How Can Ordinary People Experience Innate Wholeness?

Innate wholeness is the essence of Chan Buddhism, Zhuangzi, humanistic psychology, and existentialism, as well as a basic axiom of Marxism.

To experience innate wholeness and the tranquility of one’s original self profoundly, with unconditional confidence, freedom, and ease, is to awaken. The requirement is neither particularly low nor particularly high.

I. “Who would have thought that our own nature is innately whole? Who would have thought that our own nature is inherently pure? Who would have thought that our own nature neither arises nor ceases? Who would have thought that our own nature is inherently unwavering? Who would have thought that our own nature can give rise to all things?”

These lines beginning “Who would have thought,” spoken by Master Huineng upon his awakening in the *Platform Sutra*, are the essence of Buddhist Chan.

From a cognitive perspective, innate wholeness is a belief. Studying Chan and its entire history, and even holding Chan in high esteem, can seem ultimately to serve only to provide backing for the belief expressed in these few sentences.

*A Brief History of the Development of the Concept of Innate Wholeness in Chan Buddhism*

In *On Becoming a Person*, the celebrated work by the great humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers: every client possesses abundant, sufficient inner resources. (“Can give rise to all things.”)

II. How Can Ordinary People Experience It?

1. Recognize petty-bourgeois karmic obstructions

*Petty-Bourgeois Malaise* and *Zhuangzi: On Cockroaches*: Because of numerous contradictions and conditions, members of the petty and very small bourgeoisie disparage and reject ordinary people and workers at the bottom of society. Petty-bourgeois karmic obstructions distance them from the ideas that everyone possesses innate wholeness and that human nature is good; they firmly believe that human nature is evil.

*The Vicissitudes of an Inner Journey: From the Kuomintang’s 60th Army to the Communist Party’s 50th Army*: The Yunnan 60th Army, a second-tier, non-core formation in the KMT forces, underwent transformation and quickly became the formidable 50th Army that stood its ground against US forces on the Korean battlefield. Ordinary soldiers went from being KMT troops in a second-tier unit to soldiers of the People’s Volunteers. Here we can see innate wholeness.

1. The advanced character of the proletariat

See the simple sincerity, goodness, beauty, and innate wholeness of the masses; see how billions of people find ways to save themselves.

A billion people are all sages like Yao and Shun.

a. *How to Find Connection with the Simple Sincerity, Goodness, and Beauty of Working People at the Bottom of Society*:

That billions of working people at the bottom of society naturally retain their simple sincerity, goodness, and beauty amid such hardship is irrefutable evidence of the goodness of human nature, innate wholeness, and the advanced character of the proletariat. When so many people find their way out of hardship and desperate circumstances, is it because of “random genius,” or innate wholeness?

b. *It Is Not Industrial Upgrading, but the Downgrading of Industries Worldwide*:

The engineer dividend and the PhD dividend: PhDs becoming as cheap and plentiful as cabbages -> high-tech industries becoming as cheap and plentiful as cabbages. China’s much-criticized K–12 and higher education systems have achieved a “success” that nobody anticipated. This is not meant to praise China’s education system; instead, it reveals the “failure” of higher education, education in the social sciences, sciences, and engineering, and general education in Europe and the United States to establish a clear lead over developing countries. It also shows that having a “PhD” has little to do with being elite or gifted. Tens of millions of small-town exam aces can overcome countless difficulties through the inner potential of their innate wholeness, using the internet and self-directed study to acquire general and technical knowledge. They are not the supposedly brainwashed bookworms and nerds people call them; they can do what ordinary people can do. This is further evidence for humanistic psychology, and further evidence of the advanced character of the proletariat.

Psychological self-rescue among the masses:

c. *The Barefoot Doctor Era of Mental Illness*:

Many people use fragments of knowledge learned online to treat their own complex mental illnesses and their deeply wounded hearts. The placebo effect is strong in psychology. People’s innate wholeness contains sufficient resilience, and the deeper mind has sufficient inner resources. Often, just a little positive energy, tranquility, warmth, sincerity, goodness, or beauty can give a bewildered mind a much-needed boost. It is like giving a helping hand to someone drowning in shallow water.

d. *Psychoanalysis Reveals the Poetry, the Sacred, and Cthulhu in Ordinary Life*:

A child who has dropped out of a mountain village primary school, a delivery worker rushing about to support a family, a secondary school student skipping class to go to an internet café, a bewildered university student, a homemaker facing a midlife crisis… In other words, our own everyday lives as ordinary people are exceedingly ordinary and uneventful in social and utilitarian terms. But through the eyes of psychoanalysis, they are colorful fireworks, extraordinary sacrifices, indomitable fighting spirits, struggles against sinking into despair. They are stirring oil paintings, souls with innate wholeness, existentialist epics of struggle amid the difficulties of reality.

e. When we feel inspired by children from mountain villages who struggle through their own efforts to make their way beyond the mountains, have we not also made our own way out of the mountains?

f. Television, the internet, arcades, internet cafés, short videos, mobile games, online novels, and countless other things have been called scourges that would destroy a generation. Yet generation after generation has not been destroyed. Instead, people have grown into capable adults, drawing small amounts of energy from these things to withstand the pressures of reality. This, too, is a contradiction between the condescending arrogance of elitism and the innate wholeness of ordinary people. Many people have forgotten how they themselves got through childhood.

