If you want to see the inside of your head, all you have to do is keep your eyes open. Because everything that you’re experiencing in the external visual field is a state of your brain. All these colors and shapes are the way in which the brain nerves translate the electrical impulses in the external world; being in the world outside the envelope of skin. So they translate all what is going on outside into impulses which are, to us, shape and color. But shape and color are states of the nerves, so what you see when your eyes are open is how it feels inside your head.
What is highly virtuous is a virtue that is not conscious of itself as virtue. The moment it’s conscious of itself as such, you see, it fails.
Lao Tzu says, “When the great Tao lost, there came duty to man and right conduct.” In other words, nobody talks about how you ought to behave unless things have gone radically wrong. There wouldn’t be any conception of faithful ministers of the state unless there are a lot of lousy politicians around. No one would talk about filial piety unless there were wayward sons and daughters. So there is constantly, in the tradition of Taoism, the idea that all moral preaching is confusion.
All talk about selfishness—all talk about success in becoming virtuous, or enlightened, or integrated, or non-neurotic, or self-actualized; all the terms that are being used, all this talk—attests to the fact that it hasn’t happened, and will, in fact, get in the way of its happening.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. And all the neighbors came around to commiserate that evening. “So sorry to hear your horse has run away. That’s too bad.” And he said, “Maybe.” The next day, the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and everybody came around in the evening and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky! What a great turn of events. You’ve now got eight horses.” And he said, “Maybe.” The next day, his son tried to break one of these horses and ride it, and was thrown and broke his leg. And they all said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad!” And he said, “Maybe.” The following day the conscription officers came around to recruit people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the people came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” And he said, “Maybe.”
The secret is that “other” eventually turns out to be you. I mean, that’s the element of surprise in life: when suddenly you find the thing most alien. We say now: what is most alien to us? Go out at night and look at the stars, and realize that they are millions and millions and billions of miles away. Vast conflagrations out in space. And you can lie back and look at that. Whew! Say, “Well! Surely I hardly matter. I’m just a tiny, tiny little peekaboo on this weird spot of dust called Earth. And all that going on out there. Billions of years before I was born. Billions of years after I will die.” And nothing seems stranger to you than that, more different from you. But there comes a point (if you watch long enough) when you’ll say, “Why, that’s me!” It’s the “other” that is the condition of your being yourself, as the back is the condition of being the front. And when you know that, you know you never die.