Binary thinking. Black and white thinking. All-or-nothing thinking. “False dichotomies.” Finally, us and them, friend and enemy. These are all names and phrases that point at the same inflexible attitude toward life; an attitude that only leads to conflict.
If it must truly be one or the other, either/or, then we are always engaged in a process of selecting one and rejecting the other. Tuning out the faults in what we choose, turning them up in what we reject.
Choices demand a story – here’s why this is good and that’s gotta go. Our stories are like the lines connecting the dots that form the constellations in the sky: imaginary lines drawn between distant and materially unrelated objects scattered through space. The reasoning may be airtight, the evidence ample, and the course of action decisive, even constructive. The results might even be entirely positive – from one perspective.
Logical analysis can only take us so far (to be clear, there are far too many of us who have yet to come that far), and there is more to the world.
Picture the Yin and Yang symbol: two halves, one white and one black. But what makes it special? The little bit of white in the black, the little bit of black in the white.
What does this mean?
It means that the dichotomies of the world are completely acknowledged. The world is filled with black and white distinctions: us and them, subject and object, male and female, day and night, young and old, rich and poor, life and death, predator and prey, for or against.
However, they are not perfectly segregated. What they are is integrated. Not diluted into indistinction and oblivion, but, rather, inseparable: just enough of each is present in the other that you can never have either in its entirety.
This could not be better illustrated than in chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching:
Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
This is the definitive example of Yin and Yang, because there can be no clearer distinction than form and void. Something and nothing. Substance and emptiness. The material that makes the cup cannot be called a cup until it frames the void with itself: its material function is inseparable from the balance of form and formlessness.
If this seems banal and even a bit unsophisticated, good: that demonstrates the extent to which form and void are integrated everywhere.
You can’t digest what’s in your stomach unless you leave some room: filling your stomach completely doesn’t promote health but undermines it.
You can make the most brilliant argument in the world but if you’re not paying attention to the person listening, it will all be wasted.
The best way to care for children is to leave just enough gaps in their care that they learn to care for themselves.
The way to make someone fall in love with you is to give them a chance to miss you.
What happens when you try to have 100% of something?
Total peace requires totalitarianism – something worthy of being destroyed in a war.
Total tolerance means saying yes to things that are unhealthy for the people extending tolerance – rendering the value of their tolerance null.
Total inclusion similarly destroys the value of being included – what is it worth to be included by people with no standards?
To be totally gentle and loving is to hand over soft, spoiled brats to an uncaring world for which they are hopelessly unprepared – does that sound loving to you?
To always be there for someone only erases the selfhood of both parties. Siamese twins are always there for each other – is that desirable?
Finally, pursuing a world without racism requires presuming racist intent of the majority ethnic population (either in sheer numbers or in socioeconomic dominance) – in other words, invidious discrimination on the basis of race.
It is not a matter of all or nothing – all is nothing. And, to make matters worse, nothing functions without some degree of Nothing.
What is supposed to happen to your life if you take this idea to heart? An appreciation for simplicity that shows itself in everything you do; a cultivated tolerance for boredom; a measured and unhurried pace at all times.
The beauty of this chapter is the way it illustrates that you don’t have something until you have enough space for it to function properly. Instead of trying to fill up every hour of every day, instead of always having to be doing something, acquiring something, even learning something, what if you could do nothing, just here and there?
Not all the time, and not to the point of neglecting any of your responsibilities, but just to the point that you can actually just be, rather than constantly busying yourself with the work of becoming.
We might call this being present – it is, but Lao Tzu doesn’t tell us to be present. What he tells us is that usefulness comes from what is not there. The void is not an esoteric ”spiritual” concept: it is everywhere. In the empty cup, in the room you walk into, in the blankness between cogent thoughts, at the end of every sentence, in every functioning drain, and pervading every moment of dreamless sleep.
The esoteric meaning is that everything in your life will be more useful to you when it has enough space. Not too much space, not a life of emptiness and endless contemplation of nothing but thoughts about thoughts, but enough. Space has to be understood as that which makes room for things.
The things are, ultimately, what matter. Prosperity and abundance are good things. Possessions and conveniences are good things. Plenty of food and sleep and things to do are good things. They are, however, addictive. They can easily become ends unto themselves. It is entirely too easy to lose ourselves in the stimulus they provide and the sense of purpose their pursuit gives us. Judging by the age of the text, we can probably conclude these are eternal human struggles, which means that society cannot solve them for us: only the private cultivation of wisdom is sufficient.
A wise person consciously grants each and every element of his or her life the space it needs to function properly. Without this, we become tragic figures who have it all but benefit from it not at all.
This is the part of the movie when everything stops – facial expressions are fixed, the overturned coffee, flying bullets, or an impudent domestic cat is suspended midair, and we have a chance to stare at what would normally be over in an instant. Cue the voiceover saying, “how did I get here, you ask?”
There is a reason we’re stopping in place, mid action. A reason we’re not zooming out to show the big picture, or zooming in to show some microscopic occurrence secretly causing everything.
We stop in freeze frame fashion because it proves that all the information you need is in front of your face. To clarify: not, all the information, but all the necessary information.
Freeze the moment and it all becomes clear: where you are, what you’re doing, how you got here, where you’ll end up. You need to do nothing more than look.
Look until you see. Until you understand. Until you know exactly what must be done, and why.
You need no specialized knowledge, only the information presented to you by your physical eyes, conveyed to your thinking mind. And the most direct form of thinking is to ask a question. To inquire into the nature of something.
This is the spirit in which I’d like to approach chapter 10 of the Tao Te Ching: you are being given a questionnaire by a wise sage. All of the questions are strange. They require you to come to a complete stop in order to answer them. Let’s have a look:
Carrying body and soul and embracing the one, Can you avoid separation? Attending fully and becoming supple, Can you be as a newborn babe? Washing and cleansing the primal vision, Can you be without stain? Loving all men and ruling the country, Can you be without cleverness? Opening and closing the gates of heaven, Can you play the role of woman? Understanding and being open to all things, Are you able to do nothing? Giving birth and nourishing, Bearing yet not possessing, Working yet not taking credit, Leading yet not dominating, This is the Primal Virtue.
Six questions, each so opaque as to border on nonsensical. When I was memorizing the text, brooding over it daily and hourly, I returned to these questions again and again, for over a year. Little by little, they began to make sense. Some of them yielded their meaning quickly, others slowly, but the meaning of each word arrived in the same way: as an inevitable consequence of repeated exposure. I looked at nothing outside of the words themselves to interpret them. I didn’t assume I was missing information that an academic or scholar would have, but resolved to make the absolute best use of my own mind. Just as someone lost in the woods pays attention to the environment in ways someone possessing a map, or driving down a paved road does not, I attended to Lao Tzu’s words with a kind of life-or-death earnestness.
I will now attempt to distill the insights born of such a process: a map of the path I took out of the wilderness.
Carrying body and soul and embracing the one, Can you avoid separation?
Can you be, at all times, a loving steward of your inner and outer being and the world which houses both?
Can you reconcile every apparent conflict between any and all of these elements?
It sounds like an impossibly high standard, and the sentiment is all too easily dismissed out of hand. When I hear trite drivel to the effect of “all is one,” I know I am talking to someone who, at the very least, has abused his or her capacity for magical thinking, someone hopelessly ignorant about the realities of life and yet convinced he or she is above it all.
The sentiment expressed here is the opposite: grounded in reality, soberly owning up to the inherent challenge of living.
It is made clear by the poignant question, “can you avoid separation?”
Can you live your life in such a way as to never feel alienated or dehumanized? To even ask the question is to acknowledge the countless forms of emotional suffering that often dominates people’s lives.
When you separate yourself from the depths of your conscience, avoiding the unanswered questions for the sake of superficial pleasantries, you cheat yourself of the moral sophistication and maturity you could have realized.
Even worse, you will not know yourself, and will be painfully aware of that. Not directly, not clearly, but it will be felt in the dread that surges up like the roar of the wind when opening a window in a car going over 80mph.
Avoid your mind and you become its prisoner, confined to the surface, like a guest forced to wait in an antechamber or foyer, hearing footsteps through the floor above but never being privy to the goings on.
The mantra of people like this is always forget, forget, forget…
And they have tools for forgetting.
What of those who are lost in the attic of the mind, and have forgotten about the yard of the body? Who are separated from the physical?
One version of this person might be the “absent minded genius.” Inattentive to time, inattentive to appearance, opaque in language, a foreigner to consistency, an enemy to “normality.”
Another version of this person is the monastic type. Regimented, austere, and entirely too attentive to everything of which the brilliant disaster above is utterly oblivious. The monk, the ascetic, the devout person is aware of the physical and despises it, wants it brought to heel, believes it can be silenced by deprivation of both resources and sympathy.
And what is the meaning of “embracing the one?” What does a failure to do this look like?
It must be said straight away that “the one” is not comparable to any religious notion of God. Its meaning is simple: life itself. The world as a single and singular world, and not a disconnected series of finite but innumerably numerous objects. The one world, with its endless facial expressions that we call situations, circumstances, moments in time. It is the same world, unimaginably the same and unchanged, from moment to moment.
Return to the language of Lao Tzu: “carrying body and soul and embracing the one,/can you avoid separation?” Can you, in a fully integrated body and mind, integrate fully with the world? Can you “avoid separation?” Can you avoid discontinuity, avoid making self serving exceptions, and live in a state of carrying and embracing all?
To clarify: you are not responsible for the world! But wherever you go, whatever you do, however you feel, you are continuously responsible for yourself. Neither anger, fatigue, horniness, self-conferred superiority, the protection or rejection of the group, or the vagaries of any niche ideology excuse anything, ever.
Can you avoid separation? It means – can you never do anything you know to be wrong, and when you err, can you acknowledge the error and submit to instruction that you might improve?
More specifically, you cannot neglect your innermost self, the outer form that is not just the vessel for “the soul” but a living thing with a life and intelligence all its own, or the world in which both body and soul live.
If you lose yourself in one, you abandon the others, and the more sensitive among you will feel the pangs of remorse once you have come to your senses. For the rest, something will simply be missing: the conscious experience of integration. The fullness of containing all of your thoughts and feelings, all of your physical being, all of your external commitments, and a well-wishing regard for all existence, simultaneously, will elude you.
A life characterized by a wealth beyond reckoning: this is what it feels like to move through the world without any part of you drifting out of reach. This is what it means to “have it all.”
Attending fully and becoming supple, Can you be as a newborn babe?
What does the body lose over time? Flexibility. And why is this? Because we gradually shy away from our full range of motion. Again, why? Because we gradually settle into increasingly narrow routines. We go from being playful and curious children to purposeful, transactional adults. We once roamed freely; now we are set upon both a clear and confined path.
I mean this in every sense: our movements become prescribed, our thoughts become prescribed, our speech becomes prescribed, and our perceptions become prescribed as well. Everything narrows, everything occupies less and less of its full range of motion.
Continue this way for a few decades, and much of you is old, curmudgeonly, and the prisoner of a rigid mind and body.
What do people over a certain age miss more than anything else? Their youth. Their innocence, purity, imaginations, and, above all, their energy.
And what we can do about this apparent loss of self, of what made us precious to ourselves?
Attend fully, and become supple: thus shall your innocence be returned to you by your own hand.
To “attend fully” is to become a diligent student toward everything in your life: looking at everything done automatically, halfheartedly, and superficially, and laboring to reach its deeper layers. Rather than living with an unexamined “good enough,” handling things as a physician who is responsible for making a sober assessment of a patient, diagnosing a problem accurately, and prescribing the precise method that will restore it to full and healthy functioning.
I “attend fully” by asking myself, does this seem healthy and normal? Is this supposed to be, look, and feel like this? Is this as orderly and organized as it should be? Is my understanding of this where it should be? Do my interactions feel genuine and life affirming to myself and my counterpart? Am I openly acknowledging what is going through my head, or running from it, chastising it, or pretending it isn’t there?