1. Experience unconditional confidence

Recall times when you felt unconditionally confident, free, and at ease. Your primary school years, secondary school years when schoolwork was not too difficult, the sunny side of adolescence, time spent beneath a tree watching ants and leaves. Beginning in the second year of junior secondary school, as we enter the processes of involution and socialization, the tranquility of our original self is gradually obscured and forgotten.

I spent many years caught in inner conflict. In 2020, at age 30 and in my sixth year working in finance, value investing, improvements in my professional abilities, and modest progress in my industry reputation and connections increased my confidence, conditionally. Suddenly I no longer felt so oppressed. Suddenly this new confidence felt “restored” and “unconditional,” rather than based on those external factors. It came naturally once my inner core had recovered and stabilized.

The point is not how to increase confidence, but how unconditional confidence returns once a lack of confidence falls away.

Conditional confidence is rooted in psychological issues: conditional love, a false self, a harsh superego, and so on. See the earlier article *Psychological Growth for Ordinary People: Self Psychology and the Object Relations School*.

1. Experience unconditional freedom and ease

To experience freedom and ease, you can follow Zhuangzi: watch butterflies and swimming fish, and feel their unrestrained freedom and ease. “I shall drag my tail through the mud.” It is not that they have escaped the pressures of survival or the laws of physics, but that they are in a state of presence and ease. *Presence and Ease Are the Answer to Existential Crisis*

There is always some holiday or moment of rest when you have slept enough, the sunshine is just right, your energy has returned, and you experience unconditional freedom and ease. You may even have felt it while working. That is the tranquility of your original self, rather than external conditions.

At some point, you realize that ease and tranquility are life’s ultimate “pursuit.” To be ordinary and free of concerns is to be an immortal.

*Zhuangzi: On Cockroaches—Cockroaches Have Existed for Hundreds of Millions of Years Without Needing Meaning; Neither Do Humans*: Cockroaches have existed on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. What is the meaning of their lives? They do not need “meaning.” Or rather, the Way and the laws of nature give me, a cockroach, a meaning of my own; I follow nature’s course. Every cockroach is complete, at one with the Great Way. How much more so a flower or a blade of grass, a bird or a butterfly, so beautiful and at ease that they enchant us—and how much more so a living human being. When all things are seen as equal, life opens up.

1. Experience the unity of humanity and nature

There is nothing mysterious about it. It is what happens when we quietly immerse ourselves in looking at the stars, the clouds, or the evening glow, or feeling the wind. This aesthetic experience requires no conditions or expense. The little ego recedes. The universe—the world—has never rejected us; we are children of the universe. Mind and nature form a harmonious whole.

1. Experience the tranquility of your original self

*I Suggest Keeping a Diary of Your High-Energy Moments*: I suggest keeping a diary of times when you feel happy, internally motivated, positive, energetic, and tranquil. Such moments do come. This is actually a record of each person’s innate wholeness. You will discover that all true happiness is, in fact, the same: a kind of “tranquil utmost joy.” That is the feeling of “meditative absorption, the original self.” It is simply so brief and so “ordinary” that we overlook it and think little of it.

*This Year, I Often Feel I Am in the Tranquility of My Original Self*: Focused, quiet, and carefree. External stimuli and old karmic obstructions still draw me out of tranquility. But knowing that this is only a temporary state and that I will return to tranquility brings a profound sense of security and confidence.

*Returning from Tranquility to Suffering, or from Suffering to Tranquility*:

The painful everyday life of an ordinary person: Sure enough, happiness is always fleeting, and life is always painful, chaotic, bewildering, agitated, explosive, simmering, and something to endure. The tranquil everyday life of a happy person: Sure enough, suffering is always fleeting; the original self is inherently pure and innately whole, neither arising nor ceasing, neither defiled nor pure. If the mind has clear skies for 20% of a year, or clears up for 20% of a day, then the whole person is optimistic and sunny. The mind never needed very much in the first place.

Confidence in innate wholeness and the tranquility of the original self is a person’s deepest confidence.

It is normal not to know how to return to tranquility. The return happens naturally, just as you do not know how you fall asleep. The harder you try to fall asleep, the harder it becomes. It is like muddy water becoming clear as it quietly settles on its own. Zhuangzi’s phrase “An empty room fills with light” captures this best.

For unfortunate people with relatively deep karmic obstructions, tranquility occupies only three ten-thousandths of their time—so briefly that they have no way to recognize its importance. It is like someone who lives under cloudy skies all year having no concept of a clear day, or telling a child in Africa about ice-cold cola when they have no concept of it. Zhuangzi wrote a great deal about how you cannot speak of ice to a summer insect; this is what he was describing.

