Nature

What I was trying to say in the Poetry posting below is that Nature is a plethora of possibility and that we choose our own path through this richness. The first chapter of the Tao Te Ching states that if your mind is full of success or failure then that is what will be realised – you'll either succeed or fail, but if your mind is empty then magic and miracle are allowed to fill the soft space you have created and take you beyond your imaginings and into your destiny. The problem is always how to create the empty mind. An empty mind is not a quiet mind. It is possible, through will, to quieten a hard mind full of opinion and conditioning. An empty mind is a natural one – one free of pressures – thoughts, ideas, opinions, habits, fears – that tend, through the illusion of free will, to draw a constrained and conditioned future to you. In a way the secret of life is to let your energy out as fully and as creatively as possible. What stops us from doing this is the mind – its workings are constantly creating a world of our own making – either a comfortable one or an uncomfortable one, an exciting one or a boring one, a happy one or an unhappy one. When the mind stops working in this dualistic expectant way then we have freedom – energetic interaction – in the sense that we constantly realise a little of all possibilities – or many of them – we travel forwards on a front rather than a line. The empty mind is bright and full of spirit so that it and your energy can dance, flit, from possibility to possibility and even between possibilities, and live a swirling richness that admits, accepts and creates a fullness that belies analysis or observation. When you come into contact with someone that lives like this then their very existence and presence is an act of compassion. They naturally share their richness. It is as though they lay down a carpet all around and beneath you that accepts and nourishes everything you are and do. They do not judge, or advise, or attempt to manipulate in any way. How can they? That would be using their constraining narrowing mind which no longer exists for them. Instead they are simply intensely present and intensely open, so open that they reveal other possibilities to you, ones your own tension has been preventing you from creating for yourself. They heal as a matter of course.

Another way of saying this is that compared to Nature there is a real paucity to the human mind and its creations, and that the purpose of softness is to remove the mind (and eventually the body as well) as much as possible so that Nature can come in and, if you like, take over for us.