At the level of the body, am I taking complete responsibility for my health, or am I ignoring whatever feels daunting, inconvenient, or minor enough to justify dismissal? Am I putting myself through my full range of motion daily? Am I digging into and opening anything and everything that feels tight until it loosens? Am I diligently strengthening everything that holds me together?
In other words, have I become, through examination, recognition, and effort, so cultivated, skilled, strong, and adaptable, that I eagerly open myself up to life and its moment-to-moment challenges? Am I curious, earnest, forthright, and tenacious?
A baby is unselfconscious because it is unaware, lacking experience, and lacking a basis of comparison. For adults, for you and me, we can only become less self conscious by increasing our self confidence. Whatever we think we can’t handle, we avoid. Whatever we avoid, we gradually lose the ability to handle. This background feedback loop of passive deterioration can continue, unexamined, for decades. We begin reversing this by refusing to avoid anything, no matter how awkward or inept we feel at first. This is the essence of “attending fully and becoming supple.”
Washing and cleansing the primal vision, Can you be without stain?
What has Lao Tzu been rhetorically asking us so far? Can you keep all your responsibilities in view? Can you do everything you were born capable of doing? Can you, now, wash not your hands but your eyes of the past? Can you free yourself from the corrupting influence of all the wickedness, stupidity, mediocrity, boorishness, and sheer error that you have witnessed and partaken of?
“Washing and cleansing the primal vision,/can you be without stain?” It means that you are stained by what you have seen. You have seen too much to see anything correctly, and you have become an unseemly sight as a result.
My language sounds hyperbolically stern, but consider whether the mirror feels like a flattering friend, or whether your conscience feels like someone you keep close and who smiles at you from across the room wherever you go.
Being without stain means seeing clearly, but what does “clear” mean in this vastly general sense? Rejecting the examples offered by others. Everything you see proposes a way of being. Everything you can encounter invites you to imitate it. “Look at me! Do you see? What you see is my answer to the question of life, and if you have yet to find your answer, perhaps mine will suit you.”
Whether you realize it or not, everything that exists is, almost by definition, offering itself as a suggestion for how to exist. How to handle disagreement. How to take a compliment. How to give and receive criticism. How to think about work, money, sex, relationships, children, humanity, god, the truth, the value of time, and so on.
Let me ask you then: is what you’re doing now the consequence of rigorous inquiry and revision, or is most of it haphazard? It’s some blend of the two, and this describes just about everyone: a mishmash of thoughtful and thoughtless. The most thoughtless thing would be to thoughtlessly adopt thoughtless behaviors, and this is exactly what the injunction to wash and cleanse the primal vision is about.
To be stained is to become something we would never have chosen, which means to have some remnant of an experience stick to us in a way that makes us uglier.
Removing the influence of the thoughtlessness of others: this is “washing and cleansing the primal vision.” Clear vision means the ability to ask, how would I best like to live? Where is my opportunity to act with dignity and virtue in this moment?
You will never achieve this kind of clear eyed innocence by unthinkingly following the examples of others, because the way of imitation is the way of accumulation: letting everything leave its mark until you are an aggregate of influences.
To be without stain is to be without anything that doesn’t belong, without any sign of mismanagement – ultimately without anything that draws negative criticism.
Not that you should be perfect, and not that there aren’t people out there who criticize poorly and inaccurately, but there is a difference between the mistakes and limitations of someone who is earnestly striving for excellence, and somebody who has grown cynical about life, about humanity, about themselves.
Cynics see the world poorly, having learned all the wrong lessons from life. The cynic rhetorically asks, “why bother?” To the clear eyed person who can feel right and wrong internally, there is neither questioning nor hesitation – wash away the grime of relativism, and see for yourself.
Loving all men and ruling the country, Can you be without cleverness?
If anyone is still confused about the meaning of seeing clearly and living without stain, look no further than this: “loving all men and ruling the country.”
Everything implied by those six words is just about everything you need to redeem yourself from every accumulated instance of moral compromise: maximum compassion and goodwill married to maximum agency, duty, and personal risk.
Simply take a moment to consider the reason to become a ruler would be your love for your fellow human. To invert a tired cliche, great responsibility demands great power. What is power, but the capacity to shoulder responsibility?
One of the unmistakable themes of the Tao Te Ching is personal responsibility: not to transcend the world, not to go to heaven after death, not to convert or subjugate non-believers, but to learn how to live in the world. How to live with yourself in such a way that the world begins to make sense.
A life of cleverness, of cunning, of striving to win, is not the path of a great ruler: a ruler is responsible. Think of yourself this way wherever you are, whoever you’re with: your job is to hold the happiness and fulfillment of others firmly in view.
The way of cleverness is the way of getting, but the way of love is clearly giving. When you feel small, you seek. When you feel large and significant, you give. And what of those who are indeed small, who are clearly in need? Is it either sensible or kind to say that they should somehow be expected to give? Yes. Yes, because necessity is better than sympathy. It is better to contribute, better to be a pillar of stability in someone’s life, better to engage their instinct for reciprocity by being the first to be generous.
Better than what? Better than making sure others feel sorry for you. Better than eliciting charity born of pity. The truth is that we despise what we pity, and we intervene because we cannot bear to see something so pitiful.
We give to the pathetic in order to change them into something we find palatable: a broken window, a graffitied wall we must fix. And if it proves unfixable, if it stays perpetually in need of repair, of aid, of pity and sympathy, it puts the lie to our pretenses of efficacy; it proves we are useless. How long can you tolerate the presence of anything or anyone that advertises your impotence?
Therefore, no matter what you have, strive to be useful to others. Be an unclever, loving ruler over your life: whatever you have, put it to use. Whatever falls to you, strive to make it better. The compensation will come. The competence and discernment will develop. The unselfish fastidiousness will develop. The promptness will develop. But it never develops when you see yourself as a victim, a beggar, or an object of sympathy. Reject sympathy, and earn respect.
What do you think happens when someone who sees himself as a pitiful victim somehow gains power? Somehow gets the girl, the money, and the authority? Let me put it this way: what happens when someone who only understands how to exploit the sympathy of others with their own wretchedness no longer elicits sympathy? Nothing good!
Carefully examine every word of Lao Tzu’s verbal monument and you will not find a single word about the nature of a human. The nature of the universe, yes. The “way of nature,” yes. When it comes to thinking of ourselves, he only speaks in terms of how we must respond to the world. One might go so far as to say he sees us as not as human beings, but human “doings.” His subtlety is directed toward attitudes, actions, and observation of processes: what brings about peace within the heart of a person, thereby promoting peace in his or her society? In this way, we must repeatedly put aside what we believe we are owed, must put aside an insistent self concern, and, instead, look about our lives and begin to care for what is around us, with love and without cleverness. In precisely this way, we achieve the importance for which we yearned: to become the rulers of our private worlds.
Opening and closing the gates of heaven, Can you play the role of woman?
Something I’ve learned to appreciate over the years is the mental challenge of empathizing with a text that occasionally transgresses our contemporary sensibilities: in other words, I read these words and recognize there is much here that “you can’t say anymore.”
Let’s say what is uncomfortably obvious – opening and closing the gates of heaven means two things, in this context: the act of childbirth and the act of sex.
What does it mean to be directed toward these behaviors, these functions, and be challenged by a great sage in our ability to adopt this role, the uniquely female role?
It means: can you bring ideas into form. Can you materially contribute to the world? Can add to the sum of humanity? Can you usher in something precious and delicate, filled with energy and potential? Can you make the world a more beautiful place?
The gates of heaven swing both ways: mortals are lifted up to it, and the material world descends from it. Women are here identified as facilitating that process symbolically but also in a very literal way. There is more or less nothing more pleasurable than sex and there is nothing more awe inspiring than the birth of a child. Life comes into this world through women, and women do a great deal to make life what it is. Therefore anyone who reads “can you play the role of woman” and recoils in offense is nothing but a churlish prude: Lao Tzu has quite literally recognized women as having divine purpose.
Also, remember that it was not uncommon for women to die in childbirth. Can you, therefore, summon the fortitude to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the future? For the sake of our collective continuity? Can you conceive of something more important than you, meant to outlast you, meant to literally replace you, and commit everything you have to its development? Can you pay the ultimate price for the sake of what will die without our continued care and attention?
The “role of woman” is here defined by answering the terror of our own mortality with the sacrificial act, in both big and small ways, of creating the future.
Understanding and being open to all things, Are you able to do nothing?
Doing nothing becomes an option to the person who has achieved understanding. Without openness and understanding, there is only discomfort with what is not understood. There is only the threat of what you don’t understand and cannot control, and the countless ways people flail about in their frustrated confusion.
Much of this activity doesn’t look frustrated or confused on the surface – often enough, it looks and many ways is perfectly orderly and elegant. A job, a career, a relationship, a family, even a healthy, active, scholarly or meditative way of life – these are all constructive and worthwhile things that are nonetheless likely to be used as distractions from the deeper mysteries we feel unfit to face.
We busy ourselves being industrious, or leisurely, or artistic, or sociable, to some degree, because we are not truly at peace just as we are. I have to insist that this is not meant to, nor does it diminish the value and the benefits of living in these ways – but all I have to do is ask you, do you understand and accept the world?, and just about anyone is short-circuited by this.
To be fair, it’s a highly unfair question! A person isn’t meant to go asking this of others, and no acceptable answer or explanation could possibly be given! Nor is do nothing meant to be taken for the Sage’s prescription to the aspirant! What you are meant to do is ask yourself.
Calmly and quietly, search for the still reservoir of calm and quiet inside yourself. Look for the understanding already present within yourself, give yourself permission to acknowledge it. But, rather than jump up to act on it, thereby spoiling it, simply accept that you know whatever it is that you know. Don’t tell others, don’t write it down, don’t try to change your life. Simply admit to yourself that you understand. Accept your own knowledge, and do nothing but accept it.
Once you have learned how to want to understand rather than want to change something, your day to day thoughts, words, and actions will change. They will change in the sense that they will gradually adjust and reflect your growing understanding, just as they currently reflect the understanding you have now.
There is a lag time between the new understanding and it’s reflection in your actions, because you have to learn how to behave in accordance with new knowledge. The lag time is enhanced by the fact that if you are truly seeking understanding, from a place of complete openness, you are certainly not preoccupied with yourself. You’re not thinking of how you look, how you sound, or how to impress or convince others. What you’re thinking about is the object of your understanding – whatever it is in your life that you have truly begun to investigate and care about. You are earnest, sincere, and diligent, and will not be rushed or dissuaded by anything or anyone: this is the path of understanding, as contrasted with the path of preoccupation and performance.
Preoccupation? Performance? By this I mean that many of us can do the right things well enough, but the motive is not totally right – we perform our morality because we are preoccupied with our own standing in our social milieu, or preoccupied with our own discomfort in the face of what life presents to us, and so we act out the prescribed behaviors to make the discomfort go away.
You can live your entire life this way, to the point where the discomfort in the face of what is not truly understood is buried beneath all conscious recognition. No one is castigating anyone for this, but Lao Tzu simply asks, “are you able to do nothing?” Can you be still and resist the compulsion to manage things into their cubbyholes, can you be still and mentally investigate the meaning of the events unfolding around you? Can you welcome reality in a gentle and benevolent way, seeking to see beneath the surface and to truly get to know your world?
Giving birth and nourishing, Bearing yet not possessing, Working yet not taking credit, Leading yet not dominating, This is the Primal Virtue.
Lao Tzu asks his six penetrating questions, setting a high bar both conceptually and ethically, and concludes by distilling the essence of them into a simple injunction: pour yourself into whatever you do, and put yourself aside.
Shoulder the weight, but don’t claim ownership of what you carry. Carry it because it needs carrying.
Bring life into the world and care for it.
Perform the tasks before you because they are incomplete, and incomplete work cannot stand. That you did the work does not make you special – failing to do it does.
When you know what needs to be done, how to do it, and why, you have a responsibility to guide those who don’t. This does not make you superior to them, nor them subordinate to you.
