The pursuit of a goal reifies not only the goal but the one pursuing it as well. So long as there is a fixed someone pursuing a fixed something, the veil remains intact. However, the mystery is dispelled when the separation between the intended goal and the one intending it is revealed to be an illusion, and with that their mutual reification is dissolved and a flow state naturally and effortlessly presences itself. The flow state is the natural condition of life; it is the flow of the Tao. The rational mind conceals that flow by imposing its reductionist point of view on all that it perceives with the result that only separate, individual objects can appear to the mind. We don’t see life; we see the life that rationality gives us to see.
Eliminating the gulf between observer and observed by revealing that it never really existed in the first place is what opens us to the post-rational experience of flow. And this is why reaching the goal by letting go of the attempt to reach it leads to effective action. For example, in the process of giving birth to a child, a way of being becomes accessible to – and even necessary for – a woman in labor; a way of being that is neither active nor passive, but rather responsive, participative.
Thus, engaging with the paradox of effective action goes far beyond merely achieving a desired result. Perhaps more importantly, it also offers the opportunity for further maturation as a human being by inviting a collaboration with life in a moment by moment dance that is both creation and discovery. Just as we outgrew childhood when we became an adolescent and adolescence when we became an adult, so too we can outgrow the constraints of observer consciousness to know ourselves as participants in the flow of life. In the instant of experiencing flow there is neither an intention nor the one intending, there is just flow. Effective action is merely the term we use to explain it later.
