think that's the best translation. It's often called not doing, not acting, not interfering,
 but not to force. Seems to me to hit the nail on the head. Like don't ever force a lock
 by you bend the key or break the lock. You jiggle until it revolves. So wu-wei is always
 to act in accordance with the pattern of things as they exist. Don't impose on any situation
 a kind of interference that is not really in accordance with the situation. For example,
 we have a slum, and the people are in difficulty and so on, and they need better housing. Now
 if you go in with a bulldozer and knock the slum down, and you put in its place some architect's
 imaginative notions of what is a super-efficient, high-rise apartment building to store people,
 you create total mess, utter chaos. A slum has what we would call an ecology. It has
 a very complex system of relationships going in it, by which the thing is already a going
 concern even though it isn't going very well. Anybody who wants to alter that situation
 must first of all become sensitive to all the conditions and relationships going on
 there. It's terribly important then to have this feeling of the interdependence of every
 form of life upon every other form of life. How we, for example, cultivate animals that
 we eat, look after them and build them up, and see that they breed in reasonable quantities.
 We don't do it too well, as a matter of fact, especially troubles arising about supplies
 of fish in the ocean, all sorts of things. But you have to see that life, that the so-called
 conflict of various species with each other, is not actually a competition. It's a very
 strange system of interrelationship, of things feeding on each other and cultivating each
 other at the same time. The idea of the friendly enemy, the necessary adversary, who is part
 of you. You have conflicts going on in your own body. All kinds of microorganisms are
 eating each other up, and if that wasn't happening, you wouldn't be healthy. So all those interrelationships,
 whether they appear to be friendly relationships, as between bees and flowers, or conflicting
 relationships as between birds and worms, they are actually forms of cooperation. And
 that is mutual arising. You have to understand this as the basis, apply this not forcing
 anything, and you get spontaneity. A life which is so of itself, which is natural, which
 is not forced, which is not unduly self-conscious. Now, another term that is important, although
 I'm not aware that this word occurs in Lao-tzu's book, it's found in greater use at a much
 later time in Chinese thought, in a philosophy that is called Neo-Confucian, and it's also
 used in Buddhism. But it is a very useful word for understanding the sort of order that
 all this constitutes. It's the word "li." And this means, originally, the markings in
 jade, or perhaps the grain in wood, or the fibre in muscle. It is translated nowadays
 in most dictionaries as "reason" or "principle." But this isn't a very good translation. Joseph
 Needham suggested that "organic pattern" was an ideal translation for this word. Now, you
 see, the markings in jade are always regarded as beautiful. You might say, if you look down
 at the water here, when you see the waves break, there are patterns in the foam. Now,
 if you watch those patterns, you know they never make an aesthetic mistake. Never. But
 they are not symmetrical, and they're very difficult to describe. They're wiggly. So
 are the markings in jade. So is the grain in wood. But we love the grain in wood. And
 you see, Jafu has done these paintings of rocks based on examples, I think, in the Chinese
 book called The Mustard Seed Garden. These all exhibit "li." That is to say, they are
 forms which we know are orderly, and we can distinguish them from messes quite clearly.
 And so, in the same way, the foam patterns, the rock patterns, the patterns of vegetation
 are at once extraordinarily orderly, but they don't have an obvious order. Nobody can ever
 pin it down, that's what I'd like to say. You know that there is order there. There's
 something quite different from a mess, but there's no way of really getting it. Now,
 in order to be able to paint that sort of way, or to live that sort of way, or to deliver
 justice that way, if you were a judge, you have to have it innately. You have to have
 an essential sense of "li," and there's no way of prescribing it. This is the very devil
 for teachers, because you see, all our universities and schools are trying to teach creativity.
