The Evil of Good and the Good of Evil, Part 1

“Evil is the Active Springing From Energy. Evil is Hell.”*

Montaigne and Blake - Music: Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson - Heaven and Hell & William Prince - Heaven and Hell

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*Subtitle taken from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake.

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Introducing The Marriage of Heaven and Job’s Shotgun Wedding to Hell 

From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Without Contraries [there] is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active, springing from Energy.

Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell

(plate 3, William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, my emphasis. For modern prints of Blake’s plates.)

Curious. Does Blake’s claim apply to the Book of Job? In Job Satan uses a reasonable argument, a heartless and cruel one, to convince — or some would say dupe — God to play with Job’s fidelity towards God. Jung suggests that it was the lack of consciousness in God that allowed the extremes of cruelty to be unfolded on Job by Satan. Furthermore Jung concludes that Job provided God with an expansion of consciousness, Blake’s ‘progression’, into the nature of suffering that the infinite nature of God did not experience before Job. I would still question the ability of ‘the infinite’ or infinity to experience or know suffering in the way that we humans experience it within the confines of the objective limitations of being a body alive with an expiry date. And this, some could argue and maybe have argued — I’m not a Biblical Scholar so I don’t know — gives a reasoned rationale for Christ’s incarnation: the tangible experience of life by God as, or at least one that encompassed suffering.

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Playlist

Spotify

YouTube contains music and readings of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Job, Answer to Job Uberboyo’s Nietzseche and a couple of other non-music videos for the super curious.

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Infinite Fractal - Music: Philip Glass - Einstein on the Beach - Train

I’m not sure that that argument would hold because of the many thousands of years gap between what might be the oldest book of the official Bible and Mary’s immaculate pregnancy.

And in this effort by Satan did Satan provide a ‘good’ in two interrelated ways? Satan indirectly expanded the infinite of God and that expansion was comprised of, perhaps, an initiation or increase of awareness of what is not infinite.

This of course has the language(?) problem that the infinite of an all-knowing God is without the ability to be expanded. So if God’s awareness was in some way expanded, then God is less than infinite and less than all-knowing. Or is it possible that there are limits and/or delimitations within the infinite, and God is one of them?

And the idea of God and Devil as a paired subset from the infinite corresponds, in a funny way, with the meditation practices of seeing the dualities of life as complementary, ie Blake’s ‘contraries’. And that those dualities, the fundamental principle of Taoism, are seen as necessary for there to be awareness of experience as they move through our lives even while we notice that we have the possibility to be unreactive to the complementary dyad. The experiences of the ebb and flow of Yin and Yang is both objective and subjective, in that we experience the effects and have within ourselves the ability to remain joyfully equanimous.

Now I find myself laughing because, really, does all that word-dancing really matter? Is it not really just a silly word-game that will not help the farmers grow the food we eat?

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I have seen in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred plowmen, wiser and happier than rectors of the university, and whom I would rather resemble. Learning, in my opinion, has a place among things necessary for life, like glory, nobility, dignity, or at best like beauty, riches, and such other qualities which are really useful for it, but remotely, and a little more in fancy than in nature.

We hardly need any more offices, rules, and laws of living, in our community than do the cranes and ants in theirs. And nevertheless we see that they conduct themselves in a very orderly manner without erudition. If man were wise, he would set the true price of each thing according as it was most useful and appropriate for his life.

If anyone will sum us up by our actions and conduct, a greater number of excellent men will be found among the ignorant than among the learned: I mean in every sort of virtue (p436, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters by Montaigne.)

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To Know Reason the Whore; and Evil and the Unconscious as Energy of Life 

Jung and Luther - Music: Lowell - Words Were the Wars

Luther

Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom (Martin Luther, Works, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142 my emphasis.) [Did Luther get triggered by Book of Job just before writing this?]

Jung

One is inclined to think that ego-consciousness is capable of assimilating the unconscious, at least one hopes that such a solution is possible. But unfortunately the unconscious really is unconscious; in other words, it is unknown. And how can you assimilate something unknown?

… 

[I]f we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed…. (Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by CG Jung my emphasis.)

And this suggests a ‘contrary’ that Blake did not include: Infinite and Defined. Once we have created the word ‘infinite’ very much like the word ‘unconscious’ the reasoning mind will gobble up that word-trap like it was something understandable simply because we gave it the word that reason can and will fornicate with, in Luther’s language. As Jung has said, paraphrased, the unconscious really is unconscious, meaning it is both unknown and not knowable. Giving it a word is rife with the potential for confusion.

