Western thought has changed so rapidly in this century that we are in a state of considerable confusion.
 Familiar concepts of space, time, and motion, of nature and natural law, of history and social change,
 of human personality itself, have dissolved, and we find ourselves adrift without landmarks
 in a universe which more and more resembles the Buddhist principle of the great void.
 The various wisdoms of the West, religious, philosophical, and scientific,
 do not offer much guidance to the art of living in such a universe,
 and we find the prospects of making our way in so trackless an ocean of relativity rather frightening.
 For we are used to absolutes, to firm principles and laws to which we can cling for spiritual and psychological security.
 That may be why there is so much interest in a culturally productive way of life
 which for some fifteen hundred years has felt thoroughly at home in the void,
 and which not only feels no terror for it, but rather a positive delight.
 To use its own words, the situation of Zen has always been,
 "Above, not a tile to cover the head; below, not an inch of ground for the foot."
 But the scientifically trained Westerner is a cautious and skeptical fellow who likes to know what he is getting into.
 This does not advocate importing Zen from the Far East,
 for there it has become deeply involved with cultural institutions which are quite foreign to us.
 But there is no doubt that there are things which we can learn, or unlearn, from Zen, and apply in our own way.
 Historically, Zen may be regarded as the fulfillment of long traditions of Indian and Chinese culture,
 though it is actually much more Chinese than Indian,
 and since the twelfth century it has rooted itself deeply and most creatively in the culture of Japan.
 It is not a religion or philosophy. It is not a psychology or a type of science.
 It is rather an example of what is known in India and China as a way of liberation,
 and is as much Taoist as Buddhist.
 Zen is a translation of the Sanskrit word "dhyana," pronounced "chan" in Chinese and "zen" in Japanese.
 It is unfortunately untranslatable in English.
 It designates a certain state of consciousness that is sometimes called meditation,
 but that won't do it all. Contemplation isn't really the point.
 And sometimes one-pointedness of mind.
 I would prefer to translate this word with the notion of total presence of mind.
 When we say a person is crazy, we often say they're not all there.
 Now go to the opposite of that and visualize a person who is completely there, or who is completely here.
 A person who lives totally and absolutely now,
 that doesn't mean he's incapable of thinking about the past or the future,
 because thoughts about the past and about the future are included in the present.
 You have them now.
 But imagine the kind of person who is not distracted,
 who when he talks to you, he really gives you his whole being.
 The Tao is a way of life, the word Tao means the way,
 the course of nature, the flow of things.
 And in order to understand this point of view,
 we have to make a very, very radical adjustment in our ordinary common sense.
 Because Zen and Taoism in common involve not a system of doctrine,
 not a set of beliefs as we ordinarily understand religion.
 They involve a transformation of your consciousness.
 That is to say, of the way in which you experience your own existence at every moment.
 One might say that the average individual, not only in the West but also in the East,
 has a feeling of himself as separate from his surroundings,
 from other people, and from the Earth itself,
 and from the space and the stars and everything around the Earth.
 He feels this in such a way that it's expressed in all the phrases of common speech.
 We talk about coming into the world.
 I came into this world.
 As a matter of fact, you didn't.
 You came out of it.
 Just in the same way as an apple comes out of an apple tree,
 as an expression of the apple tree.
 So the world that we live in and we experience is not cut up into things and events.
 It all goes together in the same way that the bees and the flowers go together,
 only we don't notice this.
 We've got a way of thinking which splits it all up,
 and as a result of that we think of ourselves and so feel ourselves
 as if we were something separate from the whole domain of nature.
 To make a long story short and to tell you the whole point right at the beginning,
 the disciplines of Taoism and of Zen
 propose to change your consciousness in such a way
 that you will no longer feel that you are an isolated unit
 locked up inside a bag of skin,
 but that you will actually experience the fact that your real self,
 your real you, is everything that there is,
 but concentrated and expressing itself at the point called your physical organism.
 We as individual organisms, as what we call physical bodies,
 we come and go like leaves on a tree, but there's the tree.
 And you are the tree.
 In the saying of Jesus, "I am the vine, you are the branches."
 But that "I am" before Abraham was "I am" is the self,
 and it's what the Hindus call the Brahman, and the Chinese call the Tao.


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