In short, nothing you do can give you some claim to special status or treatment: a duty is a duty because of the harm that befalls the community when it is abdicated. “Status” is nothing but a position of greater responsibility, greater and more consequential duties. We are not here to barter with life – not here to set up deals and collect on whatever we can get for ourselves.
The best way for us to enhance ourselves is by meeting life’s demands in the right way:
By learning to hold our in our minds our inner beings, bodies, and material and social environments all at once, continuously;
By giving complete attention to whatever we engage with and thereby staying fresh, flexible, and forever on the edge of discovery;
By cleaning our perceptions of the deposits of the past, and resisting the buildup that leads to cynicism and corruption;
By fully stepping into the role of a benevolent ruler, seeing to the needs of others and letting go of all “tricks of the trade;”
By using our minds and bodies as vessels for the future, bringing things from conception to material reality;
By having the insight and open-heartedness to resist compulsive, thoughtless actions – by having the capacity for stillness.
This is how we become virtuous, how we realize our potential, and find what we truly want out of life.
In short, what is needed for a remarkable and meaningful life is to be found in the completion of the various tasks life supplies to us without our asking. Therefore there is nothing to seek, only a life to be lived – it is nowhere else but before you now.
I want to tell you about something strange that happened to me.
A few birthdays ago, I noticed a switch had flipped in my head. Not on the very day, but the morning after. It hasn’t switched back.
All of a sudden, everything in me said, “it’s time.”
I went from wanting to want the right things to wanting them. I stopped hesitating, and locked in on my life the way a tiger locks in on and advances toward some unsuspecting animal in a jungle.
Things changed quickly. Some very serious problems went away, never to return. I began to clean up, beautify, and expand my life, one day at a time. I got organized, made a plan, and, wonder of wonders, stuck to the plan.
What fueled me? Well, today I am fueled mostly by positive feelings of desire: I wish to see things come to fruition. I like hitting “publish,” “post,” “send,” and sometimes even “dial.”
I like the sound of my amplifier switching on, I like the monotony of weightlifting and cardio and roasting in a sauna, the monotony of maintaining my technique with the aid of an unrelenting and obnoxious metronome.
I like working on new music, preparing for a performance, bringing the gear back to the rehearsal space after it’s done, letting the sense of accomplishment digest.
I like noticing that I’m behind and knowing how to catch up, and then actually catching up and getting to spend at least a few hours in a state of “caught up.”
I like that my biggest problem is that I have to find a way to make more time for client outreach.
My friends, it was only a few years ago that my biggest problem was that I was habitually abusing drugs and alcohol, and hanging by a thread in every area of life.
I am modestly successful in an absolute sense, but relative to my own past, I really do feel like I’ve conquered the world. I crawled out of a hell of my own making, and I get to live the rest of my life as a free man upon whom such freedoms shall not be wasted.
But what fueled me?
You may have noticed I dodged the question earlier, speaking somewhat dotingly about my life now, and my cherubic inclinations to beatific edification.
But how did I get to the point of living a life that inspires a twofold approach of unrelenting ambition and delicate creativity?
Now is your chance to understand what my mother understandably misunderstands: I was fueled by an unimaginable intolerance.
Intolerance of problems. Intolerance of indolence, selfishness, wastefulness, immaturity, and everything casual.
I looked around at this gutted piñata of nothing that has accumulated around me, a suitcase full of IOUs called excuses, and I became, in a way I can only express in this way, consumed with a profoundly loving hatred.
A hatred of mediocrity. A hatred, if you can understand this, of cynicism. A hatred of all the ways I had failed to meet the world with love and commitment. My life did not look like the life of someone who loves life, but rather of someone who hates himself.
That became the object of my hatred: that I had somehow failed to exist in a state of self advocacy.
Something I told you about in another article: one of the plans I made and stuck to was the plan of memorizing the Tao Te Ching. This served me in many ways. Discipline is redemptive no matter who you are or what you need redemption from, but the Tao Te Ching was a supremely worthy object of my discipline.
Repeating and reflecting upon the words day in and day out, I truly saw the error of my ways. I saw them in every point of contrast between the perspective of a sage, which is conveyed in every line of the text, and the facts of my own life. Not just the facts of my deeds, but of my thoughts, attitudes, and emotions.
The Book Of The Way was like a filing cabinet that allowed me to finally organize my life and make it livable, even lovable.
I say all this to tie off the loose thread of my immense intolerance and hatred I spoke of before. The clear wisdom of Lao Tzu became the sword in my hand as I militated against my own selfish immaturity. It became the standard to uphold, the corrective mechanism that would kick in to stop me from doing or saying something destructive.
Little by little, the problems disappeared. I stopped creating, prolonging, and worsening them. They lost momentum and ground to a halt. Now they are strewn across some deserted wasteland like the ruins of some decadent civilization: poetic and beautiful only because they are in fact ruins.
With this in mind, let’s walk together through the garden of wisdom that is chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching. Simple, subtle, nuanced and adaptable. Simple on the surface, incomprehensibly rich upon investigation. Not the stuff of dogma, but of depth. Let us be joined in the hope that some wickedness in you might come to an end in contemplating these ideas.
Let’s begin.
EIGHT
The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.
In dwelling, be close to the land. In meditation, go deep in the heart. In dealing with others, be gentle and kind. In speech, be true. In ruling, be just. In business, be competent. In action, watch the timing.
No fight: No blame.
Let’s summarize what we are looking at.
A broad statement about the nature of nature, a series of injunctions that appear to follow therefrom, and a closing “punchline” that doesn’t quite make sense in relation to the rest, at least not right away.
I intend to give a satisfactory exposition of all 3 sections, which means I am obligated to explain why one should see value in kindness, justice, and truthfulness.
This is at once preposterous and gauche in its ambition. I am no Plato, no Nietzsche, not even a garden variety PhD.
What I am is someone who understands what happens when you ignore the value of these humble virtues, and has struggled mightily to reclaim them. They mean something to me, and this is the meaning I am entitled to articulate and impart.
The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.
The language of the Tao Te Ching is deceptively simple. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard the whole “be like water” thing so many times, in so many patronizing feel good movies, that it’s become meaningless by now.
It’s not meaningless, but simply easy to say. It’s so easy to say that it’s even easier to say unthinkingly.
When people say it’s about the process, life is a journey, or, everything in moderation, it’s about balance, and so on, these are examples of people speaking without thinking: saying meaningful things in ways that render them meaningless.
So, why don’t we attack this claim that the highest good is like water, and truly come to understand it?
If you want to understand water, listen to Mozart’s piano sonatas.
Ceaseless, effortless continuity. Continuously inventive, always varying itself yet always consistently itself. Always perfect – so perfect that it seems light, delicate, and inconsequential.
It flows on, unceasingly, with enough repetition that it has coherence, and enough surprises and flourishes that it dazzles.
The flow of water is just like this. Go look at a river, a brook, a lake, the waves of the ocean meeting the shore or reflecting light from the sky. Routine, predictable, even logical in the broadest sense, but bafflingly complex when viewed more closely.
There is so much going on, and yet its movements are reducible to simple descriptions.
What causes this perfect expression of both simplicity and complexity? Water’s total embrace of its environment. As it flows on, over new surfaces and under continuously changing weather conditions, these changes are like new information for the water to adapt to. Except the changes happen instantly, so much so that even the word “adapt” seems misplaced (it is).
How can we be like this?
Well, we are told that water works miracles (giving life to the ten thousand things), but does not strive.
Will we, you and I, become miraculously perfect if we simply get out of our own way and just be? If we stop trying and just let it happen through us?
Absolutely not.
If Lao Tzu really meant this, if this were true, the world would indeed be run by innocent children. It isn’t.
You arrive at a state of unforced flow by striving until striving is no longer necessary or helpful. It is the fruit of both rigorous and vigorous effort, and not a way to bypass it.
Let me say a few things about effort. Only the people who never look for shortcuts actually find them. They find them over time as their skills develop and they can see more connections between things. They become remarkably efficient in this way.
If you are looking for a way out of putting in the work, you are a child who never grew up. I mean that straightforwardly: you still see playtime as the default state of existence, and moments of exertion as unwelcomed interruptions. You feel constantly put upon, and reluctantly, half heartedly comply.
Should you go all in on effort then, hoping to work your way to mastery?
Yes and no.
You’ll have to go through an unimaginable amount of trial and error.
You’ll think you’ve got it right, and maybe it’s right for a time, but eventually it stops working.
You won’t want to admit that it no longer works, because that means admitting it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
You won’t want to admit it because you’re under the illusion that a fresh start is a negation of what came before, which it isn’t.
The truth is that it takes a lot of repetition to get good at anything. It takes long stretches of focusing on something that isn’t quite coming together in the hopes that it will, only to see nothing happen and move on, in what feels like defeat, only to find the obstacle one day vanished, days, weeks, or even decades later.
Let me tell you a secret: you have to enjoy it enough to keep going when you can’t do it well yet, but you also have to be sufficiently dissatisfied with how badly you’re doing it now to actually push hard enough to get better.
When you do something because you like doing it, you always find ways to get better at doing it. You make sure you do it often. You focus on the activity, not on how doing the activity makes you look, and this is how you can endure the awkwardness of always being a beginner at some new aspect of the activity.
You keep this up long enough, routinely maintaining your facility at something while routinely adding to your skills, and one day you arrive at fluency. The water-like ability to flow in the expression of your craft. This is giving life without striving.
In dwelling, be close to the land.
We are told, over and over again, to choose reality over fantasy.
“The land” is another word for what is real, what is rooted and grounded in sober observation and contemplation. Rooted in the physical: the body and its environment.
To quote the poet Wallace Stevens, “the Earth is a stone. It is not ‘like a stone.’” He means the physical thing is the real thing, and the image of a thing you hold in your mind, that is not physically before your physical eyes, is not a thing at all. The giant rock of the Earth is a physical stone, not merely similar to the memory of a stone that something else reminds you of (“like a stone”).
When I talk about the difference between hard substance and abstract reference, it might feel boringly obvious to you. On the other hand, if you have witnessed, in shock, the way your mind and the minds of others have completely mistaken imagination for substance, you should find this interesting.
Conduct an experiment sometime, and treat the world and everything in it as though it were utterly devoid of deeper meaning. That glance meant nothing, that tone of voice meant nothing, that lack of a response meant nothing.
Now, let me clarify that they all do mean something, but their true meaning is vastly less than the make-believe meanings you have saddled them with.
If you gradually discipline yourself to see objects and events as meaningless, trivial, and almost lifeless facts of nature, like rocks and clouds, your fantasies will die off from being starved of oxygen, so to speak. In this vacuum of invented, self-serving meaning, you can now investigate your life, the motives and behaviors of others, and the time delay between your actions and their results, in a more soberly analytical light.
There is much to be learned about the world, but you have to “dwell close to the land” to see it. You have to handle the stones yourself, rather than the toy marbles of your whimsy that are “like stones.”
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
The loneliest thing is to be physically close to another person and yet barely know them – to be lonely in their company. Therefore, when you have time to yourself, open up deeply.
Take an interest in yourself. Not as in self importance, but have some curiosity and a desire to know what is beneath the surface. Don’t assume you can see and hear and know it all from where you sit and observe now. Rather, assume there is more.
Let me now open a new path of thought. How do you get someone else to talk more? By saying something interesting, and then adopting a posture of interested receptivity toward your counterpart. Not merely hearing, but listening. Perhaps the text will occasion a more protracted discussion on listening later on, but, right now, think of meditation as listening to yourself.
The posture of meditation, the initial dimming of the lights and sitting down in such a deliberate and embarrassingly pretentious way, this is the interesting comment that gets the other going. The sustaining of the position, despite every urge to change or vary it, is the way you indicate to your self that yes, you are still listening. Still here. Still openly awaiting whatever more there is to be said.
This is the pinnacle of decency: inviting someone to say whatever it is they need to say. A self respecting person can offer this invitation to him or herself, and does so with regularity.
