Confidence through Spontaneity

It is often said that young children are happy, careless, and innocent. In other words they act spontaneously because live in the moment without worrying about consequences of their actions. The Buddha shines inside them!

Unfortunately, the more we grow and the more society forces the original spontaneity of life into the rigid rules of convention. We progressively lose that natural state of unified one-pointed awareness as we learn about duality: to be and not to be, right and wrong, difficult and easy, before and after, etc. However, logic and meaning, with its inherent duality, is a property of thought and language but not of the actual world. In fact duality arises only when we classify our experiences into mental boxes, since a box has an inside and an outside (i.e. opposites).

"Be no concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind." (Hsin-hsin Ming)
"When everyone recognizes goodness as good, there is already evil." (Tao Te Ching)

While the argument here is against the categorization of actions I am not prescribing fatalism as the way of life, but rather intuitive wisdom, called prajna. Wu-wei is the art of arriving at decisions spontaneously, by letting one's mind alone and trusting it to work by itself. This unconsciousness is not coma, but a state of no-mind, wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily without the sensation of an ego standing over it in control. When body and mind achieve spontaneity, the Tao is reached and universal mind can be understood.

The centre of the mind's activity is not in the conscious thinking process as we become accustomed to believe. No mindedness is employing the whole mind as we use the eyes when we rest them upon various objects but make no special effort to take anything in. Te is the unthinkable ingenuity and creative power of man's spontaneous and natural functioning - a power which is blocked when one tries to master it in terms of formal methods and techniques.

Although the process of conformity to the rules of society is clearly detrimental to our spiritual growth, it is nevertheless socially required to have order in the world. Therefore we must accept the fact that we will struggle to undo the inevitable damages caused by the rules of convention in trying to restore and develop the original spontaneity (tzu-jan). The process of re-finding the lost spontaneity is professed by Taoism, which is a way of liberation and therefore in sharp contrast with the aims of Confucianism.