7
Trust Is Unity
Sincere introspection will reveal aspects of your inner and outer worlds that you do not completely trust. People belonging to dogmatic religions often say that they trust God, and that God is love and God is one. But when we observe these people, they are in many cases judging other people or other religions as if this “one God” had made a mistake. Hence there is a lack of trust in their narrow concept of God. The spiritually mature, however, can see how the lack of trust imbedded into our consciousness serves as a blockage to the light of God, or in the terminology of Taoism, the Way of the Tao.
In our speech, thoughts, and mannerisms, we exhibit a propensity to doubt life. We usually doubt that we can achieve anything, so we continue to cling to our own conditioning. We doubt because we have been taught that we are alien to this world and that somehow we do not belong. This fuels the mind’s bias toward negativity. The deluded mind always seeks to change the circumstances of life to suit its own conditioned perspective. Conversation takes on a negative tone. When we are positive, we are not doubting, because sincere positivity is an affirmation of life. Yet in a world that feels cut off from life, we think of positivity as a disgustingly strange attitude.
The trust we have lost is the result of the deluded, unnatural world in which we find ourselves. But we should not get too distracted by this fact, because to assume that any of this was a mistake is to move away from trust. Again, we are growing out of the old and into a new way of life, which at the moment is beyond our comprehension. At the same time, if we do not comprehend the trust of wu-wei and see how it is a universal reality, we may fall back into old patterns. And paradoxically, if this were to be the case, we would need to trust the unfoldment of that process as well. This unwavering trust does seem unattainable to the deluded mind. But when you sink into the depth of your own being, you will know that this is the only reality, and that any other type of reality would be absurd.
TRUST IN LIFE
Even though to trust yourself and life is the only sane way to experience this world, most of us do not understand the practicality of this way of being and its value for true freedom. Many people are swept up in the doing aspect of life, so they seek to change the world. But this approach—to only do and never allow life to take its own course—confuses them deeply. Not only do they lack trust, but their doing comes out of their conditioning.
But if our motive for doing anything comes out of our conditioning, how could the unity of humanity prevail on Earth? To separate yourself from humanity by acting out of your limited beliefs only harms the world. It is not an act of peace but a subtle act of violence. Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti poignantly articulates this violent separation of beliefs:
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.1
The practical value of a trust in life, yourself, and others should be self-evident, but our intentions, no matter how good, are, again, plagued by conditioning. Wars are a testament to this fact. Wars are invariably waged because of the delusory belief that humanity is divided by the boundaries of nations and religions.
Even though the practical use of trust can be comprehended intellectually, it is only when we live by it in our own lives that we can understand that freedom is the result of trust, or in other words, wu-wei. As we are the microcosm of the world, any process and any knowing that can be verified within us is also a reality in the world as a whole. We contain the complete picture. True freedom at the heart of this picture is beyond our beliefs and conditioning. This is known when an individual is sincere in her own introspection.
The Tao can only make use of you when you are empty of all that blocks a union between yourself and the universe. The unity we seek is not an intellectual understanding, but instead it is a sense of unity. Yet unity, and a sense of unity, exist only in a liberated mind, which is the authentic contribution that one can make to the possibility of a unified humanity.
The root and essence of both consciousness and the universe is that everything is connected and ultimately one. The universe in its awe-inspiring totality produces consciousness, and consciousness evokes the universe. Both are inseparable and paradoxically the same. The big picture and the small picture are one.
A sage knows this intrinsically, because the mind, when emptied of all its hypnosis, begins to replicate the eternal space of the universe, showing that the foundation of consciousness is space. Yet this should not be misunderstood. The essence of consciousness is not a blank state, as many spiritual seekers believe. On the contrary, while consciousness is exactly like space in emptiness and vastness, it is also like space in that it contains the whole universe. Consciousness, like space, is always open to new experiences and change. The liberated mind functions in this way, leading to trust. In the same way that consciousness evokes the universe, so does trust evoke a sense of oneness in the individual. The truth and reality of the universe and consciousness are one, but trust is where the oneness is realized within our being.
UNITY, TRUST, AND WU-WEI
When you trust the universe, you become one with it. Wu-wei dawns upon the individual in the same way, because when we let go of control, we gain the indescribable power and virtue of Tao. This relation of trust and oneness is the principle of living wu-wei. When you are humble enough to leave things alone, you begin to feel a sense of unity intuitively. Lao-tzu’s words in the Tao Te Ching reveal this trust for the individual whose inner ear is attuned to the rhythmic silence of the Tao. The wisdom of Lao-tzu was not to intellectualize oneness, but instead to feel it and know it.