 That's the great thing these days, you know, and you hear at the Esalen, all sorts of people
 are giving courses and workshops in creativity. Now, the trouble is this. If we found out
 a method whereby we could teach creativity, and everybody could just explain how it was
 done, it would no longer be of interest. What always is an essential element in the creative
 is the mysterious. The dark, it's like the black in lacquer. The impenetrable, and yet
 the profound depth out of which glorious things come, but nobody can see why. There's a poem
 which says that when the bird calls, the mountain becomes more mysterious. You imagine, for
 example, you're in a mountain valley, and everything is very silent, and suddenly a
 crow squawks somewhere. You don't know where that crow is, and that little sound emphasizes
 the silence. Now, all those things have in them, you see, an element of mystery. There's
 a Chinese poem which puts it this way. It is a poem written by a man who has gone to
 find a sage in the mountains, and the sage has a little hut at the foot of the mountain,
 and a boy there who is his servant. I asked the boy beneath the pines. He said the master's
 gone alone, herb gathering somewhere on the mount, cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown.
 In so many athletic and artistic skills, you'll find a teacher who teaches you how to do it
 without forcing it. I once studied the piano. I'm absolutely no good at it now, because
 I don't practice. I'm involved in other things. But I had an absolutely superb teacher for
 a while. He was a very, very great musicologist. You know, there was nothing sloppy about his
 standards. They were the highest perfection. But when I first went to him, he said, "Let
 me see what you can do." So I played him a Scarlatti sonata. He said, "Yeah, but the
 trouble with you is you're trying too hard. You're hitting the piano, and you should never
 hit a piano." He said, "Actually, all you've got to do in order to play a piano is to drop
 your hands on it, and you need to have relaxed arms." So he made me practice for a while.
 He felt my muscles to see whether I was relaxed or not. And he said, "Now just drop your hand
 on the piano. I don't care what notes you hit, but just drop your hand. Let it fall."
 He said, "There's enough energy in the weight of your arm to play as loud as you will, or
 as soft as you will. But just let it drop." He said, "That's all you have to do. Drop
 your hands." And he kept feeling my arms. He said, "No, no, you're getting too tense.
 You must pretend you are lautzer." And he was a very educated man. He knew about these
 things. And then he said, "Now, after dropping your hands, all you've got to do is to hit
 the right notes." And he said, "You know, the same thing is involved in making a very
 complex trill." And he demonstrated. He just dropped his hand on the piano. And at the
 same time, his fingers went like that. And there was this magnificent ornamentation.
 Then we went on. We practiced this for some time. He said, "Now let's get around to hitting
 the right notes." And he found immediately I had a block on reading music. Because when
 I was a small boy and studied piano at the age of roughly eight, I had a pestiferous
 teacher who was a mistress in this private school I went to in England. And she used
 to sit beside you and hit your fingers with a pencil every time you made a wrong note.
 Gregory Bateson, I think, was taught piano as a child in such a way. And he has a total
 block on reading music. I mean, he's got a brilliant mind, you know. He's a mathematician
 and a great anthropologist, ethnologist, and so on. But he has a total block to reading
 music. And so this man had to teach me to overcome my block. And he said, "Now, first
 of all, feel perfectly free to make mistakes. Everybody's going to make some mistakes, and
 it doesn't matter if you make a mistake. And if you do make a mistake, don't go back and
 do it over again, but just go on. So play as slowly as you like. Don't hurry, just so
 long as you keep the relative rhythm, the relative values of the thing, go slow and
 take it easy. Another thing is not to pay so much attention to the notes, but to the
 distances or intervals between them, because that is the significant jump. And this sort
 of overcomes, too, the difficulty of key signatures, where we started out learning music with this
 weird system that the lines on the stave really represent the major scale of C. And that therefore,
 when you put a key signature at the beginning, you remember that every time you're playing
 in F, every time you hit B, it should be B flat. Well, that's an extremely tedious way
 of learning music. And you just have to think in different keys. That's the only way to
 adjust to a key signature, and play the thing according to the intervals appropriate for
 that key. But you see, in this instance, this man, although he was a great perfectionist
 and was highly skilled in music, he used intelligence, first of all, to give you a shortcut. And
 then he also used relaxation to enter into a difficult thing by the easiest route. In
 Zen training, in its initial stages, the master discourages intellectualization. You know,
 you come in with a lot of ideas, but this difficulty you have is not going to be solved
 by ideas. It's not going to be solved by talk and intellectualization. So in the same way,
 this is discouraged, because intellectualization sets up a kind of interval or lack of rapport
 between you and your life. You think about things so much that you get into the state
 where you're eating the menu instead of the dinner. You're valuing the money more than
 the wealth. You are confusing, as Korzybski would say, the map with the territory. And
 what they want to do is to get you into the territory, to get you into relationship with
 what is as distinct from ideas about what is. And this is an important preliminary discipline.
