The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep. - Alan Watts

You know the past only in the present and as part of the present.

Civilized people, whether Western or Eastern,
need to be liberated and dehypnotized from their systems of symbolism and, thereby, become more
intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world. For lack of such awareness our
consciousnesses and consciences have become calloused to the daily atrocities of burning children with
napalm, of saturation bombing of fertile earth with all its plants, wild animals, and insects (not to mention
people), and of manufacturing nuclear and chemical weapons concerning which the real problem is not so
much how to prevent their use as how to get them off the face of the earth.

"[W]u-wei means "nondoing" simply in the sense that by no action of our own can we bring ourselves into harmony with Tao, for [...] the secret of this harmony in the moment is not action but acceptance of a harmony already achieved by Tao itself. We do not alter the actual situation; but our attitude toward it undergoes a change whereby we feel harmony where before we felt discord."