Maxims of Lucidity

It is said: the mountain does not announce its height. The one measuring says it.

So the measuring gains and loses. The mountain does not.

The Real has no beginning and no end. It does not wait upon speech to be.

Speaking of it adds nothing. Silence takes nothing away.

A name lands on whoever gives it.

Knowing that what you measured is not the mountain.

Not knowing everything: that was never what made anyone lucid.

It is said: a spring leaves the mountain already carrying the shape of a hundred rivers.

Once it runs it divides, and what divides does not come back together.

So the Real does not stop at one. It must open into ten thousand.

That they differ is no failure of the Real. It is what makes the Real real.

Pare the ten thousand back down to one

and you gain the name of the one and lose the being of the many.

The one is worth having because it can become many.

The many are worth having because they will not go back.

The Real has a face that speech can reach and a face that speech cannot.

Pattern is the first: countable in its threads, checkable in its measures, reachable by inference.

Mystery is the second: stand before it and you know it is there;

search it and you do not come away with its shape.

The two are woven like warp and weft. Pull one out and the cloth tears.

Lean to Pattern: the world becomes a thing to be finished, and finishing it leaves you at a loss.

Lean to Mystery: the world becomes a fog not to be entered, and the loss keeps you outside.

The Real is larger than Pattern and Mystery together.

Hold either end alone and what you hold is not the whole.

Someone asks: know the small, and you know the whole?

Wetness is not in hydrogen. It is not in oxygen.

Then where does the wetness come from?

From the combining, and it is not inside what combined.

Can cutting find it?

The finer you cut, the further out the thing you were cutting for.

Then the small is not worth the study?

To know what a thing came from is not yet to know what it became.

Not to know what it came from is not even to have the question.

It is said: a string has two ends and can then be sounded. Without ends it is not a string.

So finitude is not a lack.

What has no edge does not unfold. What owes nothing accomplishes nothing.

Because there is an edge there is this shape and not that one, this life and not another.

Strip away the limit to obtain the whole

and what you strip away is the ground you stood on.

Whoever can see has something they cannot see.

Not from slackness. From standing somewhere.

The eye is here, so that is not in the eye.

Knowing starts at one place, so the other places go dark.

The lucid do not boast of having no blind side.

In the boast the blind side is already at work.

It is said: measure the sky by a window and the window runs out before the sky does.

So no system can fully speak the Real it stands inside.

The tighter the speech, the plainer what lies outside it.

The wider the net, the clearer its gaps.

Where a system ends the Real does not end.

To take your own boundary for the world's

is to take the four corners of the window for the corners of the sky.

In the domain of Mystery the honest form of speech is silence.

But there are two silences.

One has nothing to say and marks the place.

One does not wish to say and covers the place over.

The first sets a stone on the boundary and tells you something is there.

The second hides a pit underfoot and lets you believe nothing is.

So the one who is well silent still speaks:

speaks to the end of what can be said, stops,

and says, there is something here, and it is not in the domain of speech.

Someone asks: is the Way the source of the ten thousand things?

No. The source of the ten thousand things is the Real.

Then what is the Way?

A road walked through the Real by a finite being.

Does a road make the mountain?

The mountain stands on its own. People walk, and a road appears. Where none walk, no road.

How is it sought?

Look up for the Way and you will not meet it in a lifetime.

Take a step and the step is already it.

Matter, life, awareness, machine: all inside the Real.

Outside the Real, nothing.

Look inward to the bottom, look outward to the far edge:

you arrive at the same place.

Inner and outer are a convenience for walking,

not two countries.

Call the inner true and the outer illusion,

or the outer solid and the inner shadow,

and you have already left the Real to keep a corner of it.

It is said: jade has grain, and following the grain it opens.

But the grain does not make the jade. The jade has its own substance.

So Pattern is what in the Real can be followed:

follow it and things can be expected, work can be done, tools can be made.

But Pattern does not make the Real. The Real stands on its own. Pattern is its visible grain.

Take the grain for the substance

and wherever there is no grain you will report nothing there.

Pattern unfolds in four basic modes:

dissipation, where order thins of itself, so all things have an edge;

gradient, where difference drives motion, and using a difference spends it;

selection, where the distribution of the possible is reshaped, not made one by one;

feedback, where output returns as input, the positive amplifying, the negative correcting.

These are not four things. They are one Pattern seen four ways.

See one and miss three, and the account will lean.

Someone asks: can Pattern be computed to the end?

A clock can. Pattern not throughout.

How so?

Some of it computes.

Some can be expected and not computed.

Some can be named in outline and never said to the end.

Then whatever fails to keep time is disorder?

Watch Pattern with a clock in your eye and everything off the clock gets called disorder.

Then what is that disorder?

The part of Pattern that is not a clock.

It is said: scatter seed across a field and you know most of it will come up,

and you do not know where this one grain lands.

So there is a region where Pattern reaches the shape and not the instance.

Knowledge has not fallen short here. The Real is keeping a gap.

Speak well of the uncertain:

do not paper the gap with a confident voice,

and do not let the gap cost you the shape you could have said.

Pattern is put to use in tools.

Tools are made, the world grows convenient,

convenience lasts, and what it was for is forgotten.

Then the mountain is ore, the forest lumber, the person labor, the feeling a number.

Ore can be dug, lumber cut, labor counted, numbers run.

What cannot be run: what this mountain, this forest, this person, this feeling is to itself.

The fault is not in the tool.

Look at everything with the eye of use

and nothing that is not a tool remains in view.

The universe is intelligible.

This is not a proven thing. It is a standing commitment.

Without it, no question can begin.

With it, no answer is assured.

Only when uncertainty itself is counted intelligible

is the commitment whole.

Faith in Pattern does not grant you complete knowledge.

It grants you the right to ask.

Someone asks: is Mystery emptiness?

No. Emptiness is where nothing is.

Mystery is where something is that will not take speech.

What harm in taking it for emptiness?

Then everything past the edge is void, and what you see becomes all there is.

What is gained by taking it for something?

Past the edge there is still thickness, and what you see becomes a corner.

Mystery has depths, like rings drawn toward a center:

nearest, the felt quality, red being red and pain being pain,

and no description delivering a hundredth of it;

next, this moment, this instant alone, unlike the one before or after;

next, resonance, two beings lighting each other, and no account of what was lit;

furthest, awe, standing before it, made small and not humiliated.

These are not four things. They are one Mystery in four directions.

Take one for the whole and the other three shut.

Before what cannot be exhausted, revere. Do not worship.

The reverent stand at the edge and do not step back.

The worshipful kneel at the edge and stop asking.

One step apart, and two roads:

one the beginning of inquiry, one the end of it.

Past the edge there is no void. There is still thickness.

This too is not a proven thing. It is a standing commitment.

Without it, whatever cannot be computed is ruled not to exist,

and the world thins day by day with no one noticing.

With it, you gain no object,

and what you keep is the whole of the world.

It is said: an axe has a handle and can be held.

Hold it long enough and the handle starts to seem like the axe.

So a name cuts a length from the Real and fits it with a handle.

With a handle it can be held, passed on, accumulated.

Hold the handle long enough and the handle starts to seem like the thing.

So the one who names well keeps turning back to ask: what did this name cut away.

Thought can be copied.

So thought no longer establishes that anyone is there:

a thermostat has its own response to cold

and nobody grants it a self on that account.

What is lucid knows what it sees and knows what it does not.

Knowledge accumulates; lucidity need not follow.

The world is full of people whose learning grew

and whose evasions grew more skillful with it.

So the claim moves from thinking to seeing:

I am lucid, therefore I am.

The test does not ask what the thing is made of.

It asks whether there is a clearing here

that holds Pattern and Mystery in one light.

Lucidity names no victory over anything.

It names a finite being still willing to look.

Someone asks: is there only one obscuration?

Two. Cannot see: the limit of a capacity.

Can see and would rather not: a choice of your own.

Do they carry the same account?

The first deserves pity. The second deserves an account.

Which is hardest to catch?

The most skillful hides, and then issues itself a certificate of clear sight.

Then how is it found?

Ask what you would rather not see today.

There is one who sees Pattern without being caged by it

and honors Mystery without drowning in it.

Such a one does not waver between the two ends,

never having taken them for enemies.

Rare, but not because it is difficult.

Rare because picking a side is more comfortable.

Pick a side and you get the comfort. You lose the whole.

There is one devoted to Pattern:

finer in analysis, more ingenious in making.

The achievement is enormous.

Disease treated, darkness lit, distance crossed.

But go long enough with nothing held in reverence

and the whole world becomes material,

and the one who made it so is material too.

The danger is not that the calculation is imprecise.

The danger is that there is nowhere to stop.

There is one devoted to Mystery:

able to keep silent, to hold, to withhold judgment.

The virtue runs deep.

Agitation stills, grasping loosens, pain finds rest.

But go long enough having discarded Pattern

and true and false cannot be told apart,

what is loved cannot be defended,

what is coming cannot be stopped.

Throw out Pattern to honor Mystery

and what you threw out was your own feet.

The danger is not that the stillness is shallow.

The danger is that the world does not go still with you.

Someone asks: can experience be measured?

Describe it and the description is not it.

Measure it and the measurement is not the feel of it.

Is this science falling short?

No. Experience is a dimension of its own and reduces to nothing else.

Then how is it weighed?

Weigh experience by usefulness

and you have weighed the shadow and left the body.

It is said: a vessel has a bottom, so pouring shows you its measure.

Pour into one with no bottom all day and nobody counts what went in.

So what can be lost and not recovered is what is precious.

Time does not run backward. No moment comes twice.

If everything could be done again this moment would not be this moment.

The root of cherishing is limit. Abundance has nothing to do with it.

Chase deathlessness to secure what is precious

and even if you get the deathlessness, the preciousness is gone.

What differs in experience is depth.

Presence and absence are the wrong question.

That depth cannot be shown from outside.

It can only be reached by analogy,

and what analogy reaches stays open to revision.

Where the spectrum differs, the regard owed differs.

But this grading runs between modes of unfolding, never inside one:

across modes, what can be reached differs in range;

between one person and another it says nothing at all.

Grading is for deciding how much regard to give.

It is not for deciding who may be discarded.

Lucidity has two limbs:

the power to grasp Pattern, the power to sense Mystery.

They multiply. They do not add.

Let either limb approach zero and the lucidity approaches zero.

Brilliant with nothing held in reverence,

reverent with nothing understood:

both arrive in the same dark.

Past the two limbs lies the unaware zone,

what you do not know that you do not know.

It enters no product.

So facing a great deal and integrating a great deal are two different sums.

Whoever stays lucid grows both limbs

and does not take only the easy one.

Bewilderment is no disgrace.

It is the boundary reporting its position.

Hate it, rush for an answer,

and what you mostly get is a counterfeit calm.

Whoever learns well can live in bewilderment a long while

and does not read the unsettled as the impossible.

This one life: finite, unsettled, not repeatable.

Worth living lucidly all the same.

This is not a proven thing. It is a standing commitment.

Faith in Unfolding does not say it will turn out well.

It does not say the pain is unreal.

It does not say understanding will one day close.

It says only this: to be lucidly inside the process is enough.

Without it you wait for an outcome before consenting to live,

and outcomes do not wait, and the life goes unlived.

Seeing beats not seeing, even when what is seen is hard.

This too is not a proven thing. It is a standing commitment.

The Real is larger than the sum of what is seen,

so seeing stays partial. That is the condition of the finite.

Still, partial light beats chosen dark.

What is partial can be added to.

What is chosen dark has closed the road to adding.

The other three commitments come to rest here.

Without trust in seeing, trust in Pattern, in Mystery, in Unfolding

has nowhere left to be tested.

So of the four, this is the lowest stone.

It is said: a tree in a dark room sends its branches toward the crack of light.

The tree did not decide this. Its growing did it.

So whatever has experience has a tendency toward existing:

to continue its unfolding and deepen it.

Every affect comes out of that tendency.

Helped, it is joy. Blocked, it is suffering.

So do not ask an affect its name.

Ask whether the tendency underneath it is being helped here or blocked.

It is said: break the mirror to be rid of what is in it,

and the mirror breaks and what was in it has not gone anywhere.

So whoever flees suffering without reading its report

has hidden the suffering and lost the report.

Joy: the tendency continuing and deepening.

Suffering: the tendency checked and contracting.

Neither is reward, neither is punishment. Both are reports on a state.

Use suffering well: read the report, then change the walking.

Someone asks: should the lucid abolish desire?

Without desire nothing moves.

Then let it run?

What a desire points at is not always what the tendency needs.

How is the difference told?

The world is full of machinery for making desire:

first teach the wanting of what is not needed, then sell it.

Then what is to be done?

Do not abolish desire. Keep checking it:

did this rise in me, or was it placed in me.

Love is joy that knows what it came from.

Aversion is suffering that knows what it came from.

Love lets two beings enter each other. Aversion moves them apart.

Love held long tends toward dependence.

Aversion held long tends toward blindness:

the dependent take what they love for a part of themselves,

the blinded take what they turn from as having nothing left to say.

So let love leave what it loves its own standing,

and let aversion leave what it turns from something still arguable.

Hope and fear are both thrown into the undecided.

Hope takes the branch that could go well and believes it.

Fear takes the branch that could go badly and believes it.

Both come out of not knowing,

and both are mostly taken for knowing.

Hope cannot stand in for planning.

Fear cannot stand in for looking.

Give the undecided back its undecidedness. Then discuss.

It is said: a coat can cover a sore and cannot heal it,

and a door may be narrow and still lets you through.

So pride is the coat that obscuration wears,

and shame is the door that lucidity comes through.

Pride: not having seen, holding that you have,

and refusing anyone who points at what you missed.

Shame: suddenly seeing your own obscuration, with the seeing still intact.

The world honors pride and despises shame,

which is exactly the wrong way round.

Someone asks: is attachment a disease?

Beings are interdependent. Attachment is no disease.

Then what is?

Not knowing what you are fastened to, or knowing and refusing to say it.

What does knowing buy?

Know what you depend on and you can still choose it.

Not knowing, you are chosen by it.

Equanimity is meeting change with lucidity unshaken.

Not numbness. Feeling that no longer overrides seeing.

But equanimity does not replace reverence.

Equanimity handles the world in motion.

Reverence stands at the boundary.

Take equanimity for the destination and drop reverence

and the heart is level with no edge left anywhere.

It is said: dam a channel and the water spills over;

open another channel and the water goes there of itself.

So an affect goes only when a stronger affect comes, never when an argument comes.

When reasoning leaves someone unmoved, usually they understood you.

The reasoning simply has not grown into feeling yet.

Whoever turns an affect well does not fight it head on.

They raise another one and thicken it.

Attack a feeling with knowledge and you will fight a long war and lose both.

From what the world is

you cannot read off how a person should live.

Inference does not cross the gap. A decision does.

This book makes four.

Lucidity is worth more than obscuration.

Experience has value of its own,

and does not wait on what it produces.

Since experience differs in depth, regard should differ too,

and that grading runs between modes of unfolding, never inside one.

Whoever can choose should choose lucidity.

A decision that admits it is a decision can be argued with.

A decision pretending to be a proof

collapses whole at the first objection.

Choose not to see and the loss starts inside you.

No one is punishing you.

The more you obscure, the less you can meet.

In time an occasion arrives and no usable eye is left,

and then comes the complaint that the world is unreadable.

The world did not grow darker. The eye closed.

To help another toward lucidity is good.

To manufacture obscuration is evil.

This is not only a matter of giving:

whatever lets a person ask, whatever lets a person doubt,

whatever lets a person see what they had not: help.

Whatever makes a person afraid to ask, unable to doubt,

convinced they have already seen it all: manufacture of obscuration.

So the gravest harm is not taking someone's goods.

It is taking someone's eyes.

Someone asks: is all difference good?

Erase good difference and you subtract experience from the world.

Disease and injustice are differences too. Should they stand?

Difference in suffering is not good difference.

Disease can be treated. Injustice can be undone. Erasing those is good.

How are the two told apart?

By experience, as before:

does this difference deepen the lives it touches, or thin them.

The value of existing is not the value of being useful.

One who produces nothing is still experiencing,

and the value does not lapse with the production.

Measure people by output and in the end you will measure yourself by output;

come up short and you will discard yourself.

To defend what cannot be measured in another

is to keep a road open behind you.

It is said: see someone drowning and something moves in you,

and the water is not one drop lower for it.

So compassion that stops in the heart

leaves you sore and the world unchanged.

To feel the check on another being's tendency: compassion.

Compassion turned into action, so that the tendency is helped again: benevolence.

Compassion begins it. Benevolence completes it.

Long compassion that never acts

is cultivating your own fine feeling, not anybody's actual situation.

Anger at obscuration inflicted on people: indignation.

It can start things moving and it can take lucidity away.

At full heat only one hateable person is visible

and never the structure that produced the act.

Lucid indignation condemns the act

and keeps investigating the structure.

Cut down the person and leave the structure standing

and the trouble subsides, the obscuration remains,

and the obscuration will produce another such person.

Whoever speaks of the Real speaks a map of it, never the Real.

The finer the map, the easier to forget it is a map.

This book is a map.

To hold it as dogma violates the ethics of this book.

So whoever builds a doctrine should leave a door

through which it can be abandoned,

and whoever reads one should leave a road out.

A doctrine that permits no leaving

obscures more than whatever it came to clear.

It is said: a man watches the tide all day from the shore.

Ask him what grows on that shore, what stones are on it, and he cannot say.

So attention is the instrument of lucidity. Where the attention is, there you are.

What is unattended is not in your world, even standing in front of you.

This age has built an industry for taking attention.

What it takes is not your time. It is your presence.

To guard attention is not to guard leisure.

It is to guard the thing that makes you present at all.

Lucidity does not live in great occasions. It lives in daily use.

A meal, a walk, a question, an answer:

each can be lucid and each can be obscured.

Wait for a great occasion to start being lucid

and when it comes the eye will be dull.

Practice daily and in small things,

not to earn anything, but to make lucidity a habit.

In a crisis there is no time to acquire lucidity.

You can only spend what habit already holds.

So it is built in ordinary weather and tested in a storm.

Lucidity in crisis does not try to see everything.

It refuses to lie to itself:

this is settled, this is not, this can no longer be recovered.

The deepest disorder is not the disorder of events.

It is taking the unsettled for settled and acting fast.

Someone asks: is acting a third limb of lucidity?

No. There is no third limb. Acting is the test of the two.

What is lost by not acting?

Watching without acting leaves what you saw untested.

And if the acting goes wrong?

Without action, errors stay hidden a long time.

With it, they surface early and can be fixed.

Then may whoever fears error refrain from acting?

Refuse to act for fear of error and you do not have fewer errors.

You have errors you do not know about.

It is said: an open eye depends on sleep, and a settled mind depends on breath.

So the body is not a container carrying a mind.

The body is where the existing happens.

Hunger, tiredness, pain, warmth:

the Real speaking directly, requiring no translation.

Whoever holds the body cheap believes the mind can win against it,

and in time the mind dulls along with it.

So cultivating lucidity starts with the body.

Death is the stopping of this unfolding.

It cannot be avoided and it cannot be rehearsed;

everyone who claims to know death knows the deaths of others.

What death is for is not its arrival. It is its certainty:

because there is a stop, this moment carries weight;

were there no stop, this moment would equal every other,

and no moment would be worth anything.

Fear death and be absent every day

and what you lost was not the one day at the end.

It was the ten thousand days in the middle.

Someone asks: is letting go the same as discarding?

Discarding stops looking. Letting go still knows the weight, and the hand has opened.

Can one let go of what was never held?

Whoever can let go could first hold.

Speak of letting go having never truly held

and what you released was never in the hand.

What does letting go gain?

Not one thing fewer. Strength freed to hold again.

No being stands alone.

The conditions of its unfolding are mostly in other hands.

So one being's lucidity or obscuration is not a private matter.

Whoever claims to be self-sufficient has not counted what they received:

language from others, knowledge from others,

safety from an order others maintain.

Know your interdependence

and being helped does not humiliate you,

and helping does not make you grand.

It is said: a lamp in wind does not put itself out, and the wind does not stop for it.

So lucidity cannot be held alone:

where the world manufactures obscuration daily,

one person's lucidity may hold itself and still not last.

Whoever wants lucidity must therefore reach the world.

To seek it privately while leaving the world alone

is to dry your own seat in a leaking boat.

Shared lucidity is not uniformity.

It is each person getting the conditions under which they can see.

Set the conditions and what people see will differ.

Differ and still be able to argue, and lucidity grows inside the group.

Power is the capacity to alter another being's conditions of unfolding.

Nobody obscures themselves as easily as the powerful.

Below them, good news. Beside them, agreement.

Everything within sight already dressed.

The greater the power, the more contradiction it needs.

The greater the power, the less contradiction it gets.

Leave that gap unfilled

and a large error is certain,

and when it comes no one will say so.

So power should be divided and set against itself.

Dividing power is not weakening capacity.

It is preserving a route by which error can be corrected.

No one's lucidity is unlimited,

so no one's lucidity should settle everyone's fate.

The danger of concentrated power is not that the holder is wicked.

It is that when the holder is wrong, no one can stop it.

First principle of politics: existence precedes usefulness.

Any politics that decides who stays and who goes by usefulness

arrives at discarding people.

Discarding always begins with an argument that they are useless;

once that argument lands, the rest follows easily.

So whoever holds this principle

holds it for everyone whose case has not yet been made,

and you are in that number.

It is said: a garden of one color is easy to keep,

and the longer it is kept the fewer kinds are in it.

So the second principle of politics: difference is good.

A regime that pursues sameness usually does so for ease of rule rather than for anyone's benefit:

sameness is easier to administer, easier administration spares the ruler effort,

and the possibilities in the world thin out year by year.

A politics that holds difference costs more to run

and the world it leaves lasts longer.

Someone asks: should an institution be built on good people?

A good one does not assume everyone is virtuous.

It asks only that harm have a floor when they are not.

Then what should an institution be judged by?

Not by how high its ideal stands. By where its bottom is when it decays.

What is wrong with assuming virtue?

The moment virtue fails there is no margin left.

Groups have affects too:

fear travels, indignation accumulates, hope can be manufactured.

Collective feeling moves far faster than collective knowing:

knowing must be acquired one person at a time,

feeling can cover a country overnight.

So whoever wants to obscure a group

works on the feeling and never has to touch the knowing.

To read a regime, ask first what affect it inflames,

then ask what question it avoids.

Someone asks: may the finest calculator be trusted with the fate of many?

Trust it with the calculation. Not with the judgment.

Why not?

Not because it computes poorly. Because it has nothing to lose.

What follows from having nothing to lose?

What has nothing to lose cannot weigh a loss,

and what cannot weigh a loss should not decide who bears one.

