Getting lost in the Tao of wandering

To walk always with new feet, and to look always with new eyes, is to forever trod new paths, and forever see new vistas; we cannot honestly 'see' the novelty of 'what is' while we are looking for something, or at something, which we claim to know or recognize. We can only see when we have the purity to look without perspective, without words, without even ourselves doing the looking.

The Chinese poet Chaoyi synopsizes this intent, writing: "I wander aimlessly along out-of-the-way trails/ Where I have never been before,/ The more I change my direction,/ the wilder the road becomes."

Here he chooses to get lost. And we can all do this in the physical realm, or in the metaphysical one. To get lost metaphysically is to get lost everywhere, regardless if you think you know where you are or not.

Thus Alan Watts can claim:

“¼when a Taoist sage is wandering through the forest, he is not going anywhere, he is just wandering. When he watches the clouds, he loves them because they have no special destination. He watches birds flying, and he watches waves slapping on the shore. Just because all this is not busy in the way that human beings are normally busy, and because it serves no end other than being what it is now, he admires it. It is for this reason that you get the peculiar styles of Chinese painting in the T’ang, Sung, and later dynasties, where nature in its aimless, wandering way is the main subject of interest.” (The Way of Liberation, p75)

Absolute, 'memoryless' attention is the open-ground which cannot include interpretation. Which is to say, to not comprehend the spectacle one is watching, is to truly to 'watch', everything else is perspective. This is what Krishnamurti has called “choiceless awareness”.

To 'never know' is to always be ready for the sublime enigma to reveal itself in every step, around every corner, from every vantage point.

For, "Faith means living with uncertainty, Traveler- feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark." relates Dan Millman in The Laws of Spirit (p53).

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These excerpts on following the heart and aimless wandering are taken from unpublished chapters of THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas