The sense of the vast gulf between the ego and the world disappears and one's subjective inner life seems no longer to be separate from everything else, from one's total experience of the stream of nature.

Everything is the Tao' - an integrated, harmonious, and universal process from which it is absolutely impossible to deviate. This sensation is marvelous, to put it mildly, though there is no logical reason why it should be so, unless it is just through release from the chronic feeling of having to 'face' reality. For here one does not face life anymore; one simply is it.

The effect appears to be controlled passively by its cause only in so far as it is considered to be distinct from the cause. But if cause and effect are just the terms of a single act, there is neither controller nor controlled. Thus the feeling that action has to spring from necessity comes from thinking that the self is the centre of consciousness as distinct from the periphery.

For as the nonsense of the madman is a babble of words for its own fascination, the nonsense of nature and of the sage is the perception that the ultimate meaningless of the world contains the same hidden joy as its transience and emptiness.

If we seek the meaning in the past, the chain of cause and effect vanishes like the wake of a ship. If we seek it in the future, it fades out like the beam of a searchlight in the night sky. If we seek it in the present, it is as elusive as flying spray, and there is nothing to grasp. But when only the seeking remains and we seek to know what this is, it suddenly turns into the mountains and waters, the sky and the stars, sufficient to themselves with no one left to seek anything from them.

The fear that self-acceptance necessarily annihilates ethical judgment is groundless, for we are perfectly able to distinguish between up and down at any point on the earth's surface, realizing at the same time that there is no up and down in the larger framework of the cosmos. Self-acceptance is therefore the spiritual and psychological equivalent of space, a freedom of which does not annihilate distinctions but makes them possible.

Growth in philosophical understanding, or just plain wisdom, is always a matter of being able to distinguish between levels of truth, and frames of reference, at the same time being able to see one's own life in its intimate relation to these differing and ever more universal levels.

Indeed, the world is not unlike a vast Rorschach blot which we read according to our inner disposition, in such a way that our interpretations say far more about ourselves than about the blot.

[I]f we think of spirituality less in terms of what it avoids and more in terms of what it is positively, and if we may think of it as including an intense awareness of the inner identity of subject and object, man and the universe, there is no reason whatsoever why it should require the rejection of sexuality. On the contrary, this most intimate of relationships of the self with another would naturally become on of the chief spheres of spiritual insight and growth.