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 In R. H. Blythe's arresting metaphor,
 when we were just about to swat the fly,
 the fly flew up and sat on the swatter.
 In terms of immediate perception,
 when we look for things, there is nothing but mind,
 and when we look for mind, there is nothing but things.
 For a moment we are paralyzed,
 because it seems that we have no basis for action,
 no ground underfoot from which to take a jump.
 But this is the way it always was,
 and in the next moment we find ourselves as free to act, speak, and think as ever,
 yet in a strange and miraculous new world,
 from which self and other, mind and things, have vanished.
 In the words of T. S. Chan,
 "Only when you have no thing in your mind, and no mind in things,
 are you vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous."
 The marvel can only be described as the peculiar sensation of freedom in action,
 which arises when the world is no longer felt to be some sort of obstacle standing over against one.
 This is not freedom in the crude sense of kicking over the traces and behaving in wild caprice.
 It is the discovery of freedom in the most ordinary tasks.
 For when the sense of subjective isolation vanishes,
 the world is no longer felt as an intractable object.
 In the context of Christianity, this might be interpreted as feeling that one has become omnipotent,
 that one is God, directing everything that happens.
 However, it must be remembered that in Taoist and Buddhist thought,
 there is no conception of a God who deliberately and consciously governs the universe.
 Lao Tzu said of the Tao,
 "To its accomplishments it lays no claim.
 It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.
 The Tao, without doing anything, leaves nothing undone."
 To use the imagery of a Tibetan poem,
 "Every action, every event comes of itself from the void
 as from the surface of a clear lake there leaps suddenly a fish."
 When this is seen to be as true of the deliberate and the routine,
 as of the surprising and the unforeseen,
 one can agree with the Zen poet Pang Yun,
 "Miraculous power and marvelous activity,
 drawing water and hewing wood."


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