Imagine you have a perfect marriage. You notice some small change in your husband or wife’s demeanor, their tone of voice, the pause between the end of your statement and the beginning of theirs, a loss of appetite, anything, and you would adjust instantly. You would gently demonstrate in a way that made sense to both of you that you recognized the signs, and you’re now inviting the other to share what’s really going on.
Meditation is doing this for yourself. The routine of checking in. Maybe it’s difficult, maybe it’s easy, maybe it’s deep, maybe it’s lighthearted – but it’s real, genuine, seriously interested, and not a sham: when it’s time to get serious, you stay the course and don’t disappear.
You learn to do this, and your emotions and intuition will communicate forthrightly with your conscious mind. Over time, you will become attentive, insightful, and whole: your life will make sense. You will make sense to yourself.
This is what going deep in the heart means, and this is why you do it: so that you can legitimately say you are your own best friend, your own closest companion, your own most attentive and appreciative listener.
When you get this right with yourself, you get things wrong with other people so much less often and so much less seriously. It matters a great deal.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
People often have difficulty seeing their own defensiveness, and antisocial behavior in general.
For one reason or another, it always feels perfectly rational and justified. But gentleness and kindness represents, in many ways, the opposite of a rational response: pretending like threats aren’t there. Lowering your defenses.
Yes, you’ve got it right: this isn’t exactly natural in all situations. What’s normal is to have your own survival in mind. To keep others, with their own self interested agendas, at an arm’s length.
What is implied, then, by being gentle and kind with others? That you do not fear them. However they present themselves, interact, and communicate, you are not creating impediments to a potentially flowing exchange.
I didn’t use the word “flowing” unintentionally. In many ways, we are still elaborating on what it means to be like water, what it means to say that the highest good is like water.
Close to the land: conforming to the shape of its environment or vessel.
Deep in the heart: water will flow into all openings no matter how small or remote.
Gentle and kind: “flowing” is also equivalent to “unforced.” We almost never think of water as tense, rigid, unyielding, or harsh.
A sage, the person we all wish to become, never resists, only responds. By being open with others, a sage invites them to offer their best presentation of themselves – rather than merely obliging them to manage his or her own resistance.
Give people a wide opening, a generous reception, and you’ll often see something similar in return. It diffuses tension. It lowers defenses. It promotes feelings of goodwill and magnanimity. It gives them the chance to flow freely.
And, I think this is sufficient. Being gentle and kind does not mean you infantilize people, treating them as though they were fragile simpletons. It also does not mean you do the work for them, or ignore their bad behavior. Gentleness and kindness cannot be offered by a pushover, someone who manipulates others by feigning defenselessness.
No.
Think of these as royal virtues befitting a king or queen: wherever we meet, even if it be in your own home, I treat you as an honored guest in my presence. I receive you graciously, I anticipate your needs, I give you space to think, to choose your words, and even retract them.
I invite you to share what’s on your mind, to present yourself in whatever way you feel the moment demands, and I respond with unflinching understanding and acceptance.
My complete acceptance of my own humanity is the basis for my unrehearsed and unmotivated acceptance of yours – I get to be me, you get to be you. I rather enjoy being me, truth be told, and the least I can do is make it easy for you to be yourself when you’re around me. And, lastly, if you don’t know how to do that, at least you have me as an example.
This is what being gentle and kind really means.
In speech, be true.
Hell is a real place, and you get there by lying and by doing things that self preservation requires you to lie about. I don’t mean you go there after you die. I mean you are there right now if you are a liar. I mean you wish you were dead when your life becomes an edifice of lies.
When you tell the truth, you have your innocence: something invisible to most until later in life.
When you tell the truth, your friendships are also true friendships.
When you tell the truth, you become a master of language: you understand the difference between tact and deceit, subtlety and euphemism. And, you understand this because you will find yourself in a world where people both expect you to tell the truth and are not always happy to hear it.
When you tell the truth, you will eventually end up telling truths about what you want, how you feel, and what you believe that lead you into unknown territory. Something in the familiar, the immediate, and the provincially self satisfied will simply no longer cut it for you. The call to adventure, as old as Abraham, and older, will animate your life if you simply refuse to lie about or deny it.
When you tell the truth, you know yourself. You trust yourself. You provide yourself and others with undeniable proof of your courage and character.
Why is the truth so important? Why is lying so destructive?
Because words are how we make sense of the world. The space in which we live out our lives can only be understood with words, or with thoughts that are not meaningfully distinct from words.
Even the most rigorous and well-intentioned efforts to understand the world, our selves, and how to best conduct our lives, are incomplete in serious ways. In the text we are discussing here, the Tao Te Ching, we are warned about this from the beginning:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
Our very best is incomplete, because truths that hold up on paper still have to be applied by real people, in real situations, in real time. They must be translated into action successfully, and the buck stops here, with you and me, because we are those translators.
Wherever you seek useful, truthful knowledge, you are the limiting factor in whether or not the information serves you.
In other words, the truth and hard won knowledge does not by itself make the world a better place: it is exactly half of the process.
And this is why lies are some of the worst things in the world: if our best attempts at truthfulness are still faulty, how much worse is it to give people information you know to be incorrect or deceptively incomplete?
If truthful speech is the earnest attempt to represent the objective world, lies are the opposite: the construction of an alternate, private, subjective reality, and passing it off as the real thing. A bad map.
In ruling, be just.
We always speak of truth and justice together, because they are extensions of one another: to be just is to strive for objectivity. To let states of affairs speak for themselves, and to unflinchingly follow the rules regardless of who they favor – this is justice.
But to be a just ruler means something more than “fair minded.” A just ruler settles conflicts between disagreeing or otherwise opposed parties. And, in so doing, he or she must weigh the first, second, and third order consequences of the various forms of resolution available under the circumstances.
Such considerations can seem dizzying in their complexity and their gravity. You try thinking through all the possibilities, all the different sequences of events you could set in motion were you to be given sufficient authority, and soon you are sick to your stomach with worry. Soon, the idea of playing god looks more like a one ticket to a personal hell of anxiety.
And, rightly so.
Just about all of us should sit and contemplate the sheer weight of the mantle of justice, the weight of the sword of Damocles, until we turn back in sheepish embarrassment. Until we are nauseated by the thought of bearing any responsibility for the world. The odds that you, dear reader, are utterly unfit for such a burden is something close to 100%.
Why issue the churlish harangue? Because justice begins when you turn away from whatever inspires judgment in you. Wherever you seek revenge, you cannot rule justly.
Victims deserve justice, but a person animated by a victim mentality does not understand and in fact actively undermines justice.
Whatever you can only describe in terms of “they,” or “society,” the “status quo,” and so on, is simply not for you. Whatever you can only describe vaguely is, by definition, not your business.
Let’s dispense with uncomfortable and inconvenient realities right now.
Disparities are not evidence of discrimination. Poverty is not evidence of oppression. Rejection is not evidence of “phobia.”
And now a necessary twisting of the knife.
Sometimes people simply dislike you for who you are, and it has nothing to do with your “demographic markers.”
Sometimes, bad experiences, bad relationships, bad employers, bad treatment, and a bad life are nobody else’s fault but your own.
And now, the worst possible honest thing I could say:
Sometimes, “injustice” is what people call it when they realize the world doesn’t see them as special.
I’ve said all this for one simple reason: being a just ruler means ruling justly over your own life. Settling disputes and grievances in your own heart. If you are always ruling in favor of yourself, you are inculcating the habit of finding fault with others, and fault with “the world.”
But if you convict society, or men, or women, or whatever subcategory thereof, this already makes a mockery of your courtroom: how is the verdict and sentence enforced? How does the world pay you the fine of a better life after it’s been convicted of treating you unfairly?
If you must pass judgment, pass it on yourself. Because you can discover the error, the injury that followed from it, and the proper course of action to set things right again.
You can gauge the costs, you can estimate the time, you can even sentence yourself to community service if you see that as the wisest path to reform.
This is all undeniably within your power.
Aha, but here we are: the exercise of power must be cultivated! People prefer to judge the world, to judge people they cannot possibly punish, because to do so is the exercise of fantasy and whimsy!
Demand reform from yourself, and you will see, in horror and shame, the weak and spineless worm you have become through indolence and self indulgence.
To be just, look at the state of affairs, and make the proper demands of the party who can actually be held responsible: yourself. Work out whatever arrangement is both adequate and bearable, and get to work. Get to work, and put the world and its injustices out of your head. Follow the laws of your conscience, and see that it never drags you into court again.
In business, be competent.
If there is a miracle cure for whatever is wrong in your life, on any level, it is the cultivation of excellence.
Become more skilled, more effective, and more efficient, and watch your dreams come true. Watch your very dreams improve in clarity, achievability, and even quality.
Striving to be a better human being means striving to perform each and every activity competently.
What is competence? Having what it takes to do whatever it takes to get the job done. To produce a result. To meet the demand for effort, resources, or attention with the appropriate supply.
Life is demanding. Life is difficult. However, in just the same way that a person can grow stronger until what was once a heavy weight feels almost feather-like in the gripping hand, the difficulty of life itself can decrease into relative insignificance when you pay enough attention to your overall level of skill at the specific tasks life confronts you with.
The same way that water conforms, without the slightest resistance, to the shape of its vessel and the influence of its environment, a competent person conforms to an environment of expectations.
Unless we sincerely wish to each go our own way in the wilderness, we have to work together. That means considering the needs of others, and imposing some degree of structure in an effort to maintain the flow of exchange between us all – in other words, human civilization.
In view of what has been said so far about competence, I feel that something important is missing. A foggy cloud of “so what” hangs over it all. Let me try to burn it off with something a bit more personally relevant.
The heart of competence is the notion that you matter. You are a subject exerting agency in the world. You have the power to achieve a result. You are a cause and not merely an effect.
You are more than a cog in a machine, more than the person occupying your current address,
more than a man or woman belonging to such and such ethnic background, religious affiliation, national identity, sexual orientation, age, height and weight.
You are more than a number or a pawn in someone else’s game…
…If you choose to be.
If. You. Choose.
You are a plot of land. Tend to it like a garden, or it will fill up all by itself, but only with weeds. There will be life, there will be activity, there will be community, beliefs, behaviors, friends, family, and all the rest – but it will all merely happen to you, and it will be mediocre.
The perception that it does all happen seemingly by itself can lull you into a melancholic stupor. Here I am, a product of circumstance. Unsure if I belong, unsure if I am worthy, unsure if I am necessary and good.
The world does not tell you that you matter. It doesn’t make room for you (it does, but you have never known a world without you in it, so you never saw the displacement caused by your arrival and sustained presence). It appears to go on perfectly well without you, to the point that you might even question if you have anything to contribute to it.
The reason why we need competence the same way we need truthfulness, fairness, kindness, self knowledge, and connection to what is tactile and tangible, is that life does not make sense without it.
See yourself as a cause, not an effect, and you will start to notice countless missing pieces in your world. Countless little spots in the garden where a flowerbed, or a fruit bearing tree, or shrub might go. You learn to identify and respond to vacancies: perhaps you fill them, perhaps you defend them from being filled, but you exercise power of your own in either case.
Now, life has meaning because your presence or absence has meaning. And, the more skilled you become, the more consequential your presence or absence becomes.
In action, watch the timing.
Timing is a necessary piece of competence: if what you do matters, then when you do it matters every bit as much. There is no what without a when, anymore than there can be musical rhythm without musical pitch. One requires the other and is literally unimaginable without the other.
To pay attention to timing is not easy: it requires focus. Response time is a proxy for focus. And, what does it mean to focus? Your attention is in one place. That place may be a ping pong table during a match, or it may be a thought in your mind. Either way, if you fail to seize an opportunity at the critical moment, you can lose whatever is at stake.
And there is that beautiful word: stake. Actions matter, and timing matters, because we are indeed at war. In every moment, hour after hour, day after day, victory and defeat are at stake. Everyone who loses an argument, the attention of a crush, another person’s trust, a match, a duel, or a war is someone who committed a critical error. An error of action, and an error of timing.
Similarly to my point about honesty, timing must be taken seriously because you can still lose your life even when paying perfect attention to the timing. In what world, then, do you have the luxury of flouting it?
Your wife tells you she loves you and you are silent. You tell your friend you’ll be right there, and 20 minutes go by in idleness. You tell someone “I’ll do it tonight,” but another month goes by. The baseball is thrown from the pitcher’s mound, the sword is drawn from the sheath, the car in front slams on the brakes… and you are somewhere else.
It doesn’t matter where your mind was – it wasn’t where it needed to be. One of many possible beginnings of wisdom is the realization we are all of us chattel slaves before the whip of time.
It is the most impressive person who has paid time its due so completely and so wisely that he or she can sit in quiet repose and engage in deep thought. Whether this occurs at the start or end of the day, space to truly think is afforded to the person with an uncluttered mind, which can only mean an uncluttered life.
Water flows, but not only water: life’s unceasing demands for a response, for attention. To the focused, humble, and responsive person, these waves of events are like the water at low tide on a calm beach, lapping at the shore.
For the person who arrogantly chooses the private world of fantasy and ignores the world, dissociates from it, minimizes and dismisses it, the waves of the world are always crashing overhead. Frustrated employers, disappointed and disappearing friends, nagging girlfriends, a car that looks like someone is living in it – these belong to the person living in his head, fumbling handoff after handoff in the real world.
People who’ve never actually read “eastern philosophy,” or who approach it like a drug addict (thinking it will “make them feel good”) have hallucinated that it preaches unconditional love and acceptance. People make similar hallucinations about Christianity. This is rubbish. Why would the great sage tell you to pay attention and watch the timing if nothing really mattered, and, no matter what you do, everything is okay, and the Tao or some great spirit will always love you anyway?
Living life well means waking up to the fact that your life can be squandered. Through arrogance, through servility, through cowardice, through indolence, lack of focus and lack of earnestness.
Wake up, man up, and take this life seriously. Every single second counts. And, by seriousness I don’t mean drudgery. I mean, exchange the blissful ignorance of childhood for the hard won joy of a life hardened and sharpened by skills and commitments.
Learn to play this game of life to the point where you are retiring at the end of each day with something to be proud of. Set a high bar, but permit yourself every positive emotion at the reaching for and grasping and exceeding of that bar. Children think happiness is inherent, unconditional, and eternal. Adults understand that satisfaction must be won daily and even hourly.
As Leo Tolstoy once wrote, the most important thing can only be whatever and whoever is before you now, and the most important thing to do can only be to do him good. Therefore, watch the timing.
No fight: no blame.
The genius of this text is in what it promises: freedom from self-created problems. Not perfection, not bliss (I gag at the word), not the world living in peace – but you putting an end, once and for all, to the war between you and yourself, you and your own life.
If you don’t cause problems, nobody will hold you to account. Nobody will come after you, ostracize you, or punish you.
Now, of course, there are bad people in the world who will do all those things to you no matter what you do, precisely because they are bad people.
When you have done nothing wrong, and you know it, you can stand up to such people easily, because all the layers of yourself are in alignment – your mouth is not merely a press secretary in a perpetual state of running cover for a dishonest and incompetent politician. You are singular, hiding nothing beneath the surface that would contradict the exterior were it to be exposed. Whatever is beneath the surface is simply private, but not a secret. This is the only state in which you can stand up straight and face the wickedness of other people.
I said face it, not fight it.
If you find yourself fighting with people, you are to blame. Remember? No fight: no blame.
Someone who has accepted reality is, almost by definition, not in an active state of combat with it. Not adversarial! When you are at peace, you can tell when someone else is looking for a fight. You can spot it from a distance. And, being the person who values peace, you don’t engage with quarrelsome people.
Let them find each other.
Let them have to look far and wide before they find one, to the point that the fight goes out of them in the search for a fight.
But what to do when you inevitably encounter them?
One does not end conflicts by validating the impulse to seek conflict. However, conflict will quickly intensify when the aggressor feels dismissed or minimized. Conflict, then, comes to an end when it is recognized as unnecessary. Reframe the interaction, rather than seek to win the contest. If you win, you make a loser of your counterpart. A loser is someone with something to prove: the best way to guarantee a fight tomorrow is to win one today, and this is far from the worst possible outcome.
Making conflict unnecessary means lowering the price of significance for the other party.
What does that mean?
People want to get into fights because they want to prove that they matter.
People cannot live without the felt sense, daily and hourly, that their lives are significant: do not make anyone go to desperate and dangerous lengths to obtain it.
Validating someone else’s perspective does not mean agreeing with it! It means taking it seriously, responding in earnest, and actively, visibly striving to understand it. Not claiming to already understand it (this is minimizing), not refusing to try to understand it (this is dismissive), and not telling someone why they’re wrong (making them the loser of the interaction) – but thinking through their position, out loud, in real time. This is what tells someone else that they are worthy of consideration.
This has to be practiced intentionally. Usually, when we hear a differing perspective, we are tempted to assert our own. I am guilty of this far too often. Is there anyone who cannot say, “I could be a better listener?” Listening is so hard because we make it hard. We make it about giving away our power, forcing ourselves to behave in ways we don’t find natural, and least appealing of all, sitting there while someone else spews a whole bunch of nonsense that we instantly and intensely disagree with.
My friend, I am telling you, if the world of wars is going to come to an end, whatever you claim to find natural, that nonetheless actively and materially perpetuates the disharmony, has to be reformed by the application of method. You cannot, and I mean this – you cannot simply be. This is the difference between immaturity and maturity, a wilderness of weeds and a beautiful garden: the moderating influence of civilization. Are you civilized? Are you a paragon of virtue and civility? Or are you, pardon me, an insufferable and grating hyena? If it is the latter, I promise you, you know it. You know damn well.
In closing, whatever you resist, refuse, run away from, and refute, either in yourself, your life, or, especially, in other people, is the thing standing between you and a water-like flowing of focus and activity: the thing between you and the further cultivation of your highest potential.
However principled you may feel for shutting out what you deem to be beneath you, I submit to you that what you are really doing is rationalizing the avoidance of something that you lack the requisite skill to engage with productively.
To be blunt, in the hope of shattering an utterly unproductive wall of denial, it is you who is beneath what you claim to be beneath you. The person who is truly above something knows exactly what to do when he or she encounters it, and does so without reservation.
The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things, And does not strive. It flows in places men reject, And thus is like the Tao.
When I was a small child, I was wildly imaginative (were you the same way?). I would draw, play with toys, or simply project my imaginings onto the sky while gazing up at clouds, or into the cityscapes visible through car windows as my mom or dad drove me and my brother around town.
Because I was raised by and around kind people who understood the needs of children, I don’t recall anybody ever interjecting “that’s not real!” as a way of rudely shattering the fantasy. I was free to indulge my imagination in its various aspects, knowingly moving away from passive observation of reality and toward willful embellishments.
Now, I’m no psychologist, but I think kids can easily return to objective reality when their reality feels safe. I wasn’t running away, but simply at play. Having fun. My mind might have been a hard act to follow, but my “real life” was filled with gentle people who loved and encouraged me. And, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge my undying gratitude for that now.
It’s when reality becomes unstomachable, however, that fantasy slowly becomes a surrogate. A step parent. A delusion. Permanent, or at least the subject of an attempt at permanence.
But delusion is more widespread than anyone would like to think, touching almost all of us in some way.
How can I say that?
Because I can say that there are major aspects of reality that people have not come to accept, are not even on their way to accepting, and maintain their distance from them with the daily use of fantasy.
I’m talking of course about the reality of death. The impermanence of all life, and the utter insignificance of individuals and even entire species of living things against the backdrop of mountains and oceans, to say nothing of the birth and death of entire stars, planets, and moons.
The easy thing to do, what I imagine most of us do in some way, is meet all that with hand waiving – how can I possibly wrap my mind around all that? Why should I concern myself with it? It just makes me depressed (alternatively, with dissociative awe).
Well, is it any different to ask why a powerless child should face the reality that his or her parents hate each other and probably won’t be married much longer?
We can look at all kinds of ugly or disempowering realities and recognize that individuals fare best when they face facts, and take back their lives from the paralysis so easily induced by what is often called fate.
A compassionate and caring person can easily recognize that it may take years for a person in a tough spot to gather the strength, maturity, and will to make sense of their life, but that something critical has been missed if this work is never undertaken.
And so, the right thing to do, I hope you can agree, is to apply the same reasoning to the facts of life and death themselves. But, not in a grand sense: it must be completely personal, completely intimate. My one short life, my ultimate insignificance, my inevitable death.
Even typing these words now is difficult!
Even sitting here on a sunny afternoon idly typing my thoughts into a doc, I shudder at the thought and look for a way out – a way out of even saying it with my thumbs to the screen of a phone!
When he saw the body of his slain companion, Gilgamesh the great King of Uruk said, unforgettably,
Must I be like that? Must I die, too?
Yes. Yes.
And once this reality has been accepted (a subject far too big for not just a weekly newsletter but for a writer of my meager stature), a degree of make believe comes, at last, to an end.
The same way I no longer imagine Wolverine leaping out from behind a copymat as my mom drives me past it on the way home from school, I can no longer imagine, I can feel the illusions melting away as I reconcile myself to reality.
Rather than be caught between passive observation and active hallucination, observation goads to action.
What sorts of behaviors come to and, and what take their place, as reality takes the place of fantasy?
We are now ready to read chapter 7 of the Tao Te Ching, now ready to consider the answer offered by an ancient Chinese sage named Lao Tzu. I’m confident you will soon see why.
Part 2: Eternal Creation, Ephemeral Creatures
SEVEN
Heaven and earth last forever. Why do heaven and earth last forever? They are unborn, So ever living. The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead. He is detached, thus at one with all. Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment.
We could begin by breaking up the short chapter in 2 ideas: the first 4 lines indirectly remind us of our mortality, the second 3 lines tell us how a wise person would make use of this information.
Regarding the first 3 lines, there is more to say than you might think. By all means, stop to contemplate the natural world, the world beyond human sociopolitical affairs, and be moved to awe. Let it inspire you, relax you, and restore you. The world is vast and beautiful – don’t miss out on even brief and frequent moments of observation: it’s downright good for you.
But I would be participating in something quite dishonest to leave it at that – if I was to simply join the bandwagon of nature worship.
To experience nature as a kind of companion – wise, gentle, and transcending – is the greatest luxury and privilege imaginable. A luxury afforded to you and me solely by the achievements and industry of humankind.
Nature is not “calm,” “peaceful,” and “rejuvenating” to human populations without ways of dealing with food, shelter, disease, injury, and waste management, just to name a few things.
Only when we have something called civilization does nature become, by contrast, quieter, more meaningful, and somehow instructive.
If nature is static, fixed, and humanity is what changes, our perspective on nature is a necessary consequence of where we’re at with ourselves at this moment – at this phase in our evolution.
My point is simply this: we, through a combination of time, discovery, striving, ingenuity, dumb luck, perseverance, imagination, optimism, and obsession, have raised ourselves up to a point where nature is no longer an enemy but a friend, a teacher, a resource, and a reminder of what matters.
With that last paragraph in mind, do not denigrate yourself and humanity as a whole when you admire nature: your capacity for admiration is, for precisely the reasons I just explained, evidence of something legitimately admirable on your part.
What you should feel, rather than inferiority, is simply distinction. Difference. Contrast.
Let me now list many of the differences that will inevitably sound denigrating but are simply truths, truths that are inescapable when comparing ourselves to nature.
Nature is eternal, while you are ephemeral. Nature is overpowering and irresistible while you are weak and inconsequential. Nature is hard and unfeeling while you are soft and sensitive. Nature is steadfast while you are capricious and whimsical.