Organized religions teach the individual about the unity of life only intellectually, because any dogma is in its essence separate and isolated. So the teachings of these religions reflect this isolation, as they assume that we are separate from God. Nevertheless, the core principle of all religions is to find God within yourself. This was the template of the philosophia perennis (perennial philosophy). The saints and sages of our past explained that in finding God within, you understand how oneness is the only reality. Thus the Latin religare (the root of the word religion) and the Sanskrit yuj (the root of the word yoga) are both words that describe the union with God that can only be found within. Yet this does not mean withdrawing from the external world, because this unity within us is what brings unity to the world. The spirit of one’s unique li brings harmony to the entire world as the tool, so to speak, of the indescribable Tao. Once our conditioning is out of the way of Tao, the peace residing deep within us knows nothing other than trust, because that is the acknowledgment of unity.
It is the feeling of oneness that we really seek—a feeling of oneness within ourselves that is never disturbed by the fluctuations of life in the outside world. When we are disturbed, we lose sight of our innate love. We never truly love the world in this way, because we condemn it on the basis of our own conditioning. The only way to truly love the world is to trust it with a trust that cannot be moved by the deluded mind. Trust is the validation that the universe is one and that you do belong.
We have built doctrine after doctrine in trying to explain the universe and our relationship to it. But these attempts are intellectual pursuits rather than a direct experience of unity. In our overemphasis on the intellect, we have lost sight of the beauty of life, which stands beyond reason. Religion attempts to intellectualize God, philosophy attempts to intellectualize the universe, psychology attempts to intellectualize the mind, and with all this we destroy the world in trying to give it meaning for our puny intellects. God, universe, and mind are all conceptual. Yet they are referring to the transcendent, that which is beyond time and space (although it includes time and space). The problem in our world is that we get stuck to the intellectual meaning. From this we build our idea of the world, which exists only in the realm of names and form. This state of perception discounts the inner world; as a result, our planet is in a constant war among peoples of supposedly different nations, religions, races, and genders. These catastrophic results stem from the fact that our explanations always come from a separatist point of view. How could we explain such things as God, the universe, or the mind from a conditioned perspective?
We are constantly attempting to measure the immeasurable. It is impossible to explain categorically why trust opens the feeling of oneness within. Being the mere humans that we are, there are just some things that we can never explain, and this is precisely the point of self-realization. We can’t intellectually explain why trust is the way of unity, but we can confirm this in our own experience. If we were sincere in living wu-wei, we would understand the truth of unity through our trust in life taking its own course.
It is impossible to explain the Tao, trust, and oneness in Taoist wisdom. It is very much like the Buddhist doctrine of the Four Invisibles. Alan Watts states in The Way of Zen:
The Buddhist doctrine of the “Four Invisibles” is that the Void (sunya) is to a Buddha as water to a fish, air to a man, and the nature of things to the deluded—beyond conception.
It should be obvious that what we are, most substantially and fundamentally, will never be a distinct object of knowledge. Whatever we can know—life and death, light and darkness, solid and empty—will be the relative aspects of something as inconceivable as the color of space. Awakening is not to know what this reality is.2
Intellectually knowing about trust and oneness misses the essence of the experience, because these two are both dissected as relative aspects of an absolute reality. The union with the Tao is only known as a living reality when the so-called relative aspects have dissolved into their original oneness. The sense of unity that we seek to discover can never be something that we could theorize or speculate upon. As I have mentioned, the very use of language itself is isolated to the field of duality, so all the investigations of religion, philosophy, and science are futile if they ignore consciousness in giving preference to intellectual study.
