The Tao is not something different from nature, from ourselves, from our surrounding trees and waters and air. The Tao is the way all that behaves. And so the basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it’s an organism.
The whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating, self-governing—indeed, democratic—organism. But it has a totality. It all goes together. And this totality is the Tao.
You have to see that life, that the so-called conflict of various species with each other, is not actually a competition. It’s a very strange system of interrelationship, of things feeding on each other and cultivating each other at the same time—the idea of the friendly enemy, the necessary adversary who is part of you. You have conflicts going on in your own body: all kinds of microorganisms are eating each other up. And if that wasn’t happening you wouldn’t be healthy. So all those interrelationships, whether they appear to be friendly relationships (as between bees and flowers) or conflicting relationships (as between birds and worms), they are actually forms of cooperation.
All our universities and schools are trying to teach creativity. That’s the great thing these days, you know? And here at Esalen all sorts of people are giving courses and workshops in creativity. Now, the trouble is this: if we found out a method whereby we could teach creativity and everybody could just explain how it was done, it would no longer be of interest. What always is an essential element in the creative is the mysterious, the dark. It’s like the black in lacquer. The impenetrable, and yet the profound depth out of which glorious things come, but nobody can see why.
Figure a world in which everything happens by itself. It doesn’t have to be controlled, it’s allowed. Whereas you might say the idea of God involves the control of everything going on, the idea of the Tao is the ruler who abdicates and trusts all the people to conduct their own affairs; to let it all happen. So this doesn’t mean, you see, that there isn’t a unified organism and everything is in chaos. It means that the more liberty you give, the more love you give, the more you allow things in yourself and in your surroundings to take place, the more order you will have.
Things just do what they do. The flower goes poof, and people go this way, go that way, and so on, and that’s what’s happening. It has no meaning, it has no destination, it has no value. It’s just like that. And when you see that, you see it’s a great relief. That’s all it is. But then, when you are firmly established in suchness—in that it’s just this moment—you can begin again to play with the connections. Only: you’ve seen through them. But now, you see, they don’t haunt you. Because you know that there isn’t any continuous “you” running on from moment to moment who originated at some time in the past and will die at some time in the future. All that’s disappeared. So you can have enormous fun anticipating the future, remembering the past, and playing all kinds of continuities.
Everything that you see is yourself. What you are aware of is a state of your nervous system and there is no other knowledge whatsoever. That doesn’t mean that your nervous system is the only existing reality and that there is nothing beyond your nervous system. But it does mean that all knowledge is knowledge of you, and that therefore, in some mysterious way, you are not different from the external world that you know. If you see, then, that “what you experience” and “you” are the same thing, then realize also (going beyond that) that you are in the external world you’re looking at. You see, I’m in your external world, you’re in my external world. But I’m in the same world you are. My inside is not separable from the outside world. It’s something the so-called outside world is doing. Just as it’s doing the tree and the ocean and everything else that is in the outside world.