Chapter 55 
  

When the mastercraftsman is fully immersed in the Creative Harmony, 
he has the innocence of a child. 
Like a child he holds no position,  
thus his perception is unobscured. [1] 

He has no preconception, thus he grasps things as they are. 
Not imposing judgment or expectation 
he allows his work to form according to its own nature. 
His non-resistance to the expression of the  
Creative Harmony increases his life force; 
working all day, he does not weary,  
such is the nature of harmony.  [2]

To know harmony is to know the essential. 
To know the essential is to be illuminated. 

To impose one's will is to bring disaster. 
To aggitate the mind with excessive thinking 
is to loose one's clarity. 
When things are taken to excess the Way of Harmony is lost. 
When the Way is lost one's work comes to nothing. 




 
  
footnotes
[1]  ...The longer I live, the more ground I see to hold in high honor a certain sort of childishness or innocent susceptibility. Generally speaking, I find that when we first look at a subject, we get a glimpse of some of the greatest truths about it; as we look longer, our vanity, and false reasoning, and half-knowledge, leads us into various wrong opinions; but as we look longer still, we gradually return to our first impressions, only with a full understanding of their mystical and innermost reasons; and of much beyond and beside them, not then known to us, now added (partly as foundation, partly as corollary) to what at first we felt or saw...
John Ruskin; The Lamp of Beauty: Writings on Art, page 87

[2]  “Therefore we must harken closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within... And then the inner voice breaks free--now feebly and now violently--from the words within which it dwells like a charm...
     If we will surrender our closed personalities, so full of tention, we are in a position to accept this magical principle of life, whether in thought, intuition, or in our relationships. For in fact we see every day beings who are absorbed in one another, whether in living or in teaching, aimless or with direction. So it is with every created thing, everything we can communicate, every constant in the flux of living; each one has its own principle which shapes it, keeps life in it, and maintains it in our consciousness. Thus it is preserved, like a rare species , from extinction. We may identify it with "me" or "you" according to our estimate of its scale or its infinity. For we set aside the self and personal existence as being fused into a larger experience. All that is required of us is to RELEASE CONTROL. Some part of ourselves will bring us into unison. The inquiring spirit rises from stage to stage, until it encompasses  the whole of Nature. All laws are left behind. One's soul is a reverberation of the universe. then too, as I believe, one's perception reaches out toward the Word, towards awareness of the vision.”

Oskar Kokoschka, 
" On the Nature of Visions" 1912  
translated by Hedi Medlinger and John Thwaits in Edith Hoffman,
Kokoschka: Life and work 
(London: Faber and Faber, 1947)