Gradual Change in Life: Sudden Insight and Gradual Transformation

I. Innate Wholeness, with No Need for Cultivation or Attainment

I like Zhuangzi, Mazu’s Chan Buddhism, humanism, and Marxism; they all share this foundation.

Every person has always existed unconditionally, complete and whole. All “conditions” are matters belonging to the outside world.

“How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness,” “Spiritual Practice Is a False Concept”

II. Sudden Awakening, Gradual Change

III. People Change Gradually, and the Pace of This Change Cannot Be Controlled

Hence, “Spiritual Practice Is a False Concept: Applying Effort Takes You Astray; Let Nature Take Its Course,” and “Accepting the Shadow Side”: accepting karmic obstructions.

Karmic obstructions are not only internal matters (trauma, defense mechanisms, the ego, and so on); they also include external karmic obstructions. For example, the end of an age of turmoil, a return to peace, national prosperity and public well-being, and economic cycles. Behind this is historical materialism.

IV. Respecting and Understanding Other People’s Gradual Change

“How People Change Others: Through Resonance with Their Intrinsic Nature, Rather Than Giving or Coercion”: wanting too badly to change others is like wanting too badly to burst their bubbles. It is craving and delusion. You believe you can easily burst the bubble and bring about change, so that the other person will no longer be troubled by it. But that bubble is a blood blister. Prick it, and there is pain, alarm, defense, and retaliation.

“The Story of Guo Tuotuo, the Tree Planter”: “They shake its roots to see how firmly or loosely they are set, and day by day the tree is further estranged from its nature. Though they say they love it, they are actually harming it.”

Psychological counselors, even more so, respect and understand people’s gradual change. They do not change people’s thinking, heighten their awareness, or impart understanding; rather, they offer acceptance, holding, and a resonance of confidence and light, allowing people to feel warmth and support, relaxation and love. This echo of energy repairs the client’s inner core; awareness increases, and some ways of thinking also change. In this process, people also become aware of many subtle and mysterious things, such as a faint sense of innate wholeness, or the possibility of change.

V. Sudden Awakening Is a Turning Point

Among life’s countless tiny turning points, one is sudden awakening. After experiencing innate wholeness for the umpteenth time, just as before, the brain finally becomes conscious of it too. Karmic obstructions no longer interfere so much with one’s libido and consciousness, and one recognizes this fact. It is like someone panicking as they drown in shallow water finally finding the bottom beneath their feet. Like someone who has lived for years under dark clouds seeing light through a gap. It turns out that the light of one’s intrinsic nature reaches everywhere; it is just that the dark clouds stretch far and wide, their mesh seemingly loose yet letting nothing through.

You realize that you have always been whole and beautiful, that you have always been a child of the universe, at one with its beauty.

This moment cannot be controlled, which is why spiritual practice is a false concept.

Just as life has milestones such as marriage, adulthood, and recovery from illness, this milestone is not something one can reach through effort or deliberately bring about. It is a turning point of qualitative change.

Or one could say that awakening to innate wholeness is the mind’s true coming of age.

VI. Can One Awaken Without “Spiritual Practice”?

Without spiritual practice, without having studied Zhuangzi, Chan Buddhism, or psychology, can one heal? Can one awaken? Clearly, one can. Among China’s billion-plus workers and peasants, countless people find contentment and an understanding of their destiny through life itself.

There is a milestone: “I have reached perfect joy and seek nothing more.” To stop seeking outwardly, to rest content in the present, with fewer karmic obstructions of greed, anger, and delusion—this is itself awakening. From then on, whether karmic obstructions or healing, wealth or poverty, success or hardship, all are outward appearances, all merely experiences.

“A New Hierarchy of Psychological Needs: Revising Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”

VII. What We Have Always Sought Outside Ourselves Is Not “Methods, Techniques, or Understanding,” but “Change”

And this change is minute, material, rooted in the depths of libido, systemic, a passage from quantitative to qualitative change, a natural falling away—the last shovelful of earth when digging a well, or the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.

We often try all sorts of things and change a little. We believe the change came from all that activity. In fact, it did not; the activity may have delayed the change.

It is like someone with a chronic illness who is very anxious, tries many folk remedies, and then improves a little, attributing the improvement to a particular remedy. In fact, they might have improved a little faster without taking those remedies.

Earlier essays: “Effort Is a False Concept” and “Spiritual Practice Is a False Concept”

The “best” direction for our attention is to stop seeking change and instead accept and face the present situation.

Our original nature is pure and will heal naturally.