Why You Need to Trust the Universe

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. 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 yuga, 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 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 intellectual, 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 the way, we would understand the truth of unity through our 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, shunya, 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. 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 and give 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 9th century CE, Dongshan Xiuqu, 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, Dongshan 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. 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 Zhuangzi text, and this is why some scholars believe Zen Buddhism is a tradition built in part on Zhuangzi'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 non-being. There is a not-yet-beginning to be non-being. There is a not-yet-beginning to be a not-yet-beginning to be non-being. Suddenly, there is non-being. Wow. Trying to make sense of such a passage is impossible, and that's precisely the point. Actually, Zhuangzi 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, Nope, 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 you 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 Dungshan Xiuqu and Zhuangzi, 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.