The Eastern wisdom traditions, especially Taoism and Zen Buddhism, seek to eradicate any such intellectual debate or speculation, because they know that a trust in self and life leads to the unexplainable peace of oneness. A Chinese Zen master of the ninth century CE, Tung-shan Shou-ch’u, was once asked, “What is the Buddha?” and he spontaneously answered, “Three pounds of flax.” Many philosophical debates have been hatched about the meaning of this reply but fall short of the mark. From the Zen perspective, Tung-shan was bringing the questioner into the reality of the now moment. The irrational answer of “three pounds of flax” extinguishes any idea of intellectual theorizing and speculation, which is the sole purpose of any great Zen koan (koan is a Japanese word for a problem or riddle that admits no logical solution). A koan is a story, dialogue, statement, and ultimately a riddle, which is used in Zen practice to provoke great doubt in the student’s mind as a way of testing his progress. One of the oldest koans can be found in the Chuang-tzu text, and this is why some scholars believe Zen Buddhism is a tradition built in part on Chuang-tzu’s wisdom. In this passage he uses complete nonsense to puzzle our intellectual faculties so that we stand back in awe and are brought back to the ground of the irrational impartiality of life:
There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing.3
Wow! Trying to make sense of such a passage is impossible—and that’s precisely the point. Actually, Chuang-tzu is using humor in this passage, because even in his day people tried to use logic to understand the meaning of the universe and our existence, only to arrive at erroneous conclusions.
Koans are famously employed by Zen masters to throw disciples back into the present moment, where process has no beginning or end because thinking has completely succumbed to the irrational.
One such encounter with a koan is described in a story in which a disciple was summoned to the Zen master’s home. The master told the disciple that he wanted an exhibition of Zen tomorrow. Leaving the master’s quarters, the disciple was confused about how he could put together such an exhibition. That whole night he tossed and turned in bed, anxious about how to please the master. The next day, on the way to the master’s home, the disciple was still fretting about the problem when he saw a frog that is unique to Japan. “Aha!” he thought, and he took the frog to the master’s house. When he arrived, the master asked, “So can you exhibit Zen to me?” In reply, the disciple showed him the frog. The master gave a slight smirk and said, “No, too intellectual.” In other words, his exhibition was too contrived, too well thought out. The very thinking about it thwarted the project. To answer the master somewhat authentically in this regard requires no thinking, as Zen is the natural spontaneity of the universe in the eternal now. So to exhibit Zen is not to worry about it, because Zen is life.
When we try to give a logical, intellectual explanation to such a reality as trust, we lose sight of its significance in our own experience. Many masters past and present, such as Tung-shan Shou-ch’u and Chuang-tzu, have had no time for philosophical debate about the reality of Tao. They would rather give you a direct experience of it so you can taste it for yourself.
When we step outside of all the learning we cling to, we come back into that sense of unity. It is the individual’s choice whether or not to live wu-wei, as this depends on no external source. To retreat from external compulsion is a gesture in favor of trust, because no outside source of learning can take away your innate connection to the universe. The peace that resides in the unity of trust allows the individual to harmonize with the world. This not only brings the light of Tao into the world but also guides and helps the individual along their journey through life. When we trust, the universe answers us through the resonance of our experience. The feeling of oneness brings the individual back into accord with the function of the universe, like a child nourished by its mother’s bosom.
TRUST, AND THE UNIVERSE IS YOUR BODY
When we trust completely, our physical, mental, and spiritual planes of consciousness harmonize with the heartbeat of the Earth. When we have cleared the passage for Tao to function through us with its natural velocity, the rhythms of our bodily functions and vibrations of our mental states move as an extension of the Earth.
A perfect example of this complete trust and harmony with the planet is the Kon-Tiki expedition of Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl in 1947. In this amazing story Heyerdahl and his crew drifted on a balsa-wood raft from Peru out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. From a logical perspective, this attempt to just drift into the vastness of the Pacific would appear suicidal. But somehow, in true Taoist wisdom, Heyerdahl had a trust that his own organism and the ecosystem of the Pacific would harmonize together as one if they were given the time to do so.
Without exercising the use of force, Heyerdahl’s trust that he and the ocean were a unified system allowed the power of te to manifest. As he and his crew drifted into the unknown, the balsa wood of the raft began to swell up and bind the logs together more securely, which gave their raft the durability to take on the tough conditions of the Pacific Ocean. The issue of food was another obstacle to overcome. Yet astonishingly, as a result of their complete trust, flying fish were on their deck every morning.
