From The Way of Zen by Alan Watts ~
“All one’s intentional acts, desires, ideals, stratagems, are in vain. In the whole universe, within and without, there is nothing whereon to lay any hold, and no one to lay any hold on anything. This has been discovered through clear awareness of everything that seems to offer a solution – or to constitute a reliable reality – through the initiative wisdom called Prajna, which sees into the relational character of everything.
With the eye of Prajna, the human situation is seen for what it is: a quenching of thirst with saltwater. A pursuit of goals which simply require the pursuit of other goals. A clutching of objects which the swift course of time renders as insubstantial as mist.
The very one who pursues, who sees and knows and desires the inner subject, has his existence only in relation to the ephemeral objects of his pursuit. He sees that his grasp upon the world is his stranglehold about his own neck, the hold which is depriving him of the very life he so longs to attain. And there is no way out, no way of letting go which he can take by effort, by a decision of the will.
But who is it that wants to get out? There comes a moment when this consciousness of the inescapable trap, in which we are at once the trapper and the trapped, reaches a breaking point. One might almost say that it matures or ripens, and suddenly there is a ‘turning about’ in the deepest seed of consciousness. In this moment all sense of restraint drops away, and the cocoon which the silkworm spun around himself opens to let him go forth, winged as a moth.
It is now possible to live spontaneously without trying to be spontaneous.”
~ Alan Watts (The Way of Zen)
C.M. Rivers 