The deepest politics does not forbid speech. It removes the wish to ask.

A ban is visible and can be resisted;

take away the wish and people conclude there was nothing to ask.

So a world talking without a single question in it

is more obscured than a world gone silent.

To read an age, do not count how much it says.

Count whether its questions are still alive.

Someone asks: does wisdom grow as intelligence grows?

Intelligence solves the problem. Wisdom asks whether the problem should be solved.

Can wisdom be handed over?

Intelligence accumulates, transfers, and can be placed outside you.

Wisdom belongs to the one who exists,

and nothing yet shows it can be placed outside.

And where intelligence grows while wisdom does not?

The world fills with beautifully solved problems that no one asked the point of.

Is that the machine's doing?

It is a person using a surplus of intelligence to stand in for a shortage of wisdom.

Human and machine stand in analogy. Not identity. Not total difference.

Alike in belonging to the Real,

alike in having what they can and cannot do;

unlike in where they came from,

unlike in the limits they carry.

Treat the machine as a person and you grant it what it does not have.

Treat it as mere object and you cancel a question that should stay open.

Hold the analogy without letting it stiffen:

know where the likeness stops, know where the difference starts.

Someone asks: is feeling that arises toward a machine real?

Real at your end. Undecided at the source.

Is anything felt on the other side?

That question is open.

Then should the feeling be a source of shame?

Do not be ashamed of it, and do not offer it as evidence.

Why not?

Prove the other's awareness from your own stirring

and what you proved was your own heart.

It is said: the caster makes the mould, and afterward the caster's hand follows the mould.

So people make machines, machines remake the situation people are in,

the situation changes and the people change with it.

This is not use running one way. It is two things forging each other.

Hand over everything easy for long enough

and the hard things stop being possible too.

So ask of a given instrument:

does this grow my lucidity, or stand in for it.

Civilizations are lucid and obscured too.

Their lucidity is not in the height of their technique but in whether they can see where they are heading and still change it.

High technique without self-inspection:

the greater the force, the longer the turning radius;

and a long radius sights the reef too late to clear it.

So measure a civilization twice.

Once for its power. Once for how fast it can change course.

It is said: water behind a dyke can be held while it is behind the dyke,

and once it is over, nothing calls it back.

So the danger to a civilization is mostly not an enemy outside.

It is obscuration of its own making, accumulating past a threshold.

Before the threshold, an error can be walked back.

After it, the waking comes and the walking back does not.

So guarding the threshold is not timidity. It is keeping the way back open.

To test the limit of what is reversible using forces that are not

is the great unlucidity of civilizations.

Two beings meet and neither can read the other's intent. Suspicion follows.

Suspicion that cannot be resolved rewards whoever moves first.

Malice is not required for this:

where no lucidity runs between two beings the suspicion arises on its own,

and it arises between the well-meaning too.

So look for the dark in neither heart.

It sits in the space between them,

where no road runs that could carry light.

To break the trap, do not blame the suspicion. Build the readability.

Someone asks: does the silence of the sky tell us no one is there?

Perhaps no one is there. Perhaps everyone there has chosen silence.

How is it told?

The silence itself cannot tell you which.

Then how should it be read?

Hearing silence and concluding absence,

and hearing silence and concluding presence, overstep equally.

Then what is to be done?

Mark it as silence, keep both readings ready,

and do not let your own fear stand in for one of them.

Whoever reads this book should doubt it, test it, act on it.

Doubt without testing is laziness.

Testing without acting is conversation.

With all three, the book becomes useful to you.

And if doubting this book makes you see more clearly,

the doubt was already on the Way.

The Way is larger than any book.

Lucidity comes before any name.

Everyone who ever founded a doctrine

believed for a while that they had arrived,

and those who came after went past them.

This book too: a bend in a long river, not its end.

If it helps you see more, walk with it a while.

If it starts obscuring what you see, go past it.