And of course we have another contrary to add to Blake’s list: conscious and unconscious. Although I see that Jung’s concepts are really an interesting rephrasing of Blake’s Reason and Energy, in that “the unconscious is life” much like how Blake infers that “energy is life”. And that conscious is largely dependent on our ability to assimilate experiences of body and/or mind and with reason discourse about those experiences, even if to argue definitively that this or that is unreasonable or merely a dismissible subjectivity. And often compulsively we seek relaxation in our words — especially in the written and/or read — mostly deluded in our understanding that the words we use as a placeholder for the thing are actually the thing, not what we have consciously chosen them to be as simply their representatives. 

Following this line of reasoning we see that life is not knowable. This is not the same as the post-modernists, who have taken a similar train of reasoning — not the same — and instead of concluding that life is unknowable, they have nihilistically concluded that life is a meaningless collective of meaningless stories because the only thing objectively real is subjectivity and by their definition that means objective experience does not exist. They have used clever reason to conclude that that they know of what life is comprised. This is an extreme version of god-delusion, ie, the attempt to swallow the unconscious, in Jung’s language. And we see crazy woke delusion and insanity filling the God-emptied space in the minds of our educators, leaders and artists.

And this hints or points to the danger of ignoring just word games. Unchecked by pragmatic reality, the word games became the tools of woke and now we are cutting off the genitals of our children because of those games. We are being subjected to the word games of propaganda that are designed to constrict our freedoms under the guise of being reasonable. Many years ago I wrote that, so long as food is abundant and with our current state of mind, in particular those in power, collectively we will value words much more than food. Delusion knows no bounds, and is always the other person’s problem.

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 Really? So What? I’ll Get to That— Maybe

Yup. Blake’s claim that Evil is life and that life is energy is a kind of allusion to our conscious antipathy towards that which we do not and perhaps even cannot comprehend: what we don’t understand we can easily, and often or even usually, be put into the evil basket instead of opening our minds with curiosity. With the release of curiosity’s energy comes our ability and desire for an expanded engagement with life and the possibilities of error, the threat of change especially of changing our mind, and the ghostly spectre of future error. The assignment of baskets is the function of the moral codexes to which Blake refers that keeps our reason happy and our energy (evil/unconscious) suppressed, denied and/or avoided.

Today while I was cooking, eating and doing the dishes, my big break from writing this essay, I stumbled into an astounding synchronicity. By ‘chance’ I listened to some gonzo philosopher from Ireland, with the YouTube name Uberboyo. “Exploring Nietzsche's BRUTAL Criticism of Christianity”.

If you didn’t guess it by his name and this title, Uberboyo really likes Nietzsche! And in his talk he provided me with a delightfully energetic Nietzschean synchronicity with, of all imaginable things, this essay and William Blake! With his talk yet another of my mostly unquestioned perceptions has crumbled because Uberboyo elaborated the amazing depth of Nietzsche’s ideas that have been mostly misrepresented in our popular philosophical zeitgeist. Nietzsche is far more than just ‘God is dead’ and the ‘Superman’. I learned today that Nietzsche has expressed almost the exact same ideas about energy as life that Blake has. The similarity is so close that I wonder if Nietzsche was inspired by Blake because Nietzsche/Uberboyo also discusses how philosophical and spiritual codexes, such as the Bible and the cants of Aristotle and Plato were key factors in the fall of the Roman, Greek and Catholic ‘empires.’ How? Because

“Good is the passive that obeys Reason”.

The key is passive. The moral emphasis on ‘good’ is enervating and cannot survive the energetic demands of being alive in the physical universe. When the Gauls defeated Rome they had the energy life, and Rome had the enervation of too many ideas about what is good and evil. This is a great point, and it resonates with me at the somatic energetic level because with my practice I’ve come to know, somatically, that the real practice of yoga is to connect to the joyful energising foundation of life. “Energy is eternal delight!” (See ‘The Voice of the Devil’, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, below.) And I’ll add my own quip paraphrasing Luther, ’Reason is energy’s eternal blight’.

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So Why Don’t We Jump Up and Down With Our Energy to Connect to That Energy?

