You will never understand the principle of wu wei, nor the experience of living wu wei, unless you understand that you are not only a mortal individual living in time and space.
It is only with this realisation that you are able to drop all the notions of good and bad outcomes that dominate the mortal’s existence. If you are concerned with finding good outcomes and avoiding bad outcomes then you cannot live wu wei.
In order to live wu wei you must see, be open to, endorse and accept of all your urges, desires and actions – even if they might at some point lead to outcomes that a mortal might consider bad. To live wu wei is to accept the validity of all things.
You are able to accept all things because you have spiritual security. You know that whatever happens you are going to be alright, and so is everyone else. You are like the wise man of the Bhagavad Gita who ‘laments for neither the living nor the dead’.
You have no reason to fear what arises within you, nor what occurs outside of you. Because you are fearless, you are trusting of all that arises. Your trust confers upon your desires a kind of Divine validity – your trust makes you infallible.
Inability to trust your desires is due to fear, the fear of your mortal ego. The moment you stand in judgement of anything either inside you or outside you is the moment you cease to live wu wei.
To live wu wei is therefore an attitude, not a method and not a technique. You cannot describe the behaviours of the person who lives wu wei – they cannot be said to behave in any particular way. You also cannot observe wu wei from the outside – any conceivable action might issue from the person who has the inner attitude of wu wei.
Wu wei is trust. It is accepting all that comes and refraining from any judgement whatsoever. Wu wei is to live life as if in the palm of God’s hand.
It is often said the person living wu wei always acts skilfully and well. This is because he has the courage to trust his desires and the spiritual security to deal with any conceivable outcome.
And because such a person has the spiritual security to trust and endorse everything he has no need to search for contentment as the mistrustful mortal searches. He is not ashamed of his desires, he does not call them bad names. He just follows them.
The mortal man smothers his desires, and refuses to be averse to his aversions. They therefore give him no peace and he gets upset by their consequences. If he had spiritual confidence he would ride them all without disturbance. Nothing serious would develop, early of signs of bad outcomes are made immediately good by trust.
It is often said that you know you have acted well if you have a feeling of lightness and correctness. This is the feeling of trust. It is possible to have this feeling in the aftermath of any conceivable behaviour. Conversely it can be absent in the mortal person even if their behaviour is flawless in the eyes of others.
But the person whose trust is so strong would never be in a situation which requires heinous behaviours. Only a mortal, without spiritual security, would find themselves needing to commit great evil in order to correct inbalance.
The person far from wu wei feels fear and danger in insignificant situations. Their minds are able to travel far into the future in order to visualise misfortune. They therefore feel fearful and mistrustful in many situations. They need to go to great lengths to find peace, and their lives are distorted by the pursuit.
Wu wei is neither activity nor inactivity. When you trust your every desire and act without hesitation it is impossible to call it activity or uninactivity. The urge arrives passively and you implement it actively. And yet you take responsibility for your desires and feel that in your action the Tao acts through you.
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