Essay Edition
Foundations of Effortless Action
There is a term in Chinese. It comes from Lao Tzu and Taoism. It is called Wu Wei. Wu means without; Wei means action. Wu Wei means without action, and it is an esoteric topic in spirituality that is somewhat elusive to grasp because it does not simply mean to do nothing.
We cannot do nothing. There is no such thing as doing nothing. The universe is constantly happening. The movements of the universe are one cause of this transmutation. Everything is a cause of everything else. Even when we are doing nothing, biological mechanisms are still moving. The heat from our body is still interacting with the environment.
Wu Wei is effortlessness. There is another word for it: spontaneity. Implicit in Wu Wei is the spontaneity of choicelessness, to act without crossroads, without a division between this and that. Spontaneity means that the actions are taken without premeditation. There is a choicelessness.
Implicit in Wu Wei is also nonresistance. We move around the obstacles, like a river moves around a piece of land or a tree. Wu Wei is powerful because, in Wu Wei, we do not dissipate energy in resistance. Every moment is an opportunity, and in its uniqueness, it is complemented by a perfectly aligned response. Therefore, destiny becomes an unfolding that is revealed before us as we watch ourselves act without action, without resistance, from silence.
Mathematics can be done this way. One can give a sermon this way.
Wu Wei has an implicit positivity. Everything is an opportunity. A large class has its benefits. A small class has its benefits. One sees the best in things and uses it to their advantage.
There is an element of trust and faith that one is dealt a hand of cards, and in that hand, they may be prompted to bluff in poker because the hand does not have very good cards, or they may use the good cards in the hand.
The spontaneity of this effortless action requires listening. One must get out of the way and act without self-consciousness, without decision. Decisions are revealed from moment to moment, and one is both rich and poor. Poor in the sense that they carry very little; rich in the sense that they have everything they need. It comes through them in the moment, and this allows them to respond precisely to the needs of the moment, which can never be a conformity to a pattern established in the past.
When we act with spontaneity, it is essential that we feel that it is not us acting. It is not even the universe acting through us, but that we are the cosmic body in its totality, acting as one with all, on behalf of all. Therefore, we are love.
We are both the silence and eternality behind transmutation, and we are the unity within the multifarious myriad of forms expressed as transient manifestation.
Energy, Power, and Practice
It is important to recognize that resistance is the dissipation of energy, and effort is a form of resistance. In Wu Wei, we have patience. There is the patience to wait and act when the timing is right.
Because of this acceptance and lack of resistance, the heart expands energetically. There is a kundalini transformation, the qi. The qi will literally expand. To become the universe, the heart has to accept the universe. This is the energetic mechanism. When I stop resisting, my heart dantian, the central dantian, expands.
The individual who possesses Wu Wei is perceived by the subtle observer as powerful. They may be gentle and quiet, graceful, soft-spoken, but one who sees recognizes the power of poise, the power of self-command. Or perhaps a better way to say it is freedom from selfhood.
One can practice Wu Wei as a way of life. In fact, that is exactly what Lao Tzu calls his book, The Way of Life. It is an ancient manuscript, thousands of years old. We can practice this as a way of life, and when we live by this, we become masters of it. Every action, every moment can be an exercise in our commitment to Wu Wei.
One will practice Wu Wei when they understand its benefits. Without it, we are dissipating energy. We are resisting destiny.
A prerequisite to Wu Wei is the bliss of being. In order to really embrace it, one must fall in love with silence. Fall in love with love, the energy, being blissful in the moment.
One is no longer completing themselves. There is some imposed sense of insufficiency. Therefore, they have the freedom to act as the moment necessitates, not on behalf of their own limitation, but on behalf of their freedom, as a movement within the concurrence of the whole.
Wu Wei can be a way of life, and we can practice it in our challenges, in our daily activities, in our interrelationships with others. We can make sure to keep it with us as our guide as we pursue our goals. We most definitely can use it in mathematics.
A good example and formal practice of Wu Wei, if one would be willing to practice mathematics, is to recognize that it is not up to us to see the answer to an equation. Silence reveals it when we stop dissipating the energy and accept our state of unknowingness until it unfolds into higher degrees of knowingness.
Mathematically speaking, we can take this mathematical inquiry into a more generalized contemplation. Whatever it is that we may be contemplating, we can apply Wu Wei, the effortless nondoing of spontaneity, spontaneity in thought. You could be contemplating mathematics, Wu Wei, or your business.
It is paramount that we see the correct course of action, and Wu Wei is a state of seeing in the moment what must be done. There is a great deal of intelligence associated with it.
Energetically, we increase our power. The river is perhaps deep and swift, but it adapts to the terrain, and it has a great deal of power, immense power, like the ocean. Thousands upon thousands of gallons of water flowing, unstoppable by any tree, animal, or landmass. It will flow to the ocean.
