Meeting The Coin - The Four Prior States to Peace, Love and Joy

Enlightenment In 6 Chinese Words

The origin of world civilization began with hieroglyphs. A testimony to this fact can be Chinese characters, which started with sacred carvings thousands of years ago and embodied astoundingly profound wisdom.

In Chinese characters, “我” stands for “I”, “找” for “seek”, “想” for “think”, “是” for “be”, “佛” for “Buddha”, and “主” for “God”.

“我”（“I”）consists of “找” (“seek”) and “丿” (“a left falling stroke”). “丿” is something that completes the seeking to formulate a separate I. To different people, “丿” refers to different things such as money, fame, power or love. The separate I seeks what it thinks would complete itself. “我" unveils that the separate I is a seeking entity.

“找”（“seek”）consists of “扌” (“hand”）and “戈” (“a dagger axe”). When seeking, one is armed with a weapon. The pictorial writing signifies that this seeking entity is also a self-defence mechanism.

“想” (“think”) consists of “相” (“appearance or projection”) and “心” (“heart or true nature”). The act of thinking is a projection of our true nature.

“是” (“be, is or What Is”) consists of “日”（“day”）and “正” (“the present”). Isness is being the present day as What Is.

“佛”（“Buddha”）consists of “亻”（“a separate self”）and “弗” (“no”). The realization of Buddha-Self is the realization that there is no separate self.

“主”（“God, owner or decider”）consists of “丶” (a right falling stroke signifying “fire that sheds light”) and “王” (“a lampstand"). God is the owner, the decider, and the divine light that is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.

When we meet the mind, we meet a coin-projector, and we recognize the illusion of a separate self (“我”) that seeks and defends (“找”) as a projection of our true nature (“想”). We thus step aside from thinking (“想”) and fall back into “being” (“是”), our true nature of peace, love and joy. We embody the separate self (“我”) and the Buddha-Self (“佛”), the separate I (“我”) and the Divine I（“主”), the human (“我”) and the being (”是”) as two sides of one and the same coin.

This embodiment is enlightenment.

Introduction

How This Book Came to Be

When I was 12 years old, I had an unusual experience in my hometown in China. At 12 years old, I often wondered what would happen after death. I was terrified by the fear of the unknown.

I thought, “Where will I be after I die?”

These thoughts always led me to a black hole, a void. I was terrified that this “I” would vanish into eternity. I would not know of any existence after I died. I would not know that I once existed or the existence that I was once aware of. A sensation of terror would shoot through my spine and run through my body, and I simply could not go on thinking further. I would shut down these thoughts and try to carry on a normal life.

One day during that time, I was walking on a crowded and noisy street at a market in my home country. It was a market in a small town in the early ’80s in China. There were all kinds of vendors selling vegetables, fruits, and other things. As I was navigating the chaotic and clamorous street, all of a sudden, I felt that I did not need my body. I felt at that moment, even without my body, that I was perceiving everything anyway. And right then, a thought arose in my head: “I do not need my body.”

As this thought appeared in my head, I had a sensation that the perceiving “I” was detached from my body, and it was located right in the front and center between my eyes.

Before I knew it, I was seeing myself walking on the same street, being exactly where I was and doing what I was doing. The only difference was that I was not in my body, and I was seeing and perceiving myself and everything surrounding my body from somewhere above. The “I” in the air above was still, silent, and weightless while the world was going on as usual. Time was absent and irrelevant. It felt that the world I was seeing was like a dream.

Then a sensation of being shocked came upon me. Before I knew it, I was back in my body. Nothing seemed to have happened! I returned to the life path as expected by my parents and society. However, that incident remained, as clear as day, for the rest of my life.

This out-of-body experience happened again 20 years later. By then, I was a partner in a nationwide Canadian consulting firm in Vancouver, British Columbia. I was completely aware of my surroundings and watched myself sitting at an office table and having a morning meeting with the area office manager.

In both cases, what struck me most profoundly was the complete sense of stillness and silence that I felt. Even now, after years of daily contemplations on life, putting down the words to describe that sense of peace and weightlessness only makes me feel the limitations of a language.

Since the incident at age 12, I carried on a conventional life, yet there has always been a mysterious energy in me pulling me back to that state of complete peace and stillness. This mysterious energy has also whispered often as an inner voice, inviting me to look closer at my life: what I am, where I am going, how I should exist, and what life is all about.

In my 20s, I was in the “fast lane” focused on climbing the corporate ladder with the primary goal of achieving security, abundance, and an image of success. I also felt a need for recognition and attention.