But do not stop there: nature is seemingly blind and automatic while you gaze in contemplation and weigh your options. Nature is ruthless while you have mercy, feel pity, and offer second chances. Nature consumes the weak while you cherish and preserve what would be obliterated without your interventions. Nature simply is, while you yearn for what you might become. Nature merely reproduces, while you fall in love. Nature kills, and so do you, but you alone bury and grieve and remember the dead. You may even call nature a god, but you alone seek and worship your god.
In many ways, you are nothing like the world. And by allowing yourself to perceive these differences without feelings of self recrimination, you can grow wise.
And this plays into what I want to say about the second half – what to do with a life that is by definition doomed to death.
Can I be a bit obvious, maybe even didactic? May I even risk being redundant? The point of comparison is to highlight differences. And, why highlight differences? One reason would be to better understand your own situation and needs. To make better sense of your life by understanding what you are and what you’re not.
Part 3: A Sage Does Not Compete
What does the sage do differently from the rest of us, as a direct result of better understanding both nature and himself? We are told that
The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead.
What do you do when you realize you’re not running a race? You slow down. And why can it be said that life isn’t a race? Because it is a farce to compete with people who are about to be annihilated, only moments before or after your own annihilation.
The sage is ahead of those still running, because he has finished the race, or rather is finished with racing.
Now, a word about competitive activities. As long as they have meaning to you, continue them. Their meaning may evolve for you, also. You may be in a place where dullness and indolence have to be burned up in some passionate striving. You may have to prove yourself, to cultivate yourself, to become capable of the rigor necessary to best your betters. So be it. There is great beauty and dignity in contests of skill, in discipline and sacrifice, and even in the yearning for glory and the hatred of one’s opponents. There is of course great ugliness in it, too. But both are united by greatness.
But a sage is something more than a great man or woman. You cannot become great without a persistent drive to do so. You have to want it, even to need it.
A sage does not need it.
A sage may do great things, but the attention is always on the quality of the work, the care and thoroughness of the work. The attention is never on the fame, glory, or leverage that could be obtained by doing great things.
A sage is ahead of others because he is not in competition with anyone. This is not fluff: there is so much more that can be done when you don’t need credit, when you don’t even need to be seen doing it. Like someone who paints over graffiti while everyone else is asleep or quietly supports others to help them achieve their own goals, there is an entire world of accomplishment and virtue that opens up the moment you drop the requirement of putting everything on a scoreboard.
Someone without the need to compete and win can do thankless but necessary work without tiring, since the will to continue is not supplied in the form of recognition or encouragement.
For example, when I renewed my commitment to reading books, I began by setting a goal of X pages per day, to make sure I finished each book within 7-10 days. I quickly realized this was arbitrary, impossible, and meaningless.
The point was to understand the ideas in the books as completely as possible, not to finish as many books as possible. I wasn’t reading to read, I was reading to become more knowledgeable and cultivated. To deepen my thinking and understanding of the world. This was not about chasing the dopamine of task completion, but the slow burn of maturation.
At some point I slowed down to clarify my motives: what mattered was that I established and maintained a reading habit, not that I crossed some random finish line by a certain date.
It also didn’t matter if I pulled ahead of some other randomly selected person, either.
Truth be told, I don’t want to become the most knowledgeable person about any subject, because I would be nothing but disappointed to receive confirmation that there was truly nothing left to do or learn: “the barrenness of the fertile thing that can achieve no more.”
I would hate to be trapped in a world so petty and small that it could be conquered by me.
Now I eat information until I’m full, so to speak, and then I rest my brain. I take it in. I let the revelations soak into the soil and grow the garden of my mind. I let the same waters of knowledge erode the sand castles of imagination and whimsy. It feels contemplative and earnest, not shallow and forceful.
By settling into a natural place, I have nothing to keep up with, no whip at my back, only curiosity backed by commitment. This is sustainable, sane, and kind.
Part 4: A Sage Is Not An Addict
He is detached, thus at one with all.
Words like “detached,” or the term “non-attachment” can be quite tricky to interpret correctly. The temptation to make a bit of a straw man and say, for example, “oh, so we shouldn’t care about other people, have relationships, or feel sympathy and empathy and compassion,” or some version of this, is understandable. It’s understandable because it’s easy to look at things in a binary way: caring or uncaring.
And, that’s the first problem: conflating non-attachment with being uncaring. In reality, the unattached person is the most sincerely caring person you could ever encounter or, hopefully, become.
Why?
Let’s answer this by explaining what we mean by “attached” in this context. Side note, if you’re up on attachment theory and relationship psychology more broadly: unattached, non-attachment etc refers to something closer to “secure attachment style,” not “avoidant attachment.”
Attachment is an insecure clinging. An unhealthy preoccupation. An addiction. Yes, ultimately what I mean when I say “attached” is that a person is addicted to other people.
A sage is not an addict, but “one with all.” He is one with all precisely because he is not addicted to any.
To understand this short sentence, then, is to understand addiction broadly: when someone cannot function without the presence of something else, something that they do not truly need but upon which they have nonetheless become dependent. Addictions are things we would be better off without. Stronger and healthier and saner without. They are not legitimate needs, but closer to a symbiotic parasite: they do something for us, yes, but at a cost only a fool would knowingly pay.
The key word is “knowingly.” All addictions hide behind not only the benefits they procure but their mind numbing and deluding effects as well. Once a path has been walked with the help of the crutch or the cane of an addictive substance, the craving for it now arises in tandem with difficulties. All paths become unthinkably difficult without the crutch of this companion. In time, people forget what it feels like to stand tall on their own.
People can be addicted to other people, too: unable to stand upright without the supply of their approval, their values, their layers of identity in the form of ethnicity, culture, religion, politics, class, education, and profession.
In a very real way, people turn down the frightening journey of discovering their true selves for the comfort of a well defined place in the crowd, no matter how much they tell themselves they’re different, no matter how far to the margin of whatever completely mainstream group they find themselves.
I should clarify something: of course we are social creatures and live in groups. Of course it is perfectly natural that the group would convey culture to the individual on every level.
This is, undeniably, normal, natural, and healthy. But the group is simply an aggregate of individuals.
No matter how many questions of how to live life appear to be answered for you by society, you still have to act out these values all by yourself from one moment to the next, from one decision to the next.
In other words, yes the supply of “group think” is everywhere, but until you reduce your own demand for it, you are attached to it. Unduly supported it. Addicted to it. And as long as this is the case, there will be much within you that is both weak and unprocessed. And beyond that, it will be almost invisible to you.
This is something I have experience with: the need to labor toward self discovery.
I had to sort out for myself the difference between what I wanted and what I thought “they” would approve of.
Did I actually dislike somebody or was I merely uncomfortable or insecure around them?
Was there something in them I found intolerable, or did I see the very thing that I harbored within myself that I dare not reveal?
Was my rejection of others no different from driving out of the village scapegoat in ancient times, the killing of a sacrificial victim made to stand in for the sins of the collective?
Did I want to be close to others, or did I just want to relieve the discomfort of loneliness?
Was I there to give, or to get?
In this last question, the addictive nature should be seen clearly. In all of these little aphorisms, what is shown in selfishness, consumerism, self gratification. Attachment. There is no real interest in other people here at all.
To become a sage, at least to become more sage like than before, means to become interested in others the way someone is interested in a garden from which they cannot eat.
A sage stands tall in his or her individuality, not as an act of rebellion against the group, but as someone who has developed completely.
If I know who I am, and I’m not taking my cues from others, then the diversity of perspectives and temperaments out there is not confusing or maddening but interesting. I can see my own humanity mirrored in others. I can be happy for their happiness, their relationships, their stable lives, their accomplishments, their intelligence, everything that makes them exceptional, or average, or even agitated and dysfunctional. I can see it all and see a human just like me but simply tilted a few degrees in another direction.
When I suffered from addictions, my life shrunk to the size of the addiction: my world was a place where I purchased, consumed, experienced the world through the lens of and suffered on account of the substances.
Little by little they eclipsed everything: responsibilities, relationships, interests, ideas, and even self preservation.
My life did nothing but continuously shrink under their influence: even since I broke my attachment to them, and completely removed them, my life has done nothing but expand.
Would I say that I am now “one with all?”
Goodness, no. Run from the person who says, “I am one with all.”
Deny him parole. Don’t join his sex cult.
What I would say is I’m free to own my perspectival reality: right in some ways, wrong in others, with some ever widening level of wiggle room to become more right and less wrong over time.
Because I take responsibility for the direction of my journey and the spirit in which I undertake it, and because I know how much determination, earnestness, and maturity that takes (because I had to cultivate all three, and was born with none of them), I mostly leave others in peace. I leave them to the management of their own lives, for better or worse.
Nobody else can live my life for me. Why would I be able to live someone else’s for them?
You probably noticed I said I “mostly leave others in peace.” Mostly? Because making no interventions at all actually is the same thing as being totally uncaring and totally cowardly.
You see someone walking into the street with their headphones on, buried in their phone, and a car is coming – do you leave them in peace because you are nobody to interfere?
I hope not.
All of my improvements were, in some way, responses to the world showing me that I wasn’t measuring up.
Sometimes it did so gently, but mostly it was painful. I would not have perceived the need for change were it to be painless. Thank God, then, for pain.
I’m just as much a part of other people’s lives as they are of mine – it would be irrational to think others don’t need corrective feedback even though I do, and I benefit from it.
For most people, it is a mixture of attachment and cowardice that hides behind their “live and let live” slogans. They are filled with judgments, frustrations, and compromised standards and boundaries, but they simply do not know how to confront problems in their relationships, or excise people they find distasteful, disagreeable, or immoral.
They don’t know how to say no. They think being a good friend means saying yes, putting your feelings aside, and capitulating to the needs of the squeakiest wheel.
“One with all” means I do not fear you. I don’t live in fear of you disagreeing with or disliking or misunderstanding me or something I say or do.
I’m prepared both to defend a position and adjust when I see compelling evidence that an error was committed. It’s not that I’m so sure that I’m right – I’m willing to jump in, engage fully, and discover where and how I am wrong. Specifically. Sitting on the sidelines, afraid of the disapproval of others, you may know something is missing, but no one has found and integrated that missing something while merely looking on as a spectator.
Part 5: A Sage Is Not Selfish
Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment.
Weak, degenerative people seek fulfillment through self gratification (addictions in various forms).
Strong, healthy people attain fulfillment by contributing to the welfare of others. What they do for themselves is maintain themselves.
Life grows in scope, in value, in happiness, in meaning, by growing one’s capacity to contribute, and by repeatedly delivering those contributions into the lives of others.
Contributing to the welfare of others can take many forms – I will make no effort to enumerate even a partial list now. As a rule, however, it cannot damage or diminish another person in any way. Meaning, if you contribute by becoming a crutch that they lean on, because this makes you feel useful, it is not useful to them, because it is making them weak and dependent.
In my experience, being a good person means doing a whole lot of what looks like nothing. Minding your own business, but minding it well. Becoming meticulous, excellent, restrained, fastidious and frugal. There is more to say about human excellence elsewhere, but I want to focus on selfless action for the time being.
It is not going around and trying to be helpful. There is no “going around” at all. There is, in fact, nothing driving you to go do this or that at all – there is the perception of situations and events, the instinctive awareness of what is called for in that moment, and the fluid transition from observation to action.
The lack of self seeking is what makes it selfless: not some very flattering campaign of bringing flowers to the sick and kissing babies and letting people know “you’re here for them.”
Less letting people know, and more being there.
Less jumping in, and more watching and waiting.
Letting others find their footing, find their words, and find their way, but quietly keeping an eye on it all, so as not to miss the moment of action when action is called for.
It’s called for less often than you probably think, unless this person we’re talking about is your own infant child.
If you want to do nice things for others because you’re temperamentally inclined to do so, you shouldn’t be looking for permission from this newsletter: for God’s sake go and be good. But do it because it fulfills your nature, which is actually the best bit of all the good it does for you: to be you, through and through, and no one else.
That leads me to another important point.
Do good because you’re a do-gooder.
Do good because you wish to learn how to do good.
Do good because you need to know you’re capable of doing more than bad.
Do good because you want to find out whether or not it will make you happier.
Do good, actually, because you understand that you expect it of yourself and your own approval or disapproval is the single most important thing in your life.
But do not do good to make others like you, respect you, sleep with you, admire you, forgive you, hire you, or choose you over someone else.
It’s the “so that they will” that has to go. The neediness. The addictive craving. The manipulative, covert bartering. The resentment when they don’t do what you want, even though you bent over backwards. The contemptible, sniveling longing for recognition. This is trash. Trash.
The proper understanding of selfless action is that it is the fruit born of first ending your competitive relationship with others and then ending your unhealthy attachments to others.
How can you help people when you think their success is a threat to yours? How can you truly come to understand others, and their unique needs, when you derive your sense of self from their example?
When you find and lay claim to the path that is only available to you, competition ends.
When you cast off all forms of crutches and develop the strength to stand in your own nuanced and irreducibly complex individuality, attachments end, too.
Now you can see what others need, because they are struggling along a path you yourself have walked successfully.
You can see what would be helpful, what would be enabling, what would be superficially pleasant but ultimately irrelevant – you see a great deal, and you see it clearly: you are now, legitimately, a force for good in the world.
Part 6: Conclusion
We covered so much today, and I learned a great deal in the process of finding the words for this article. I looked at the lines of Chapter 7 of the Tao Te Ching and I saw a great task before me: show everyone the through line that connects our mortality, the grandeur of nature, and the three characteristics of a sagely life laid out here – life beyond competition, beyond attachments, and beyond self interest.
The simple fact that our time is limited is enough to justify the undertaking of sorting this all out – how ought we to feel about our place in the world? How ought we relate to one another? What should we seek in the actions we take? What will make the difference between a life spent wisely and a life wasted?
I can now say this much: a life of denial, insecurity, desperate clinging, and petty one-upmanship just is certainly the latter. The former is the path of strength, dignity, and respect. Out of these three grow the virtues of acceptance, caring, and contribution.
I hope you will reflect on what we have discussed here today, and I wish you the courage to do so.
I don’t know about you, but my biggest limitation is time. I wanted to say “skill,” but the limiting factor in skill is probably time, too. I’m the most skilled at the things I’ve spent the most time on. If I want to get better at the things I really want to be better at so I can be more productive, so I can contribute in a more meaningful way to my environment and the people I care about, that will take time. And, that subject carries a certain weight to it because of misuses of time in the past.
Maybe you can relate.
But how I spend my time is also a function of who I am, or at least who I believe myself to be. I look at the world the way that I do because of what I believe, how I feel, what I want, what happiness and success look like in my mind, where I think my suffering and limitations come from, and so on.
Because of these aspects of my identity, I spend my time doing certain things and not others. I hold myself to a certain standard, execute my tasks with a certain level of quality, and express a specific worldview through my work, because of who I am in a fundamental sense.
Therefore, if my ability to utilize my time is going to change in positive ways, my ideas about who I am have to change first. This is why I read books, why I write articles like this, and also why I habituate certain behaviors like weightlifting and meditation: these all change my concept of who I am in positive ways.
Becoming more confident in my mind, body, and emotional state makes me a more generous, tolerant, curious, and helpful person in general. Because I know I have a strong foundation within me, I take on more of what’s difficult, uncertain, and otherwise uncomfortable, and that makes my life and the lives of those around me better, plain and simple.
I hope that, as you’re reading this, you’re thinking of the ways in which you can relate to what I’m saying. Maybe you feel great about what you’re doing, but, if you’re honest, there’s probably some part of you that feels some embarrassment, some pangs of conscience, about the gap between where you are and what you’re doing about it on a daily basis.
Congratulations. That means you have an ideal. The ideal is the picture of who you wish you become, that guides everything you do, yet also renders everything you do insufficient. Insufficient in an eternal sense, not momentary.
My ideal includes smelling great, for example. Being a waste producing mammal is constantly at odds with that ideal, so my showers are sufficient in a temporary sense but no shower is sufficient in an absolute sense.
A pedantic example, to be sure, but it makes the point, and it also gives me a chance to say something else about insufficiency: it applies to the duration of the results created by my actions, not to my worth as an individual. Read that again. Just because I have to do certain things over and over again, does not mean there’s something wrong with me or wrong with the world. Repetitive action is the name of the game. It’s where results come from, where your track record comes from, and ultimately where your destiny comes from. It’s written in what you do over and over: who you are is how you’ve spent your time.
We are now ready to read and understand chapter 6 of the Tao Te Ching. This chapter is so mysterious and opaque in its wording that many of you will have a hard time understanding what it means and what it has to do with many of the ideas I’ve been discussing up till now.
Let’s start by reading through it once. Then we can begin decoding it.
Six
The valley spirit never dies; It is the woman, primal mother. Her gateway is the root of heaven and earth. It is like a veil barely seen. Use it; it will never fail.
Because of the brevity of this chapter, and the fact that it represents a singular idea, you can bring the whole thing into focus at once, like a polaroid, rather than progress line by line.
Whatever the valley spirit is, it never dies, and it never fails. We are told that it is “the woman, primal mother.” So, not merely “feminine” but maternal: the biological, material underpinnings of what is abstractly “feminine” (don’t worry, I’ll explain what I mean by this soon enough). This is about womanhood itself, not just the traits or proclivities of women.
Let’s clarify the awkward part now: when we read the words “her gateway,” yes, that means what you think it means. And, it is “the root of heaven and earth” – everything, even the world itself, issues from this “gateway.”
It must be said that nothing profound has yet been said. The lush valley, the lowest point to which all resources flow, is animated by the same spirit that animates women, womanhood, and everything entailed within and implied by the term “female.” The will to bring life into the world, and the unconscious mechanisms (pardon me) by which it is done.
What gives this all-too-familiar concept mystery, gravity, and even urgency are the last two lines:
It is like a veil barely seen. Use it; it will never fail.
This changes everything: he’s not just telling you to recognize and appreciate that all life is made possible by women (which you ought to do, and let this be a reminder) – he’s telling you to “use it.” To use the valley spirit.
Let’s rearrange a few words to see if the meaning is clearer, or at least if a clearer path to analysis emerges:
The valley spirit is like a veil: use it and succeed.
Let’s be a bit unsophisticated and say that yes, I want to succeed, and I assume that you do, too.
Good. The surest way to success (“it will never fail”) is in adapting the nature of motherhood into everything you do.
We’re almost there. We must now make sense of this word “veil.”
I think that when you properly integrate the “primal mother” into your consciousness and your methods, the results are subtle. Barely seen. Not advertised with a banner, not proclaimed by imbecilic slogans, but visible only to the most perceptive.
We can now say what “this” is and why it unfailingly produces desirable outcomes:
The power to intelligently use the present to create the future. The power to balance being with becoming. We are what we are today, but tomorrow is on the way. Tomorrow will be today soon enough. And what is tomorrow? Tomorrow only means death: the advance of time means nothing but the shrinking of the time we have left. In Sanskrit, for example, Kala means both death and time. Another name for Shiva, the Hindu God of destruction and transformation? Mahakaal: The Great Time.
Time is entropy. Deterioration. The only countervailing force against entropy is creativity. In biological terms, we reproduce so that a new generation survives after the previous dies (if you think this is too obvious to spend time discussing, just take a look at the birth rates in countries where people supposedly “know better”).
In daily life, and on a more prosaic scale than, say, the intergenerational continuity of humanity, the method is this: use a portion of today to reap the harvest of yesterday (enjoying your life), and a portion to plant the seeds of tomorrow (self denial, discipline, deliberate practice, learning, and preparation).
“Time” might be an abstraction, because you can’t see it, only its effects, and plenty of people seem to be utterly in denial about that, but a helpless infant is about as real as it gets. Who is your future self? The infant called “today.”
What is it, then, that will never fail if you use it? Again, the conscious adoption of the role of mother: the future comes into the world through me. I am the intelligence that mediates between the demands of the present, the limitations and opportunities created by the past, and the anticipation of the future.
I use my knowledge, my instincts, my hopes, my imagination, my love, my care and attention, my time, my physical presence, and my will, to overcome the stultifying optionality of the borderless now and drive it toward the future with decisive actions.
I give it direction.
My purpose is to endow everything around me, everything within reach, with purpose.
If I am to live well, I must behave as the primal mother that brings an idea from embryonic murmurs to birth in material form to adolescent awkwardness to confident enthusiasm and, eventually, maturity and mastery.
Why a mother, and not a father? Because I bring it out of me. Its all-but-formless state is present within me, as an aspiration, as a calling, as an intuitive sense – a mere thought or feeling.
And I begin to cherish it, nurture it, and acquire a profound affection for it. It’s mine. It came from within me, and is deeply connected to me. But, if I put enough energy into it, the right way, it will eventually belong to itself, to others, even the world.
After a long hiatus I dreamed of making music again. I would sit in the park and noodle around, obsessively creating songs or simply musical fragments on the guitar.
A year later I found a drummer who liked what I was doing.
A year after that we started renting a studio, and quickly found a bass player and a pianist.
A year after that, we have twenty songs, performances lined up, recording dates lined up, photoshoots lined up, follow up meetings with graphic designers lined up, people creating wiki pages for album production workflows for us.
I was once the only thing keeping this idea alive, and now it is supported by a small community. It has reality: dimension beyond what I can or could imagine because it exists outside my mind, influencing and receiving influence from external factors that grow in number by the day.
A similar thing is happening with my writing, and in areas of my life that aren’t public: the present is spent in such a way that the future is endowed with the greatest dignity. I love it. I care for it. I fight for it, luxuriate in it, negotiate with it, embark on the adventure of my life with it, but it is not truly mine, not truly for me: what it is is the means by which I might sacrifice myself, rather than squander myself.
Why does this way of living never fail? Because it automatically organizes your life correctly. How about that? To be a mother is to bring out from within yourself that which would replace you. How much more responsibility can you take for the impermanence of life than this? What could represent a more complete acceptance of the facts than this? Life deserves to go on, and it deserves a chance to become better than it is today. Others deserve to start at the point I could not exceed.
Those who are better than me, more deserving than me, the future beneficiaries of a world I will never know and which could not be realized were it to make room for the bits of the past that cannot be extricated from me – they are within me, and it is my duty to endow them with reality, with strength, with the best of what I have, and, eventually, with independence and agency.
All of this is implicit and inseparable from womanhood, from motherhood. Tamper with them at your peril. Embrace them, and thrive.
That’s the famous line from The Lord Of The Rings. The ONE ring, the one source of power that controls all the rest.
There were other rings, many others in fact, that were given to numerous people in various positions of power, but, secretly, one ring controlled them all.
In the books and the film adaptations, these rings were all created by the arch nemesis, Sauron.
But is there an equivalent to The One Ring in real life, created by the good guys? Is there one thing, hidden away, that controls all the other levers that are visible publicly? One thing, that, if seized and taken control of, makes control of all the rest next to effortless?
For you and me, in other words for regular people trying to live good lives, The One Ring is wisdom. Good judgment. Right thinking. The proper use of whatever information we have.
If you think The Lord of the Rings is an old book, let’s look at a much older one: The Ramayana. The Ramayana is the tale of Rama, an avatar or incarnation of Vishnu, the Hindu God that sustains the universe (as opposed to Brahma, the creator, and Shiva, the destroyer).
Long story short, Rama and his allies undertake the arduous mission of dethroning and defeating the Demon King Ravana (not unlike Sauron in terms of his evil intent, but, rather unlike Sauron, still having a body. Ravana is, in fact, a serial rapist, murderer, and so on).
The good guys ultimately win, but in the immediate aftermath of their victory, something quite interesting happens. I say “interesting,” because, years after reading Ramesh Menon’s beautiful translation of the ancient epic, this is the one and only line from the book that I remember, verbatim, after only reading it once.
Here’s what happened.
The good guys win, and almighty Shiva himself appears before the victorious heroes to grant them any wish they choose. Literally anything. It’s worth taking a moment to contemplate what you might wish for.
