Although quietude and calmness are necessary, it is the "non-graspingness" of the mind that mainly

constitutes the principle of "no-mindedness". A gung fu man employs his mind as a mirror - it
grasps nothing, yet it refuses nothing; it receives, but it does not keep. As Alan Watts put it, no-
mindedness is a 'state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the
sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.' What he means is to let the mind
think what it likes without the interference by the separate thinker or ego within oneself. So long as
it thinks what it wants, there is absolutely no effort in letting go, and the disappearance of the effort
to let go is preceisely the disappearance of the separate thinker."

He mentions the fact that any arresting of our conscious awareness on only one thought, aspect, object,
or focal point creates a condition of "physical stoppage", which is the anti-thesis of wu-hsin. It is akin
to trying to relax by telling yourself, "I MUST RELAX!" The act of relaxing is as natural as breathing,
and allowing it to happen instead of fixating on it ultimately allows it to present itself.

I mention this because immediately afterwards in the book, there is an analogy to felines that was the
final piece of the puzzle that I have been trying to solve since Saturday. The book says the following:

When a cat leaps from the top of a table, for example, the cat simply lets go of itself; it becomes
completely relaxed and lands on the ground with a gentle thud and continues on its way. The cat
does not fill its mind with all sorts of thoughts as to how it shall land, where it shall go once it does,
or - least of all - whether it is "safe" to make the leap in the first place.

To follow through with our illustration, if that same cat, in the midst of leaping from the table, decided
that it did not want to leap at all, it would instantly become tense in trying to change its course and
would end up in a rather sorry state once it hit the ground. And so in the same way, wu-hsin is the
avoidance of such mental tenseness, of paralysis by analysis.

It was the following paragraph that made it all come together:

In this respect, the philosophy of wu-hsin, or no-mindedness, as espoused by Bruce Lee, can be
likened to the natural response of the cat leaping from the tabletop. That is to say, the moment we
are born, we can be said to be, metaphorically speaking, placed in a state of hurdling from a position
of existence - in which we are secure with our surroundings - to one of nonexistence (in which we
are not). We are, in effect, in a state of "falling" toward death, and there's nothing that can stop us.
Granted, some of us are given a greater height to fall from, which prolongs our descent somewhat,
but we are all falling nonetheless. However, instead of going into a state of tension at the thought of
this fact and attempting to mentally cling to all sorts of things during our descent (such as
our memories of the past or hopes for the future, which have no existence in our immediate reality),
we should endeavor to be more catlike in our perspective on life.

In this moment, I finally understood what the Buddhist monk was trying to explain and what my
mother was teaching me that day. The act of letting go allows us to be to enjoy the descent instead of
being in a constant state of tension and ultimately allow us to become more alive in the process. Most
buddhists have a good understanding of this as everyday knowledge, and my mother was no exception.
I am now fully resolved to strive every day to ground myself in this way and to enjoy life to the fullest
- trying my best not to cling but to simply live.