Look, and it can’t be seen.
Listen, and it can’t be heard.
Reach, and it can’t be grasped.

Above, it isn’t bright.
Below, it isn’t dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.

Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can’t know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.

Tao Te Ching

Let’s suppose, now, you are babies again. You don’t know anything. Now, don’t be frightened, because anything you know you can get back later. But, for the time being, here is our Awareness. And let’s suppose you have no information about this at all, and no words for it, and that my talking to you is just a noise.

Now, don’t try to do anything about this. Don’t make any effort. Because, naturally, by force of habit, certain tensions remain inside you, and certain ideas and words drift all the time through your mind. Just like the wind blows, or clouds move across the sky.

Don’t bother with them at all, don’t try to get rid of them. Just be aware of what’s going on in your head, like it was clouds in the sky, or the crackling of the fire. There’s no problem to this. All you have to do, really, is look and listen without naming. And if you are naming, nevermind; just listen to that.

Now, you can’t force anything here; that you can’t willfully stop thinking and stop naming. It’s only telling you that the separate you doesn’t exist. It isn’t a mark of defeat, it isn’t a sign of your lack of practice in meditation. That it runs on all by itself simply means that the individual, separate you is a figment of your imagination. So you are aware, at this point of, a happening.

Remember, you don’t know anything about the difference between you and it; you haven’t been told that. You’ve no words for the difference between inside and outside, between here and there, and nobody has taught you that what you see out in front of you is either near or far from your eyes. Watch a baby put out a finger to touch the Moon. You don’t know about that. Just – therefore – here it is. We’ll just call it this.

And if you will feel it – the going on, which includes absolutely everything you feel – well, whatever that is, it’s what the Chinese call Tao, or what the Buddhists call ‘suchness,’ or tathātā. And it’s a happening.

It doesn’t happen to you, because where is that? You – what you call you – is part of the happening, or an aspect of it. It has no parts; it’s not like machine. And it’s a little scary because you feel, Who’s in control around here? Why should there be anyone? 

It’s a very weird notion we have that processes require something outside them to control them. It never occurred to us that processes could be self-controlling. Even though we say to someone, Control yourself! We always, in order to think about self-control, we split a person in two.

So that there is a you separate from the self that’s supposed to be controlled. Well, how can that achieve anything? How can a noun start a verb? Yet, it’s a fundamental superstition that that can be done.