While my career took off, my personal relationship was a complete mess. Feeling utter misery and frustration, I bumped into the literary world of positive thinking and the Law of Attraction. I felt truly motivated. I was infused with newfound hope, enthusiasm, and great expectations, which I had not dared to have before. I wrote down the things and the goals that I would like to have and achieve on a napkin. I changed my thoughts, my vocabulary, my behavior, my man, and my career. Within a rather short period of time, I succeeded in all of them!

However, a state of peace, love, and joy felt within was fleeting. It was absent for most of my day-to-day, moment-to-moment life experiences. Dissatisfaction and restlessness remained as dominating inner states. I appeared to have a perfect life and was upbeat on the outside, yet my inner critic seemed to be more justified than ever to creep in and whip me into a better version of myself. I was tremendously hopeful that this “better version” was within reach as long as I kept working on myself.

In hindsight, I became a full-time peace-love-and-joy chaser from that point on. By that time, I had experienced life at both ends with successes and failures. I had tasted the limitations of the upside: the limitations of the fruits of accomplished goals and fulfilled desires. I had also tasted the downside: the sense of lack and restlessness, the stress, and the periodical comfortable numbness accompanied by the quiet yet permanent undercurrent of insufficiency and inadequacy in the pursuit.

Even after choosing to leave a highly paid corporate job and changing my career to one I loved, I resisted what I was doing, which was to assist others to effectively achieve their life goals. I received many tangible and intangible rewards in doing what I loved doing, yet one thing became increasingly clear: The energy of desiring and seeking no longer resonated with me. It felt like an energy running through my body and mind, constantly rushing to the future for peace and fulfillment while accompanied by a sense of lack and restlessness here and now.

Intuitively, I knew that what I was desiring and seeking—peace, love, and joy—would not be found in any object (e.g., money, a relationship, achievements, or the things that I enjoyed doing). I thought that seeking to be enlightened would be the only hope to ever reach a state of peace, love, and joy.

Spirituality and meditation became the focal point of my life, and I lost interest in almost all the rest. I soon found myself living a very secluded life. Seeking to be enlightened had put me in what seemed like a chronic depression. Every moment of my existence resisted What Is—the life reality here and now, always reaching for a future state that supposedly promised what I was seeking. It got so bad that I started to have unexplainable physical illnesses, and my life came to a complete halt. It became clear that I was standing still, resisting the flow of the river of life in my efforts to seek enlightenment, which was exactly the polar opposite of what I was seeking! I knew then that I needed to face and meet that seeking energy within me, in and of itself, to take a closer look and find out the deeper answers.

One day, in deep contemplation, I had a revelation. Seeking to be positive will lead to no end. It is a road to infinity without ever reaching a point of arrival. Resisting to be negative is exactly the same thing.

In fact, seeking to be positive and resisting to be negative are identical. They are inseparable. Without one, the other does not exist. To seek to be positive IS to resist to be negative.

Without knowing what the negative is, how can we know what the positive is? To one person, a neutral thing can be considered positive; to another, negative. Anything positive has kept alive the forces of the negative. Over time, any negative will be revealed to be positive and vice versa.

The positive IS the negative. They are one and the same thing, like two sides of the same coin. Here I saw the coin of positive and negative.

Likewise, seeking and resisting—these two movements of opposite directions—are in fact identical. They are inseparable. Without one, the other does not exist. Resisting is a mask of seeking the polar opposite of what it resists, which is What Is. Seeking is a mask of resisting the life reality, which is again What Is. Both represent the same movement away from What Is. Without seeking, where could resisting be found? Without resisting, where could seeking be found?

Seeking IS resisting. They are one and the same thing, like two sides of the same coin. Here I saw the coin of seeking and resisting.

Astonishingly, I also discovered that “seeking is resisting” was a life phenomenon observed by ancient Chinese. This wisdom is fully reflected in one Chinese word “找” (“seek”). “找”（“seek”）consists of “扌” (“hand”）and “戈” (“a dagger axe”). When seeking, one is armed with a weapon, which signifies that this seeking entity is also a self-defence mechanism. Self-defence is resistance.

Only until much later, I learned that this revelation was called “the dualistic nature of the human mind.” Dualism refers to the nature of a human mind perceiving and separating everything conceptually in contrasting pairs (e.g., good and evil, right and wrong, positive and negative, light and dark, success and failure, up and down, and so on). This revelation was shared by major religious and spiritual teachings expressed in various ways. In Christianity, the eating of the apple was the arising of the thought of good and evil. The most significant duality in Buddhism is between samsara (the realm of suffering) and nirvana (the liberation from suffering). According to Taoism, the one circle represents the Tao, which is the undifferentiated unity that is prior to all that exists. The black and white halves of the circle symbolize the masculine yang and feminine yin energies from which all phenomena derive. Both yin and yang are Tao. They are antagonistic and interdependent. They coexist, define each other, and can't be separated. Each party has the condition of its own relative to the existence of the other party. They appear to be opposing each other, yet they share the same source.

