Maybe, you've had this experience, maybe not, but in the beginning doing nothing can feel like doing a lot

Why is this so?

Your sense of self is often established by being a doer. You grow up, go to school, make a living, form a family, and retire. From day to day, you wake up, go somewhere, pay attention, improve or entertain yourself, and meditate.

Everything happens because you do it. You're scared that nothing gets done when you let go of this doer.

When you hear that you are to do nothing, the first instinct is to do nothing actively. You don't cease to do something, you're looking for something to do.

Maybe it's actively suppressing thoughts, movements, feelings, or at least trying to. Something to cling to that you can label nothing. Going deep into some emptiness you perceive. In clinging to anything that may come along, but not knowing what to do, it can feel like you actually do more.

But as you also know, this is far from doing nothing. Doing nothing is no effort at all, no doing. It's being with what is. When you make something out of nothing it's not nothing anymore. It's something.

When you do nothing, you let all else be done. You vacate the role of the self as the center of experience and rest back as what you see, smell, touch, think, and feel. This takes no effort, no control, and no preparation. It's available every single second of every day. With time, you can do nothing while doing something. You simply let it be done.

In the beginning, it's doing more while trying to do nothing. Then it becomes doing nothing by letting all be done. Viewed from a different perspective, you never do anything anyway, only cling to what is happening already, anyway, and on its own.

Schopenhauer expressed this in his gloomy way:

"We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness."

But we don't have to view life as an exception to the blissful nothingness. It's truer to say that life is already filled with it, nothing but it. All that blinds you do is allow yourself to do and be nothing.

How do you get there?

You don't. That again would be efforting.

What you can do is notice what you are doing and let it drop.

And maybe what you find in not finding is bliss.

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