Rejecting the fear of the unknown, Heyerdahl and his crew began to replicate the intelligence of dolphins, because they were in perfect harmony with the course of nature by following the path of least resistance. The trust in following the path of least resistance is the power of te, which is a reflection of how the power of lightning follows the path of least resistance and also of how the Tao works through an empty mind. A full mind is resistant. In the Kon-Tiki adventure, Heyerdahl’s trust was answered by what we would deem miraculous events. Yet from the wisdom of sages like Lao-tzu, these events would make perfect sense, because our organism is an intrinsic part of nature. Astonishingly, as Heyerdahl continued to follow the ocean’s natural rhythms, he and his crew drifted 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) from Peru all the way to the distant islands of the Tuamotus of French Polynesia in the South Pacific.
Heyerdahl’s trust made him an aperture through which the universe could express its nature. His trust, though it may appear extreme, was the feeling of unity he had within by living wu-wei sincerely. In denying the use of force, Heyerdahl demonstrates how the power of te can change the world without any intention of doing so. When we oppose our own experience and try to control life, we develop an unnecessary anxiety within ourselves, because we fear the uncertainty of the future. We attempt to dictate to the future through our plans, and though these plans may be good in theory, they are in reality phantoms and distractions from the unity that can be found in trust.
Thor Heyerdahl is an example of what each and every one of us can live by if we are radical enough to throw off our fears of the past and future and instead live completely in the here and now. Our intentions to change the world are the result of humanity separating itself from the here and now. But it is only when we can be completely present in the here and now that we will know what is best for the future. Trust and unity arise in the crystalline clarity of stillness. Our movement out of this state tends to make us suspicious of the world. As a result, we fall into the average state of mind, which is constantly rearranging the pieces of the puzzle to try and somehow make sense of the world according to its conditioning.
All of our intentions to change the world are fundamentally flawed, because the very intention to change the world implies that we do not trust the world. The unnatural systems of government and politics are built on this lack of trust. Their primary intention is to change the world according to their agenda.
Government and politics are erroneously thought of as instruments to bring unity to the world, but the very essence of both is designed on the premise of a world divided. Anarchy and revolution are also flawed, because they arise from the idea of opposing the status quo with yet another agenda of changing the world. This perception of the world, which we have all adopted, is a step in the wrong direction. We believe that we need to work toward unity, yet our intentions are plagued by ours and others’ conditioned isolation. How could we work toward a unity that is already innate in our nature? The unity we seek is already there, but it is only revealed when we trust the world.
Changing the world in the hope of discovering unity is like a knife trying to cut itself. How can we search for something that is already there? Unity can only come from trust. Thor Heyerdahl had no intention to reach any particular destination; thus he reached where he was meant to go with no forethought or preplanning. His trust was his strength, and the guidance that led him on his journey was his union with the universe responding to his basic needs.
In any attempt to change the world, we destroy the world, because the very intention to change something is built on the illusion of separation. Organized religion is a good example of this process, because many religions make people feel separate from God. In feeling separate from God, we are taught that we should pray. But the very act of prayer is, to a degree, a lack of trust in God. When we pray, no matter how morally elevated our prayers may be, we are trying to force God’s hand in order to satisfy our conditioning and pleasures (unless the prayer is in selfless gratitude to the All). We arrogantly try to deny the destiny that is mapped out for us through praying that nothing unpleasant happens to us. To force God to your will in prayer is to lack trust in God. We are trying to change the world’s circumstances according to our own beliefs and preferences.
We will never experience the harmony with all life that Thor Heyerdahl felt if we continue to exhibit a lack of trust in any part of life. Trust and oneness are verified when we completely let go of ourselves and let the Way of the Tao guide our life. But this guidance can never come if you are anxious to change the world or force God’s hand. Our intentions for life and ourselves are the very motive that distorts the future. Attempting to force God’s hand with prayer is the same as trying to change the world, because both acts destroy the world. But the world destroyed in the act of praying is the world within yourself, as you incorrectly assume that you are alien to this universe.
Trust and unity come to those who do not experience the world with the filters of conditioning in their minds. Peace on Earth can prevail if we can individually follow our own paths in life with no resistance to the unfoldment of the Tao, which will surely soften our hearts. It is when we force our lives to be a certain way that we are blind to where the Tao is guiding us. The language of the Tao can only be known when all operations of force have ceased within the psyche. The true power of te, virtue, comes into its own when control and force have ceased within our minds. The trust that abides within us, though it is often veiled by our conditioning, is what will allow the naturalness of the Tao to unfold on our planet. But if we are not attuned to that trust, we will not be able to read the signs leading us to our fate.