 But later on, you can realize that the process of thinking is also what is. Thoughts in their
 own domain are as real as rocks. Words have their own reality as much as sky and water.
 Thoughts about things are in their own turn things. And so they lead you eventually to
 the point where you intellectualize and think in an immediate way. Let's go on and ask then
 a further problem. How about thinking about thinking? Wouldn't that be pretty far off?
 Here is a person removed from life because he's in the intellectual world, and he's all
 in a living in symbols. He's a kind of a living bookworm. Now what about a librarian? A person
 who writes books about books, a bibliographer, a classifier of classifications? That's a
 pretty dusty occupation. And as we know, sometimes librarians seem to be very dusty people. They
 seem way removed from life, all tied up in their categories and catalogs and musts and
 mustn'ts and uh, uh. That too, you see, is also its own level of reality. And thinking
 about thinking can be lived with just as much direct, fresh spontaneity as just living without
 thinking. But in order to live it with full spontaneity, you have to be in a position
 where you no longer feel the symbol, the thought, the idea, the word, as a block to life. No
 longer feel it as something you are using as a sort of means of escape. To be able to
 use the symbol not as means of escape, you have to know in the first place that you can't
 escape. And not only that you can't escape, but there is no one to escape. There is no
 one to be delivered from the prison of life. That, then, the liberation of the mind from
 identifying itself with symbols is the same process, exactly, as breaking up the links
 between the successive moments. The illusion of a self, a continuing self that travels
 from moment to moment and picks them all up, corresponding to the illusion of the moving
 water in the wave and the moving solid circle created by the moving cigarette point in the
 dark. This is the meaning, then, that there is no one who perceives anything, no one who
 experiences anything. There is simply seeing and experiencing. We introduce all these redundancies
 through talk. We talk about seeing sights, hearing sounds, feeling feelings. All that
 is irrelevant. There are sights, there are sounds, there are feelings. You don't feel
 a feeling. The feeling itself already contains the feeling of it. Do you see? That's very
 simple. To have sight, you don't need something to be seen on the one hand and a seer of something
 to be seen on the other. And then some mysterious way they come together. The seer and the seen,
 the knower and the known, are what we call terms. Terms mean ends. And they are what
 in mathematical language are called limits. Now, when we take a stick, the stick has its
 two ends. They are the terms of the stick. But the ends of the stick do not exist as
 sort of separate points which encounter each other on the occasion of meeting at a stick.
 They are actually abstract points. The ends themselves, considered as themselves, are
 purely geometrical. They are Euclidean imaginations. The reality is the stick. You see? So in the
 same way with that phenomenon called experience, the reality is not an encounter of the knower
 and the known. The reality is an experience which can be termed as having two aspects,
 two ends, the knower and the known. But that's only a figure of speech. Neurologically, this
 is true. Everything that you see is yourself. What you are aware of is a state of your nervous
 system. And there is no other knowledge whatsoever. That doesn't mean that your nervous system
 is the only existing reality and that there is nothing beyond your nervous system. But
 it does mean that all knowledge is knowledge of you and that therefore in some mysterious
 way you are not different from the external world that you know. If you see then that
 what you experience and you are the same thing, then realize also, going beyond that, that
 you are in the external world you're looking at. You see, I'm in your external world, you're
 in my external world. But I'm in the same world you are. My inside is not separable
 from the outside world. It's something the so-called outside world is doing, just as
 it's doing the tree and the ocean and everything else that is in the outside world. Now isn't
 that great, you see? We've completely got rid of the person in the trap. The one who
 either dominates the world or suffers under it. It's vanished. It never was there. And
 when it's, when that happens, you see, you can play any life game you want to. Link the
 past and the present and the future together. Play roles. But you know, you've seen through
 this great, what do they call it, the great social lie, that one accumulates, owns experiences,
 memories, sights, sounds, and from that other people, possessions, so on. It's building
 up always this idea of oneself as the haver of all this. If you think that, you've been
 had.
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