Let’s suppose that you have some difficult and distressing habit, like drinking too much. You’re assured that once you’ve become a victim of this habit, it’s an extraordinary thing to get rid of it and it requires intense willpower. And so that kills you right off. You’re a dead duck! It’s as if you had said to the devil one morning, “I’m going to get rid of you. I’m not going to have anything to do with you anymore.” So the devil, who is an archangel and is terribly clever, is all set for you. And because he knows you’re getting out of his way, he surrounds you with greater temptations than you ever imagined. If you’re going to outwit the devil, it’s terribly important that you don’t give him any advanced notice.
This is where the work of the sly man comes in. Put in Buddhism or Hindu terms, liberation is getting out of the toils of karma. Before you can be liberated, you have to pay off your karmic debts and so the moment you set your foot on the path of liberation you’re apt to find that all your karmic creditors come to your door. And that’s why it’s been said that people who start out on a serious work of yoga, suddenly get sick and lose their money and their best friends drop dead and all sort of dreadful things happen to them. That’s because they served notice they were going to do this and so all the creditors came around. If you’re going to leave town and you owe lots of money, you mustn’t announce that you’re leaving or give a farewell party to your friends because the grocer will find out. So the art of the sly man is to make no contest, but simply to leave. Without one word. In other words, that’s the meaning of Wu Wei… not to interfere, not to force things. In this respect, you are your own worst enemy. Because, even if you serve notice privately on yourself, that suddenly you’re going to drop it all, already the devil knows… because who do you think the devil is?
Now this lies behind the whole problem that is discussed in the book “Zen and the art of archery”: The necessity of letting go of the bowstring without first having decided to do so. Another way of putting it, the decision to release the bowstring and the action of doing so must be simultaneous. Why is this? If you’re going to be an expert archer, you must shoot before you think; otherwise it will be too late. You don’t aim then shoot; it’s all one action. That puts up a very curious problem that in its own terms becomes a bind: To try not to decide first… and that is an impossible problem.
How can I decide not to decide? How can I make an announcement that I won’t be making an announcement without making an announcement? There is no way out of that bind. Try as you may, you’ll go on and on and on… trying… as Harigle did to release the bowstring without thinking first to release it. But then strangely enough one day the thing happened… he did it. We work and work to achieve that final point of perfection and it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come, and then one day it happens. What is the reason for that? It is not that we have practiced it so often that it suddenly becomes perfect, it is much more subtle than that. What happens is we practice so much that we find out we can’t do it. And it happens at the moment you know you can’t do it. When you reach a certain despair. You come to a point called “don’t care.” You stop trying… and you stop not-trying (trying to get it that way)…your decision, your will doesn’t have any part in the thing at all. And that’s what you needed to know. You’ve overcome the illusion of having a separate ego.
If I say I’m going to get rid of my ego, that’s what the taoists call “beating a drum in search of a fugitive.” He hears you coming. The illusion is having a separate will and a separate eye-center that can be an effective agent that cannot be overcome by a decision that seems to be centered in the ego. You may as well fight fire with fire. It can come only when an attempt to act from the ego center has been revealed to be completely futile because you’ve really discovered that it was an illusion.
Now, be careful how you formulate this philosophically. This could correspond to the sort of person who feels unafraid and he feels very free because he is a complete fatalist. A lot of people are and are very happy in their fatalism. They feel they don’t do anything and it just happens to them. They won’t die until it’s time to die so why worry? That’s too passive. That is, he has felt that there is still some kind of little differentiation between himself as the experiencer on the one hand and force or set of forces called fate on the other. He is pushed around, but he witnesses being pushed around. In this state he still has a little impurity left… and that is the sensation of being pushed around. There is still a fundamental division between the knower and the known. In this case, the fatalist case, the knower seems to be the passive thing and everything known, the objective world, appears to be the active end.
The important thing to find out is this: That the sensation of being the knower and the experiencer of all this, is not, as it were, aside from everything else that’s going on, but it’s part of it. Although you experience your existence subjectively, you are nevertheless part of the external world. You are in my external world just as I am in your external world. So in this way, the final barrier between the knower and the known is broken down. There is nobody being carried along by fate; there is just the process… and all that you are is part of the process.
He experiences no longer a passive relationship to the world, he simply sees that all that he is and all that he ever was, was something that the entire process was doing. At the time, when he felt himself to be separate, he sees in a certain way that that was just what he should have felt because that was what the process was doing in him, in exactly the same way as it was giving him brown or blue eyes. And that’s going through the door and turning round to see there was no door. You’re not fated, you’re not trapped because there’s nobody in the trap.