Because, Uberboyo says, life is hard! Not just hard, it is brutality hard in which animals, including humans, eat each other. And our cultural socialisation has been to want life to be different than what it is. Effectively, we are socialised by the soft wordiness of our codexes — mostly to keep us constrained and disconnected from our personal source of energy — to expect life and living to be something idyllic like the pre-shock kingdom that Siddhartha Gautama had before he experienced the beggar, the ill, the agéd and the dead. We love to wallow with enervating complaint and blame about anything and everything. And tend towards hanging onto, with a life-and-death grip, our childish obsessions to be returned to or delivered into Edenic, blissful, nirvanas in order to lazily sidestep the invitation from life to embrace it in its fullest expression that includes, difficulties, hardships and suffering. Uberboyo praises Gautama Buddha and Schopenhauer for being two of very few people who had the courage to openly fully face, and perhaps even embrace, the brutal nature of our physical existence. “You can’t handle the truth!” certainly applied to some or perhaps even many of Schopenhauer’s readers, who committed suicide after reading his full exposition of the ‘real’ truth of existence.

This is unlikely the only reason. My own personal experience from childhood and throughout much of my adult life, coming from my relationships around me, is that I needed to be kept small. Small and ‘safe’. And I had internalised that, of course, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, so that it was mostly invisible to me most of the time that I was making or keeping myself small.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking, so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others (Marianne Williamson, A Course in Miracles.)

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Now for a Little More Blake and his Beautiful Embracement of Life 

Blake The Voice of the Devil - Plate 4 - Music: John Prine - When I Get To Heaven

The Voice of the Devil (Plate 4)

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:

1. That Man has two real existing principles; Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, called

Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion

of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound

or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

(My emphasis.)

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The Nihilism Nietzsche Predicted with the Death of God is Not Nigh, It is Here

Uberboyo - Music: Shakira - Suerte (Whenever, Wherever)

Uberboyo

It’s all anti-life. [The gender wars and gender denial are real world examples, two of many, of the nihilism that Nietzsche predicted.] Look at it in its root. And it’s all anti-life, because life is hard on our egos, it’s hard on our souls. Life is hard on our freedom. To embrace life is to embrace restriction, embrace problems. Yes, you can identify as whatever gender you so wish, but the problem of life is that life imposes upon you a hand that [is yours to] play. [NB: I hear a small echo with Job’s experience, here.] It says that this is what you are. And you cannot decide anything else. You [are to] embrace this and make the most of this. The heroic journey for you, the will to power in you, is to see what you can do with this hand that [life has given to] you. But instead they [the woke moral reasoners and relativists] want to ignore that, they want to deny life, they want to escape that. They don’t want to embrace, they don’t want to affirm, like Nietzsche would tell you. Instead they want to run away, they want to go in a different direction. [And that direction is death, and Canada’s MAID program (Medically Assistance In Dying) epitomises the core foundation of woke ideology: death] (slightly edited, and my paraphrase of his comment about Canada being a (the?) leading supplier of body parts in the world.) 

To be a bit of Devil’s advocate, one could argue that choosing to remove genitalia to deny the physical reality of existence of yourself or of your children, is playing the hand you were given. How do we know when such brutality to the human is actually appropriate eccentric action? It is an awareness, perhaps even a wordless one, that that behaviour has created an actual perceivable expansion of freedom and energy. In other words, it expands life’s possibilities, creates space and the space for more energy in life, more life. It seems, by recent statistics that are starting to be released, that in most cases whatever anxieties were extant before the surgery and drugs haven’t be relieved. And often people regret the change and some, perhaps many, have begun turning to suicide. For my more detailed look at ‘eccentric appropriate action’ see:

Where Is The Middle Path When I’m Stuck in the Middle With Me?

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 The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move onward (p430, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig.)

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Revisit: the Intro to ‘The Evil of Good and the Good of Evil’

The Evil of Good and the Good of Evil, Introduction

When I wrote the introduction, I was curious about what others might say about the objective nature of ‘evil’. In response to my email query, Dave Oshana replied:

It depends how you feel unless you are an objectivist ;-)

To which I replied:

[LoL!] Yes! However, who isn't an objectivist? If we describe ourselves as a 'subjectivist' have we not objectified subjectivity?

Dave has tersely come to the heart of this ‘problem’ of so-called objective ‘Good and Evil’: much of it is a creation, accidental or not, that has been the result of misunderstanding the meaning of words, or, more strongly, the mistaken belief that words are a reliable means by which the truth of life can be investigated and determined. (Luther’s rant is really about this.) This goes straight to Blake’s point, that what the rational mind deems to be ‘good’ is to align one’s self with conformity and some form of subtle nihilism that has been coded as moral and sanctified by someone or something that is, often as not, a nihilistic authority figure or structure. OMG! That is convidiana! Perhaps the best definition I’ve seen.