When we do not give away our power and adapt like that river, like water, we build, in a very real metaphysical sense, power within us. We stop giving it away, sacrificing it in exchange for some little desire, and we let the great desire of the universe become our own.
Presence, Community, and Freedom
Wu Wei is probably not that popular because when you look at the outer packaging, it says you are not going to get what you want. But when you read the fine print, it says you do not know what you want. You are going to get what you actually want.
Most people are so ensnared in their idea of what they must become or what they are that they do not get the blessing of what they want to become and what they want to be in the moment. They do not know what is possible.
Dispassion and detachment come from a great deal of richness, when one no longer cares because they are so rich. Cosmic absorption. Bliss. Beauty. Love.
Whatever we receive is always through the moment. It has the stamp of reality. The future and the past are just mere imagination projections stored in brain cells, or some other form of cognition and its mechanisms. But the now is where substance and joy really occur, the substance of joy.
It helps to have sangha, to be still together. In a world of people who are caught in becoming, it is hard to step out as a solitary practitioner. As we sit together, we consecrate ourselves to the silence, and we make it more accessible to each other.
A river does not flow as a single drop. It flows when one mountain stream meets another mountain stream, and another, until its mass is so much that it must flow through any obstacle. We are mountain streams, and we can become a river ourselves. But we must break free from the momentum and inertia of humanity to do so.
Lao Tzu, as far as I understand, lived in nature, and he stepped away from humanity, where it was easier to practice these principles. We must create the correct conditions, whether through sangha, seclusion and solitude, nature, or any other form that works for us, to do something paramount: to retain our power, which we need to maintain our freedom, so we can stay liberated from form and connected to formlessness.
Meditation and Inner Transformation
In Wu Wei, there is an art to doing less. Less explanation. Less is more. We just begin.
Meditate on Wu Wei. Meditation is not a doing. Let it dawn upon you. Give away becoming.
You are poise and power, beauty and silence. As you meditate, continue to move through the planes of light, shedding layer by layer of density until you bask in luminosity.
The fluidity. The energy.
Wu Wei opens the doors, the planes of light, power. Purify yourself of the residual impressions. To become that mountain stream, you must melt the solidity of form. Flow.
A central part of Wu Wei is heart. There is an ambient power everywhere.
How valuable is this practice, to have an uncaused happiness and unobscured perception?
Full Transcript
Foundations of Effortless Action
Adam Wes Hi, Andrea.
It's just the two of us.
Andrea P Yes, everyone is busy.
Adam Wes Yeah.
There's a term in Chinese. It comes from Lao Tzu and Taoism. It's called Wu Wei. It means "without action," and it's an esoteric topic in spirituality that is somewhat elusive to grasp because it doesn't simply mean to do nothing.
We can't do nothing. There's no such thing as doing nothing. The universe is constantly happening. The movements of the universe are one cause of this transmutation. Everything is a cause to everything else. Even when we're doing nothing, biological mechanisms are still moving. The heat from our body is still interacting with the environment.
So, Wu Wei: effortlessness. There's another word for it, spontaneity. It means Wu, "without," Wei, "action." Wu Wei.
Today, we're going to learn a little bit more about what that term means, a more esoteric understanding of it, and really connect with the subtlety so that it can become a powerful force in our life, because it's very powerful.
Silence is a form of action. I can feel the degree to which you're listening to the silence that I'm speaking, the lack of giving it your attention, and the moments where you do.
Implicit in Wu Wei is the spontaneity of choicelessness, to act without crossroads, without a division between this and that. Spontaneity means that the actions are taken without premeditation. There's a choicelessness.
Implicit in Wu Wei is also nonresistance. We move around the obstacles, like a river moves around a piece of land or a tree.
Wu Wei is powerful because, in Wu Wei, we do not dissipate energy in resistance. Every moment is an opportunity, and in its uniqueness, it's complemented by a perfectly aligned response. Therefore, destiny becomes an unfolding that is revealed before us as we watch ourselves act without action, without resistance, from silence.
Mathematics can be done this way. One can give a sermon this way, as I'm doing now.
Wu Wei has an implicit positivity. Everything is an opportunity. A large class has its benefits. A small class has its benefits. One sees the best in things and uses it to their advantage.
There's an element of trust and faith that one is dealt a hand of cards, and in that hand, they may be prompted to bluff in poker because the hand does not have very good cards, or they may use the good cards in the hand.
The spontaneity of this effortless action requires listening. One must get out of the way and act without self-consciousness, without decision. Decisions are revealed from moment to moment, and one is both rich and poor. Poor in the sense that they carry very little; rich in the sense that they have everything they need. It comes through them in the moment, and this allows them to respond precisely to the needs of the moment, which can never be a conformity to a pattern established in the past.
