You ask: “At times I feel like I can just silently sit and wait for eternity, and other times like sobbing with the futility of sitting outside a gate I cannot even see – frozen between action and inaction.” Those are the great moments, when you are frozen between action and inaction. Remain frozen. Don’t do anything, just remain in that moment. You are on the verge of a new birth.

If you can wait, a new life will arise – what Taoists call wei wu wei, action without action. And that happens only when you are frozen between action and inaction. If you choose you miss that birth. If you can, remain frozen, don’t choose – “So what?” – remain in that moment. It is arduous for the mind because the mind starts feeling suffocated, the mind says, “Do something. Something has to be done. Anything will do, but do something. Don’t remain frozen here, you will die.” You are not dying, the mind is dying, the ego is dying. The ego says, “Do something – at least meditate, chant the name of God, pray. Do something.” And if you do something, you have moved into action again.

These are rare moments when there is no action and no inaction, and you are frozen. Not that you are lethargic, so there is no inaction – you have energy, but the energy is not going anywhere because there is no goal left. The energy is simply there like a reservoir rising higher and higher, becoming greater and greater. You are ready to explode into something, into something absolutely new, of which you cannot even dream. You are on the verge of a new mode of life: action in inaction. Then a new activity starts in which you are not the actor, in which you are only a vehicle, a passage.

But I know those moments are hard, I have passed through those moments just as you are passing. Only one thing can I say to help you: that they pass. But great patience is a must. Don’t be impatient, the impatience comes from the mind. The mind starts saying, “Do something! Become occupied with something” – because mind cannot exist without occupation, mind is occupation. When there is no occupation there is no mind. Suddenly you are silent, suddenly you arrive at the primal awareness.

That’s what Buddhists call buddha nature. There is nothing to do, nothing to think. You are, but your being is just a pure mirroring, watching, waiting. And not waiting for something in particular because you don’t know where the gate is, you don’t know what is going to happen. So it is not a question of waiting for something; if you wait for something, you wait for Godot.

Waiting has to be pure. Enjoy waiting for itself, for its own sake. Don’t you see the beauty of just waiting – the purity of it, the benediction of it, the innocence of it – just waiting, not even capable of saying for what? See the point of it: pure waiting, not knowing what is going to happen. If you know what is going to happen that will be supplied by your past, it will be a continuity with the past; it will not be new. Maybe modified, but it will be again the same thing, it will be a repetition. How can you know what is going to happen? You have not known it before so how can you even imagine it?