I am not saying that objective experience doesn’t exist! I’m saying that the ability of words to describe it are at best problematic and at worst completely delusional and objectively harmfully. Our life in the time of convidiana has shown us more clearly to more people than perhaps ever before just how ‘true’ that ‘problem’ is: with the 150 years or so of very active media lies and propaganda, often words are being lobbed like bombs across an imaginary no-person land with the purpose to confine life and enervate the casualties who have managed to avoid dying unexpectedly. And both ‘sides’ of the so-called good-evil divide are doing the word-bombing and often their language contains similar expressions of fear and/or fear-mongering. One side ostensibly and even demonstrably doing ‘evil’, and the other the opposite.

How do we know for sure which side we are on, when known and unknown intentions have unknown future effects?

Is this current war of words a suggestion of the subjective nature of evil? Interesting. And yet, Matthew in Chapter Seven of the Bible suggests that evil can be tangibly objectively determined:

16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

(It is interesting that the tree that bore the apple of the truth about good and evil was not hewn down before it had ‘enlightened’ the initial humans. Does that infer that that fruit was a good thing?)

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Unblinded Seeing as the Cure and Prophylactic to ‘Objective’ Evil

And by all measure of unblinded seeing, many of us, not all of us, see the fruits in things like the media’s failed attempt to normalise SADS unlike how they successfully normalised SIDS — which most of us did not see. And like with SIDS, many do not see. Personally I’ve now had so many flashes of untruth being exposed that I no longer know for sure what I see as true or not. Instead of that having become a petard to hang myself on, I see it as an opportunity to exercise intuitively guided curiosity to simply see how expansively I can see and with that I have found that I have expanded in my mind and body and given my whole self space for the energy of life to flow where the curiosity goes.

Can evil exist objectively if subjectively people are unable to see it? Which is, in a sense, the whole problem of a tree falling without a witness to validate the sound it made. And what about the adage about evil growing when good people choose to not stop it when it is nascent? What if it simply isn’t seen? It would seem that convidiana is evidence that the unseen is objectively real because people were arrested, locked down, masked, shunned, forced into unpaid unemployment and even killed with the power of reasoned words spoken by codexed authorities. All objective experiences that many describe as embodiments or the fruits of evil. 

It is clear to me, especially after my own experiences with personal blindness to the objective truth of my obesity that I simply didn’t see XXXL shirt sizes nor even when my doctor yelled at me, to my face ‘You are obese, even by lax American standards!’ See

Blinded by Our Truth (Pt 1):

Is this, perhaps, what I’ve been struggling to uncover: objective evil grows all around us when we are unable and/or unwilling to see it? Or act on it?

Nope, nope, I don’t think that’s it. I think ‘objective’ evil isn’t what others are doing or even their fruits; objective ‘evil’ is to choose, consciously or not, to be blinded by the good-reasoned codex’s, whether ostensibly malevolent or benevolent, to turn down down down the brilliance of our inner light and to turn away from our absolute truth as energy which is eternal delight.

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Revoking Freedom with Misperception as ‘Evil’

For the last essay I suggested to Jasun Horsley that evil may be known by actions that knowingly create suffering. [Well, I just erased that lily-livered attempted definition!] Jasun called me on that, citing a dentist and a marriage being examples of knowingly creating suffering and so asked if that was evil. This refined my thinking of the definition I had given in the following way: the purpose of these known intentional sufferings are ultimately to expand freedom and energy in the life of the individuals and perhaps the community too. In the long run they are to expand freedom and space in some way in life. Whether they do or not is a different question. And in both cases, the people involved made a choice that they understood, rightly or wrongly, would in some way be a long term benefit: health and family.

And I seem stuck on a blah-blah train because this raises the conundrum of whether or not we can determine the ‘good’ or ‘evil’ intentions of people. Similar to Jasun’s raised concerned about my earlier use of knowing. If the WEFites and their climate-derangers firmly believe that they can save the planet by reducing the population and locking everyone into fifteen minute prison cities with friendly names, are they evil? Hmmmm. How do we know their real intentions? Are they all greed-stupefied dragons out to burn the community to steal all the wealth? Delusion, especially self-serving delusion, is very hard to see with honesty.