The exhilaration of the original self’s tranquility: for example, a bright winter morning, the cold wind biting, feeling invigorated, breathing slowly. A mild spring breeze, everything coming alive, feeling full of vitality.

1. Experience utmost joy

Joy has a limit. It is ordinary, common, and always present. It is a state, rather than laughter from being tickled or gains and losses in fame and fortune. Once people reach that limit, they feel completely content, knowing that nothing could make them happier, and are free of greed, anger, and delusion.

*Zhuangzi: The Joy of Rice and Wheat*: Who is happier, people in the north harvesting wheat or people in the south harvesting rice? There is no difference. Some things are merely external “form,” “outward appearance,” or “shape”; the inner joy is the same. Happiness ultimately comes from within, rather than from outside. Seek within, rather than outside.

*I Have Attained Utmost Joy and Seek Nothing Else*: These past few months, my sense of well-being has been strong: simple, quiet happiness. This is all there is to happiness in life; I seek nothing else. Life’s true flavor lies in simple joys. To be free of concerns is to be an immortal, without desires or demands. Those without special abilities eat their fill and wander at leisure.

These days, I shoot a few baskets in relaxed games at the basketball court in the county town, passing the ball around with everyone—old, middle-aged, young, and younger still—and already feel “innate wholeness,” tranquility, and utmost joy.

*I Suggest Keeping a Diary of Your High-Energy Moments*: You will discover that all true happiness is, in fact, the same: a kind of “tranquil utmost joy.” That is the feeling of “meditative absorption, the original self.” It simply seems “brief or ordinary,” like the blue sky, so we overlook it and think little of it.

*Zhuangzi: Utmost Joy—Watching Clouds at Dusk, Carrying a Child Home*:

a. The setting sun sends several broad shafts of light through a sea of clouds, painting some of them a brilliant red. When I look up again, the whole sky is filled with flying feathers, covering this land, each with different light and color, like a sky full of celestial maidens, each with her own grace. Sunshine, blue skies, and white clouds are the finest oil painters. Even the best game engine cannot render the beauty of nature.

b. Parents, or two or three small families, have brought their children outside to play. The children romp and play, while the parents sit quietly nearby, watching the sunset and chatting. Slowly, the sun sinks below the horizon, and golden afterglow spreads across the whole earth like a golden carpet or lawn. The children, too, are tired from playing, exhilarated and worn out, and fall asleep against their parents’ chests. The parents carry them slowly home.

Children and parents alike feel boundless tranquility, security, and happiness. Carefree, without desires or demands: I have attained utmost joy and seek nothing else.

1. Experience your own deeper mind

Practices such as spiritual cultivation and hypnosis help people experience the deeper mind.

a. Distinguish surface-level verbal thought from the deeper mind

*Zhuangzi’s “Discussion on Making All Things Equal” and Marx: From Surface-Level Language to the Deeper Mind*; *Gilligan’s Psychology: The Psychology Closest to My Taoist Approach*

*My Structure: The Real Self Accompanies the Libido*; Tolle’s *A New Earth* and *The Power of Now* (the ego)

b. Feel gratitude toward your deeper mind

Rather than belittling your past self, feel grateful to that young child, that frail body, who scraped by and fought through such difficult circumstances. A rural child facing loneliness, bullying, exploitation, and pressure from every direction has come all this way, even if it meant only gaining admission to a vocational secondary school or junior college.

*Do Not Stab Your Past Self in the Back*: Your past self was much weaker than you are now and lacked much of your knowledge and resources. Yet they faced painful, terrifying experiences that even your present self would struggle to handle—experiences your past self managed to steer you clear of. And yet you judge your past self’s performance negatively, as poor. You, of all people, are the only eyewitness to what your past self went through.

*We Have Always Been Fighting Alongside Our Past Selves*: We realize that even our present selves would find this pain hard to bear, let alone who we were back then. We discover that our past selves were brave, wise warriors, rather than lowly or vulgar people. It is precisely because they were so brave and wise, so sincere, good, and beautiful, that we have made it to today.

c. Experience the unity of body and mind; feel your body and your deeper sensations. (For example, stroll through a park, look at the stars, watch birds, feed fish, smell flowers, let your mind wander, pet a cat, embrace someone, laugh heartily, or have a good cry.)

d. Take stock of your many abilities

Even if you “think little of them,” they are themselves evidence of your innate wholeness.

e. Feel the profound awe and resonance you experience when appreciating art—film and literature—or nature

You can appreciate and resonate with humanity’s greatest art because of innate wholeness. Sunrise and sunset, watching clouds at dusk.

f. When you are a Buddha yourself, you see everyone as a Buddha

Like me: an ordinary, even mediocre person, following Zhuangzi and Marx toward awakening. Once you recognize innate wholeness, you also firmly believe that everyone possesses it.