The Easy Way

Scott Bradley

It is easy to wipe away your footprints, but difficult to walk without touching the ground. It is easy to use deception when you are sent into activity at the behest of other humans, but difficult to use deception when you are sent into activity by Heaven.
(Zhuangzi, 4:10; Ziporyn)

I follow a path that I call The Simple Way, the simple realization that no path need be followed, since all is already complete. There is nothing to achieve, since there is no gap between One and not-One. In the context of the inclination to judge and consequentially condemn on the basis of failure to achieve, I understand this as "there are no conditions to meet". Completion is already true of all that is. All is well.

This is just a point of view, a perspective by which to realize peace in the present irrespective of an inability to be at peace in general. It is a way to forego striving so as to be able to experience that for which I would otherwise only strive. All that is required is a suspension of the tyranny of right and wrong. Free of this attribute of the "understanding consciousness", that which was strived for and could not be achieved by virtue of the striving, is fulfilled. For though not-One is also One, the more One that one can experience, the more peace one has. And this, I believe, is a worthy value.

This Simple Way might be compared profitably to the Easy Way. The Easy Way is that which deceives itself; it says that all is well and then covers the tracks of its unwellness. The Simple Way, to be honest and true, does not pretend to existentially be what it is not; it acknowledges the mess, even while affirming that every mess is Dao. This tension does not resolve itself to a logical formulation; as I so often say, life and reality do not resolve to logical explanations.

It would be easy enough, writing here, to wipe out traces of my not-Oneness and pretend that I walk without touching the ground, but that would be hypocrisy. And what bothers me most about hypocrisy is not that I would be deceiving you, but that I would be deceiving myself. And that would be to lose the Whetstone of Heaven by which growth is made possible.

You can check out Scott's writings on Zhuangzi here.