________________
IN SEARCH
OF ZEN
79
This "natural bias of things" is the rhythm of nature, the rhythm of the Universe. "It connotes acting in harmony with the swing of the Universe-whether spiritually, intellectually or in the least movement of the body-from the physical movements of the dance of happy youth to the dance of the planets about the sun and the systems about the infinite."1 Alan Watts has much to say of this in The Meaning of Happiness. Talking of the Taoist conception of the significance of the moment, he says that this implies that all things happening now have a definite relation to one another just because they have occurred together in time, if for no other reason. This is another way of saying that there is a harmony called Tao which blends all events in each moment of the Universe into a perfect chord. The whole situation in and around you at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are to be in accord with Tao. The right life, therefore, is the natural life, and he who has found and lives in Zen lives naturally. To what extent his new found harmony affects his outward life, to bring his outward mode of living into accord with his inner awareness, is a matter of time and the individual, but just as the direct drive of an engine is sweet and without discordant tension, so the right use of action, direct action, is sweet and frictionless. Only self, the desire of self for self, intervenes and pulls the machine out of alignment. Alignment becomes the operative word. From the "power-house of the Universe" as Trine calls it, to the individual self the power is direct, and the right means used in the right way at the right time and place makes up increasingly the perfect act.
1 The Story of Oriental Philosophy, ADAMS BECK, p. 413.