This realization led me to see in clarity that there is no end to any pursuit. Whenever we seek anything, by default, we resist the polar opposite of what we seek. Whenever we resist anything, we automatically seek the polar opposite of what we resist.

Whatever we resist persists. In our efforts to have what we want and avoid what we do not want, we live perpetually in a state of resistance, and we live perpetually with what we do not want. No matter how much or what we have achieved and obtained, this way of existence provides only a fleeting sense of satisfaction.

Buddhism teaches that human beings are hardwired mentally and physically to be perpetually dissatisfied, which is the primary cause of human suffering. No amount of doing and having in the world will touch this sense of lack and dissatisfaction. In Christianity, the saying of Yeshua spoke the same truth: “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”

Seeking and resisting are the same movement away from What Is, circling around and around, remaining perpetually bound by that which we seek or by the polar opposite of the identical coin: that which we resist.

I have thus exhausted seeking. I was seeing in clarity the futility of seeking. I realized that, if I began with seeking, inevitably I would have begun with resisting, and I would be bound to end with seeking and resisting. It is seeking itself that was the one and only barrier between me and that which I sought.

These revelations answered my question, “Why was I not in peace, love, and joy when I didn’t have what I wanted as well as when I seemed to have what I wanted on the outside?”

However, one question remained: “How could I be in peace, love, and joy and stay there? How could I remove the one and only barrier—seeking—that stood between me and what I sought?” This is to say: how can I be free from the coin of seeking and resisting?

One day, I was watching a video by Alan Watts, a British philosopher best known as an interpreter and a popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. He said something that struck me like a lightning bolt, which I've never forgotten. He talked about the elements in our bloodstream and how they perpetually fight against each other and eat each other up; however, at the level of the body, the body is in a state of complete harmony.

He said, “What is discord at one level … is harmony at the higher level.”

At that very moment of hearing those words, I realized that while the elements in our bloodstream are in conflict and a perpetual fight, the harmony and resolution of opposing and conflicting halves lie in the prior, undifferentiated, and underlying unity of both. In this case, the prior, the undifferentiated, and the underlying unity of both is the body.

Later, I found out that Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology, said, “All conflict, all opposition has its resolution in an underlying unity.” This statement resonated with what Albert Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

The prior state of any mental position of polar opposites, that is, the prior state of any coin, neutralizes the fight between the polar opposites, and harmony is restored. For example, if we resist against evil and seek good, there will be no resolution. It will only create a play of perpetual war between good and evil. The resolution is in the prior state of both good and evil. Likewise, in my ultimate pursuit of removing the one and only barrier between me and what I sought, which is seeking itself, I would naturally resist seeking. Yet, there would be no resolution as whatever we resist persists. I will be forever bound with that which I do not want: seeking. The resolution and freedom from seeking is in the prior state of both seeking and resisting, that is, in the prior state of the coin of seeking and resisting.

What is the prior state of good and evil, what is the prior state of seeking and resisting, and how did I discover them? In the following years, I contemplated this principle in my day-to-day life whenever I found myself in a conflicting situation and feeling stuck and negative, that is, whenever I found myself caught in between two mental positions of polar opposites, two sides of one and the same coin. My life itself revealed four essential coins and their prior states of resolution to me.

The four personal stories in this book illustrate how these four essential prior states neutralize and harmonize the four essential warring pairs—the four essential coins—of a human mind: right and wrong, good and bad, better and worse, cause and effect. In the final prior state, seeking as the one and only barrier between me and what I sought—peace, love, and joy—is seen and met directly as an illusion in its entirety.

A bridge was still missing, which was a repeatable process to be used by anyone to travel from where they feel conflicted, stuck and negative in their daily life situations to where the prior state neutralizes, harmonizes, and resolves the internal and external conflicts they constantly experience.

During my daily contemplations over the years, this bridge quietly yet clearly emerged.

It is in the form of a 3-question process. This process will help anyone to identify the two sides of one and the same coin that they might have unconsciously signed on with, and find resolution and harmony in the four prior states of any conflicting life situation. The conflicting life situations could be from a trivia matter like feeling annoyed by others’ comments to more significant ones such as how to recover from a chronic depression, or whether to stay in a relationship, or how to discover one’s true life work, or how to be free from life’s ultimate conflict: seeking and resisting, desiring and fearing, and so on.

Following each of my four personal stories, I have included client case studies that correspond to each coin and each of the four prior states by utilizing the 3-question process.

My clients and I enjoyed the tremendously transformative effects due to the simplicity of this direct method. We experienced that the 3-question process was applicable to all conflicts and dilemmas. Somewhere in between, I realized that a book was to be born through the lives of my own and my clients as a mirror to see that which is within you already and all along: peace, love, and joy!