When we act with spontaneity, it's essential that we feel that it is not us acting. It is not even the universe acting through us, but that we are the cosmic body in its totality, acting as one with all, on behalf of all. Therefore, we are love.
We are both the silence and eternality behind transmutation, and we are the unity within the multifarious myriad of forms expressed as transient manifestation.
Energy, Power, and Practice
It's important to recognize that resistance is the dissipation of energy, and effort is a form of resistance. In Wu Wei, we have patience. There's the patience to wait and act when the timing is right.
Because of this acceptance and lack of resistance, the heart expands energetically. There's a kundalini transformation, the qi. Since we're talking about Wu Wei, we can talk about qi here. Different paradigm.
The qi will literally expand. To become the universe, the heart has to accept the universe. This is the energetic mechanism. When I stop resisting, my heart dantian, the central dantian, expands.
The individual who possesses Wu Wei is perceived by the subtle observer as powerful. They may be gentle and quiet, graceful, soft-spoken, but one who sees recognizes the power of poise, the power of self-command. Or perhaps a better way to say it is freedom from selfhood.
One can practice Wu Wei as a way of life. In fact, that's exactly what Lao Tzu calls his book, The Way of Life, which I'm holding up here. Andrea?
Lao Tzu's book, The Way of Life, is an ancient manuscript, thousands of years old. So we can practice this as a way of life, and when we live by this, we become masters of it. Every action, every moment can be an exercise in our commitment to Wu Wei.
One will practice Wu Wei when they understand its benefits. Without it, we're dissipating energy. We're resisting destiny.
A prerequisite to Wu Wei is the bliss of being. In order to really embrace it, one must fall in love with silence. Fall in love with love, the energy, being blissful in the moment.
One is no longer completing themselves. There's some imposed sense of insufficiency. Therefore, they have the freedom to act as the moment necessitates, not on behalf of their own limitation, but on behalf of their freedom, as a movement within the concurrence of the whole.
So Wu Wei can be a way of life, and we can practice it in our challenges, in our daily activities, in our interrelationships with others. We can make sure to keep it with us as our guide as we pursue our goals. We most definitely can use it in mathematics.
A good example and formal practice of Wu Wei, if one would be willing to practice mathematics, is to recognize that it's not up to us to see the answer to an equation. Silence reveals it when we stop dissipating the energy and accept our state of unknowingness until it unfolds into higher degrees of knowingness.
Mathematically speaking, we can take this mathematical inquiry into a more generalized contemplation. Whatever it is that we may be contemplating, we can apply Wu Wei, the effortless nondoing of spontaneity, spontaneity in thought. So you could be contemplating mathematics, Wu Wei, or your business.
But it is paramount that we see the correct course of action, and Wu Wei is a state of seeing in the moment what must be done. So there's a great deal of intelligence associated with it.
Energetically, we increase our power. The river is perhaps deep and swift, but it adapts to the terrain, and it has a great deal of power, immense power, like the ocean. Thousands upon thousands of gallons of water flowing, unstoppable by any tree, animal, or landmass. It will flow to the ocean.
So when we don't give away our power and adapt like that river, like water, this is the energy of water, we build, in a very real metaphysical sense, power within us. We stop giving it away, sacrificing it in exchange for some little desire, and we let the great desire of the universe become our own.
Presence, Community, and Freedom
It's probably not that popular because when you look at the outer packaging of Wu Wei, it says, "You're not going to get what you want." But when you read the fine print, it says, "You don't know what you want. You're going to get what you actually want."
Most people are so ensnared in their idea of what they must become or what they are that they don't get the blessing of, one, what they want to become, and two, what they want to be in the moment. They don't know what's possible.
Dispassion and detachment come from a great deal of richness, when one no longer cares because they are so rich. Cosmic absorption. Bliss. Beauty. Love.
Whatever we receive is always through the moment. It has the stamp of reality. The future and the past are just mere imagination projections stored in brain cells, or some other form of cognition and its mechanisms. But the now is where substance and joy really occur, the substance of joy.
It helps to have sangha, to be still together. In a world of people who are caught in becoming, it's hard to step out as a solitary practitioner. As we sit here together, we consecrate ourselves to the silence, and we make it more accessible to each other.
A river doesn't flow as a single drop. It flows when one mountain stream meets another mountain stream, and another, until its mass is so much that it must flow through any obstacle. So we are mountain streams, and we can become a river ourselves. But we must break free from the momentum and inertia of humanity to do so.
Lao Tzu, as far as I understand, lived in nature, and he stepped away from humanity, where it was easier to practice these principles. So we must create the correct conditions, whether it's through sangha, seclusion and solitude, nature, or any other form that works for us, to do something paramount, which is to retain our power, which we need. Spirit's wish for existence, to maintain our freedom, so we can stay liberated from form and connected to formlessness.
