As I understand it, an unconscious person reacts while a wise person is able to simply watch his emotions as they arise rather than acting on them mechanically. But what about spontaneity? Is spontaneity really compatible with watching?When you have learned how to watch, when you have learnt how to be utterly silent, unmoving, undisturbed when you know how to just sit, sitting silently, doing nothing, then it is true, as the zen saying goes, that the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. But the grass grows, remember!
Action does not disappear the grass grows by itself. Becoming watchful does not mean that you become inactive; Action happens through you, although there is no doer anymore. The doer disappears, but the doing continues. And when there is no doer, the doing is spontaneous; it cannot be otherwise. It is the doer that does not allow spontaneity.
The doer means the ego, the ego means the past. When you act, you are always acting through the past, You are acting out of experience that you have accumulated, you are acting out of the conclusions that you have arrived at in the past. How can you be spontaneous? the past dominates, and because of the past you cannot even see the present. Your eyes are so full of the past, the smoke of the past is so thick, that seeing is impossible. You cannot see! you are almost completely blind - blind because of the smoke, because of the past conclusions, because of your knowledge. The knowledgeable person is the most blind person in the world. Because he functions out of his knowledge, he does not see what the case is. He simply goes no functioning mechanically. He has learnt something and it has become a readymade mechanism in him, he acts out of it.
But life has no obligation to fit with your conclusions. That is why life is very confusing to the knowledgeable person. He has all readymade answers, he has everything crammed. But life never raises the same question again; Hence, the knowledgeable person always fall short.
Subtly, one has to know how to sit silently. That does not mean that one goes on sitting silently forever. It is not that you have become inactive; on the contrary, it is only out of silence that a real response, a real action arises. If you are not silent, if you don't know how to sit silently in deep meditation, but whatever you go on doing is reaction, not action, you react.