This is like the Hindu-Buddhist principle of karma—that everything which happens to you is your own action or doing. Thus in many states of mystical experience or cosmic consciousness the difference between what you do and what happens to you, the voluntary and the involuntary, seems to disappear. This feeling may be interpreted as the sense that everything is voluntary—that the whole universe is your own action and will. But this can easily flip into the sense that everything is involuntary. The individual and the will are nothing, and everything that might be called “I” is as much beyond control as the spinning of the earth in its orbit. But from the Taoist standpoint these two views fall short.
They are polar ways of seeing the same truth: that there is no ruler and nothing ruled. What goes on simply happens of itself (tzu-jan) without either push or pull, since every push is also a pull and every pull a push, as in using a steering wheel. This is, then, a transactional view of the world, for as there is no buying without selling, and vice versa, there is no environment without organisms, and vice versa...<<
Alan Watts - Tao. The Watercourse Way