Meditation and Inner Transformation
So let's begin our meditation.
In Wu Wei, there's an art to doing less. Less explanation. Less is more. So we just begin.
As we meditate here, meditate on Wu Wei. Meditation is not a doing. Let it dawn upon you. Give away becoming.
You are poise and power, beauty and silence. As you meditate, continue to move through the planes of light, shedding layer by layer of density until you bask in luminosity.
The fluidity. The energy.
My life becomes more and more brilliant.
Wu Wei opens the doors, the planes of light, power. Purify yourself of the residual impressions. To become that mountain stream, you must melt the solidity of form. Flow.
A central part of Wu Wei is heart. There's an ambient power everywhere.
When you're ready, come out of the meditation into a new form of meditation.
How valuable is this practice, to have an uncaused happiness and unobscured perception?
Thank you for being here. Wonderful.
Reflections and Closing Discussion
Would you like to share, Ariella? We can't hear you yet.
AriellaShira L That was amazing. Hi.
Adam Wes It was a blessing for us.
AriellaShira L I had no idea where I was. I didn't even know I was meditating until you started to talk. Wonderful.
Adam Wes Beautiful. Wonderful. How did you like the discussion, the topic?
AriellaShira L Completely new to me. How do you spell Wu Wei?
Adam Wes W, U. W, E, I, I believe. I think it's E, I. It might be I, E. Wu Wei. I think it's W, U, W, E, I.
AriellaShira L I haven't heard of this before, so this is a whole new world for me. Thank you, thank you.
Adam Wes Thank you. How about you, David? Namaste, Ariella. Thanks for being here.
I felt like this was a great talk for you, like it would really resonate with your practice. You're embodying the energy of it quite a bit already, so I was happy to see that you arrived.
David P Yeah, this is very me.
Adam Wes Nice. You liked the music too, didn't you?
David P Yeah.
Adam Wes Yeah, I felt that.
David P I wanted to share that it's funny that you mention water, the oceans, and the river, because during my daily practice, the first thing I try to do is dissolve myself, right? Before sitting down and doing the specific meditation of the day, I always begin with this series of practices.
One of them is trying to just vanish, or to die, actually, to try to just die completely. Then, after a few of them, I focus on the feeling of being inside the water, like in an ocean. When you go to the sea, when you go to the beach, and you are inside the water that takes you here and there, you just let the water drag you, whatever.
That's the feeling I try to connect with, because it's immense, right? You can just feel the power of the ocean, the water.
Adam Wes The ocean of life.
David P It helps me connect with this greatness, right?
Adam Wes Yes. Greatness. Love it.
David P Yeah.
Adam Wes I love how you're describing it. Beautiful.
David P So I really connected with a lot of what you said.
Adam Wes There was a lot of power in the group today. I think it's very powerful, and I felt us bringing that together. It was wonderful. Well, thanks, David.
David P Thank you.
AriellaShira L Adam, will what you shared in the talk be available on the website?
Adam Wes Yeah, I'm planning to get them up. I'm a couple of weeks behind because I'm working on a new version of the processor, but I'll do it anyway with the old version today. Then you'll be able to read the whole essay.
AriellaShira L Yay.
Adam Wes That's a lot. You should reread it a few times.
AriellaShira L Yeah.
Adam Wes Thank you, Andrea. Andrea said, "It was beautiful. I have a terrible connection, but I will send you, Adam, a voice note." Thank you, Andrea. Thanks for being here.
I'm grateful for our sangha and coming together. This is a massive purification, to come together once a week like this. David's word, dissolution. It purifies, and then there's the ocean of light, the greatness, the power. It's not even ours, but we are it at the same time, and we become one with it. Beautiful. I love how you said that.
Perhaps you'll want to read The Way of Life by Lao Tzu, or even just read about Lao Tzu. Just look him up on Wikipedia.
AriellaShira L How do you spell that?
Adam Wes I'm not sure I even got through this book. L, A, O, T, Z, U. If I haven't read this, I need to finish it. It's like poetry. It's like poems. Maybe I need a different translation. Find a translation that resonates with you.
Thank you. All right, everybody, nice to see you. See you next time. Namaste.
AriellaShira L Where are your parents?
Adam Wes Oh, they were busy tonight. They'll be back next week. They're going to watch the recording, or at least my mom is. They're busy with some important things they had to attend to.
AriellaShira L Okay.
Adam Wes What did you say?
AriellaShira L That they're okay.
Adam Wes Oh, yeah, they're fine.
AriellaShira L I was worried.
Adam Wes No, they let me know last week they'd be busy. Well, and this morning. All right, bye!
AriellaShira L Bye. Thank you.
Adam Wes You're welcome.