By my (now discarded) definition of ‘evil’ we could properly say not. By my recent discovered understanding, they certainly can because it is as plain as the chem-trailed rain in Spain, that those plans will not work. They do not see that they are looking to ‘fix’ life by removing from it freedom. The ending of movement is death; that is when movement stops. All the actions under convidiana have been restrictive ones to take away freedom of movement. Uberboyo, perhaps following Nietzsche, would describe all those actions as nihilistic, anti-life. 

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Anneke Lucas’ Perception of Evil

Anneke Lucas spent several years as a child who, after being dropped off by her mother, would be brutalised with Satanic rituals of torture, sexual assault and brainwashing. Somehow at some point early in the abuse she saw that the people who were abusing her were themselves victims of abuse and that what they were inflicting on her was their maladaptive and ineffectual method to assuage their own pain. She did not see them as evil, despite her direct experience of the fruits of their action. (See “Epoché #003 - Anneke Lucas with Brecht Arnaert”.)

Anneke’s bold statement describing her experiences and awareness, her power of seeing, confounds our language of good and evil! Because if the child-victim of these horrific tortures, that were done to her by people with foreknowledge and clear intention to produce long term suffering, does not see that the perpetrators were evil, then what is our ability to understand what evil is? Have we constricted our understanding? Or, more accurately, how have we restricted our understanding? And with that confinement of understanding, we have actually partaken in the evil. We have reduced the life-energy of expansion and expansiveness, and allowed our selves to reduce our ability to see the truths of objective life.

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Jasun’s interesting definition of evil:

If I had to define evil, I would say it has to do with what is anti-life, and that this has to do with the intentional distortion of reality.

Yes! With my addendum that the intentional distortion of reality is not the evil. The evil is how we continue to choose ways to deny or totally be blind to the distortions. Objective reality steadily shows itself to us, even though our life experiences and familial, community and educational process have all be stuffing our brains with the codex distortions. 

This of course aligns with much eastern yogic and other spiritual practices and teachers who suggest that Life is at its core and in all its particulars, regardless of what we think we perceive, love and joy. And in these practices often the first requirement to begin the process of ending confusion and samsara, to enter life as eternal energetic delight, is to properly see.

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Language; so Much Confusing Blah-Blah

It was with some hesitancy that I sat to write this. Another blah-blah on the nature of good and evil. Really? And yet my PS-RAP (intuitive muscle process) was very clear. Write this essay.

Sorry Jasun, I didn’t directly follow-up on my questioning of your argument. I ran out of time and space.

For me this has been a really tough exploration and worthwhile in several ways. I conclude with the observation that we are collectively self-perpetuating ‘evil’ by having fully adopted as true an arbitrary language of philosophy (one of Blake’s ‘evil’ codexes) that keeps us arguing about the ‘reality’ of evil, much as past Christian thinkers argued about the number of angels on the head of pin, all to keep our eyes off the earth, off our somatic, bodily, tangible physical reality that without effort or resentment or expectation they symbiotically support us in all ways.

Yoga is to come to the body. That seems, on the surface to be a preposterous statement. And yet who reading this thought something like ‘How else can I be?’ Our selves have been split in various ways and most commonly and effectively we have been actively split from our bodies. This has been an inculcated practice for likely millennia and now has very deep social and familial intergenerational roots.

Yoga is to integrate the mind-body-spirit system, to relax back to the objective reality of a now within which the body on earth chops wood and carries water, and dances in the kitchen to the smell of sautéed onions with tomatoes garlic and rosemary, perhaps ones we have grown.

And then the blah-blah falls away and we can fall into the peace of ourselves as one of nature’s natural things. And we become free from our blindness and imprisonment.

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To part 2

The Evil of Good and the Good of Evil, Part 2

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Playlist

Spotify

YouTube contains music and readings of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Job, Answer to Job Uberboyo’s Nietzseche and a couple of other non-music videos for the super curious.

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Song of the Essay

Sona Jobateh - Mamaké

Instead of Lyrics a sixth century Chan (Chinese Zen) Poem

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

If you wish to see the truth
then hold no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the deep meaning of things is not understood,
the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

The Way is perfect like vast space
where nothing is lacking and nothing in excess.
Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject
that we do not see the true nature of things.

Live neither in the entanglements of outer things,
nor in inner feelings of emptiness.
Be serene in the oneness of things and such
erroneous views will disappear by themselves.

When you try to stop activity by passivity
your very effort fills you with activity.
As long as you remain in one extreme or the other
you will never know Oneness.

Those who do not live in the single Way
fail in both activity and passivity,
assertion and denial.
To deny the reality of things
is to miss their reality;
To assert the emptiness of things
is to miss their reality.

The more you talk and think about it,
the further astray you wander from the truth.
Stop talking and thinking,
and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

To return to the root is to find meaning,
but to pursue appearances is to miss the source.
At the moment of inner enlightenment,
there is a going beyond appearance and emptiness.
The changes that appear to occur in the empty world
we call real only because of our ignorance.

Do not search for the truth;
only cease to cherish opinions.
do not remain in the dualistic state.
Avoid such pursuits carefully.
If there is even a trace of this and that,
of right and wrong,
the mind-essence will be lost in confusion.

Although all dualities come from the One,
do not be attached even to this One.
When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,
nothing in the world can offend.
And when a thing can no longer offend,
it ceases to exist in the old way.

When no discriminating thoughts arise,
the old mind ceases to exist.
When thought objects vanish,
the thinking-subject vanishes:
As when the mind vanishes, objects vanish.

Things are objects because of the subject (mind):
the mind (subject) is such because of things (object).
Understand the relativity of these two
and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness.
In this Emptiness the two are indistinguishable
and each contains in itself the whole world.
If you do not discriminate between coarse and fine
you will not be tempted to prejudice and opinion.

To live in the Great Way is neither easy nor difficult.
But those with limited views are fearful and irresolute:
the faster they hurry, the slower they go.
And clinging (attachment) cannot be limited:
Even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment
is to go astray. Just let things be in their own way
and there will be neither coming nor going.
Obey the nature of things (your own nature)
and you will walk freely and undisturbed.

When the thought is in bondage the truth is hidden
for everything is murky and unclear.
And the burdensome practice of judging
brings annoyance and weariness.
What benefit can be derived
from distinctions and separations?

If you wish to move in the One Way
do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas.
Indeed, to accept them fully
is identical with enlightenment.

The wise man strives to no goals
but the foolish man fetters himself.

There is one Dharma, not many.
Distinctions arise
from the clinging needs of the ignorant.
To seek Mind with the (discriminating) mind
is the greatest of all mistakes.

Rest and unrest derive from illusion;
with enlightenment
there is no liking and disliking.
All dualities come from ignorant inference.
They are like dreams or flowers in air –
foolish to try to grasp them.
Gain and loss, right and wrong,
such thoughts must
finally be abolished at once.

If the eye never sleeps,
all dreams will naturally cease.
If the mind makes no discriminations,
the ten thousand things are as they are,
of single essence.

To understand the mystery of this One-essence
is to be released from all entanglements.
When all things are seen equally
the timeless Self-essence is reached,
No comparisons or analogies are possible
in this causeless, relationless state.

Consider movement stationary
and the stationary in motion,
both movement and rest disappear.
When such dualities cease to exist
Oneness itself cannot exist.
To this ultimate finality,
no law or description applies.

For the unified mind in accord with the way
all self-centered striving ceases.
Doubts and irresolutions vanish
and life in true faith is possible.
With a single stroke we are freed from bondage:
Nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing.

All is empty, clear, self-illuminating,
with no exertion of the mind’s power.
Here thought, feeling,
knowledge and imagination are of no value.

In this world of suchness
there is neither self nor other-than-self.
To come directly into harmony with this reality
just say when doubt rises “not two”.
In this “not two” nothing is separate,
nothing is excluded.

No matter when or where,
enlightenment means entering this truth.
And this truth is beyond extension
or diminution in time and space:
In it a single thought is ten thousand years.

Emptiness here, emptiness there,
but the infinite universe
stands always before your eyes.
Infinitely large and infinitely small;
no difference, for definitions have vanished
and no boundaries are seen.

So too with Being and non-Being.
Don’t waste time in doubts and arguments
That have nothing to do with this.

One thing, all things,
move among and intermingle without distinction.
To live in this realization
is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.
To live in this faith is the road to non-duality,
because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.

Words!
The Way is beyond language,
for in it there is
no yesterday
no tomorrow
no today.
      —Seng T’san, the third Zen Patriarch my emphasis 

Seng T’san, who lived in the sixth century, was the third Chinese patriarch of Zen.
The poem attributed to him, the Hsin Hsin Ming, is one of the earliest and most influential Chan (Chinese Zen) writings, blending together Buddhist and Taoist teachings.