Among them is Vibhishana, not insignificantly the younger brother of Ravana. When the Lord Shiva asked him which boon to grant him, Vibhishana said, and let this be emblazoned across your mind forever,
“Let my first thought always be of dharma.”
And what is dharma? The Sanskrit root of the word means “to uphold.” So, that which holds this all together, what edifies and rightens the world, the principles-in-practice that lead us goodness and deliver us from wickedness – that is dharma.
Let my first thought always be of dharma. Let me always think wisely.
Vibhishana was wise enough to wish for wisdom. The story of the Ramayana, like Tolkien’s classic, is not just an accounting of our team beating the other team, but a parsing of right from wrong, wisdom from folly, in such a way that we might grow in understanding by reading and reflecting on it: we divide the world not into us and them but into right and wrong, good and evil, wisdom and folly.
Those lines will not obey the us/them distinction, as evidenced by the fact that Vibhishana is the brother of the villain, Ravana. In the Lord Of The Rings, Gandalf must defeat his own peer and former mentor, Saruman. The sentiment is the same: if the world is to be divided, let it be along lines of morality, ethics, and virtue. Let the good triumph over the wicked, even the wicked among us.
Let me take it a step further:
Let what is good, virtuous, and wise within you triumph over that which is wicked within you. Ravana and Vibhishana were brothers, born of the same parents, raised in the same household.
With that in mind, with this raised sense of urgency and consequence in mind, I wish to outline the meaning of chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching, the Book of the Way. My invocation of the Tao is quite close to Vibhishana’s invocation of Dharma: that which upholds.
Come with me on this journey into the obscure and esoteric: what we are looking for, what we are actually hammering into its shape with each discussion, is The One Ring of wisdom, of Dharma, of Tao.
I’ll begin by reprinting the chapter in full, and then exploring its meaning one idea at a time. Let’s get started.
FIVE
Heaven and earth are ruthless; They see the ten thousand things as dummies. The wise are ruthless; They see the people as dummies.
The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows. The shape changes but not the form; The more it moves, the more it yields. More words count less. Hold fast to the center.
We essentially have two halves, one fairly straightforward, the second more subtle. As is often or even always the case with Lao Tzu, the simple is the solid foothold from which you step across the chasm to the deeper idea. He always gives you the means by which to do this. He always gives you the low rungs on the ladder to get you going.
Heaven and earth are ruthless; They see the ten thousand things as dummies. The wise are ruthless; They see the people as dummies.
What are we to make of this word, “ruthless?” It means having no pity or compassion for others. It neither denotes nor connotes, however, ill intent or hostility. Rather, it highlights the coldness of an amoral universe.
The world is pitiless: unmoved by the suffering of its inhabitants. Not unaware: unmoved. Exceptions are not made in view of pain, loss, or even tragedy.
The world is the way that it is, and there is no operant power in it that will tilt the scales, look the other way, or otherwise grease the wheels if it can just be moved to sympathy. No. This sentiment also appears in Steven Mitchell’s translation of the Book of Job: behold, hope is a lie. More famously still, it is inscribed over the gates of Hell in canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno: lasciate ogne ‘speranza, voi ch’intrate (abandon all hope, ye who enter here): the rules shall not be bent for you, wretched creature.
As harsh as this is, it is a critical step toward wisdom. Heaven and Earth are ruthless, and the wise, too, are ruthless. Neither admit of exceptions. Neither traffic in sentimentality or sympathy.
Now hold on a moment. Usually, when we think of wisdom we also think of benevolence, but these opening lines appear to shatter that completely.
We will have to repeatedly and often forcefully cleave apart pitilessness on the one hand and active malice on the other: the former is what we are dealing with, and it is, in fact, the only way by which the latter can be contended with.
What do I mean? Wisdom is what keeps you on the right path, by definition. This means there can be no room for fanciful nonsense, whimsical make believe, naive aspirations toward fairy tale endings. The wise are ruthless, and see the people “as dummies.”
In other words, as objects completely helpless in the face of the forces governing them.
If heaven and earth, which is to say the natural world, has no pity for the plight of its plants and animals, and those that make it make it and those that don’t don’t, then the wise sages have the resolve to admit that human affairs are no different. If food runs out, there is starvation. If shelter is not secured, the elements will take you out. If the cut is not cleaned, infection will set in.
This is ruthless simplicity: we are caught in the middle of countless cause and effect relationships, and they are all as unalterable as the laws of physics and other biological realities.
“Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies” is not the refrain of the sage. A sage faces reality, and whether in the form of direct instruction or simply an instructive example, shows you how to do the same.
So far, I have been correct, but still incomplete. Benevolence must be addressed. Because, like I said before, a sage is benevolent. Wisdom is benevolence itself. How, may I ask, can benevolence be exercised in an uncaring world? And, how are people who are so often the authors of their own suffering, for reasons and in ways too numerous to enumerate, to be cared for? No honest person over a certain age can deny the frequency with which efforts to help others quickly dead-ends in frustration.
It is all too often because the naively well-meaning among us are rushing to the aide of the naively inept: help that is not truly helpful is being offered to those who are unable to receive. A stalemate, or a tragedy of errors, in the making.
In other words, a person who has not truly faced reality is seeking to remedy the reality of another
It is a hell of a statement to say that “the wise are ruthless.” Why? Because the council of a wise person is the best you could hope for. Or maybe you’d like to tell me what you’d rather have in a piece of advice or a bit of help than wisdom. Let us just say it then: the most helpful possible person is also someone characterized by ruthlessness.
Or did you already know that?
If error, if avoidable suffering, is caused by illusions, help worthy of the name can only come from someone with none, and such a person will seem downright ruthless to the deluded.
The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows. The shape changes but not the form; The more it moves, the more it yields.
This is the truly esoteric idea at the core of the chapter. Once we understand its meaning on its own, we can look at how its meaning is extended by the lines that come before and after.
Let’s start by rewording this strange phrase as “the world moves, but it doesn’t change.” I will come back to this, but I have to tease out or demystify it a bit more first.
Something else the metaphor of the bellows implies is that what “it yields” is just the movement of air. The air it draws into itself when it opens is the same air it expels when it closes: the more it moves, the more it yields.
In other words, look at “the ten thousand things,” which is to say, the contents of the world, less as many individual objects and more like a singular expression of a convulsing world.
Its shape is changing in the sense that it is moving, but the form doesn’t change. Meaning, the movements are built into the way it is structured: the form can remain static even as the shape moves, and moves much air in the process.
What, finally, does this mean? What if I answer with another question (forgive me): what if all you’re seeing before you, day after day, year after year, is movement, not change?
From one person to the next, one situation to the next, one relationship to the next, one environment with its set of dynamics, personalities, and politics to the next – it’s all just “the world.” All of this, all of it, is nothing but the world.
Are you seeing it? Not reducible to a unit smaller than “the world!”
This is why the idea of change is taken off the table, and replaced with the more limited concept of movement (this is what is meant by drawing a distinction between “shape” and “form”).
What this means is that there is not nor could there be, for someone seeing the world in this way, such a thing as novelty. Or anonymity. Or running away and starting over. When you were born, you entered into an exclusive relationship with something called The World. Every distinct person, every distinct circumstance, is still just you and the world taking a long walk together. It is all the same, ever the same, inescapably the same.
This means that everything you say or do, you say or do to the world itself. No slate is wiped clean by the revolving door of faces, situations, and circumstances.
This is intrinsically related to the ruthlessness of both heaven and earth and the wise: if there is never change, only movement, then there is no running away from the consequences of your actions, no dodging, no concealing, no procrastinating.
If there is nowhere to go, because the world is a single indivisible mass and does not break down into any, and I mean any constituent parts, then whatever is broken or incomplete in your understanding of and relationship to the world may as well be faced down and resolved right here, right now.
More words count less. Hold fast to the center.
The missing piece in our lives is not, I promise you, more words. You don’t need more theories, explanations, ideas, and dreams, but a firmer and less-frequently-interrupted grip on reality. You need to feel the center, to make it central, and to stay right there, right with it.
Thoughtless and self indulgent speech takes you away from the center. Words make conceptual maps of the world. More words can make you think the world itself has expanded. Uncovering a new idea – surely there are objective natural phenomena that correspond to these word-pictures? Maybe not. You can use words as if to fashion a brand new key. You now assume there is a special door somewhere waiting to be opened by it.
But the world we construct out of words, the world of abstractions, of which political or religious rhetoric is filled to the brim, is like the incomprehensibly large keyring of a janitor in a high rise building –
Except that none of those keys correspond to actual doors. They are just there, jingling at the jostling of your hips, like the ringing of a bell that heralds the presence of the man of knowledge, the sophisticated person.
There was only ever the world, the one and only true world, and because it is the one and only, there isn’t even a door, isn’t even a key, and there never was.
Wisdom is the ruthlessness that strips all this make believe away, sees the one and only real shape standing in the room full of mirrors, holding fast to the center all the while.
What does it mean to understand the world? If I say I do, what is it that I’m really saying?
That the world as such is no longer a problem for me. Existence is not a problem, and life no longer requires justification.
I no longer require justification, because I am a constituent of a world that I see as being precisely what it should be.
Does this mean I see the world as perfect?
Yes and no.
The way most people use the word “perfect,” I would have to omit a great deal from my field of vision to affirm it thus.
I don’t see all, but I omit nothing that is within my power to see.
Therefore,
When I say the world is as it should be, demanding no justification, and that this quality of rightness necessarily extends to me as well,
My saying so is also my saying that I mean something very different from you when I say “perfect.”
The world is not incomplete, flawed, or in any way a deviation from the way it was intended to be.
Because there is no intent, no plan that ran aground in the process of implementation, no explanatory gap between conception and execution.
It is what it is supposed to be, because this is how it came out. A world can no more fail to be as it should be than a wave can fail to swell and crest and crash as it should have.
While this kind of language is maddening in its apparent rejection of the rigor of protracted arguments, the simple tautology is actually the correct statement: it should be this way because it is this way.
If that sounds like it fails and even refuses to explain anything, that’s because it does indeed fail and refuse.
The world does not require justification.
I’ll go a step further: all justifications are refusals to understand and accept.
All explanations are designed to paint some details as relevant and others as irrelevant: without an argument to win, or an agenda to pursue, all details are either totally relevant or totally irrelevant.
“The world is as it is” is step 1 of the project of knowing what it is that the world is: I refuse to accept any plot summary, but demand to read the original text without abridgement.
People use words like “obvious,” “self evident,” “of course,” and so on, as a way of acting as if they already understand, that the world that is here to be seen is somehow insufficient in its obviousness – and they are only interested in explanations, justifications, hypothetical alternatives, utopian futures, lost paradises of the past.
Anything, apparently, but the world as it is. Anything but the world before their eyes.
We can now discuss chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching, written by Lao Tzu and translated into English by Gia Fu Feng.
Go more deeply into what is self-evident, and see that there is nowhere to go and nothing to do: the secret is under your nose now, never more close at hand than it is now, and no one stops you but you.
I will reprint the chapter in its entirety and then expound upon it 1 idea at a time. Let’s begin.
Chapter 2:
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short contrast each other; High and low rest upon each other; Voice and sound harmonize each other; Front and back follow one another.
Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking. The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease, Creating, yet not possessing, Working, yet not taking credit. Work is done, then forgotten. Therefore it lasts forever.
Analysis
This chapter is essentially broken up into two sections. The first section defines the relationship between conjoined opposites, and expends 62 words to make 1 point as perfectly clear as possible. 8 pairs of opposites are given as a way of driving home the point that this concept touches everything that can be characterized in any way whatsoever – that is to say, absolutely everything.
The second section makes far less self evident points, but nonetheless cannot stand without the first section.
The subtle thing is always, by definition, hidden within the obvious thing: one who refuses to look at what is obvious, the busybody who says it is beneath his sophistication, will never see the subtle thing within.
This was the point being made in the introduction: if you cannot grant what is obvious, perhaps it is not obvious to you at all.
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short contrast each other; High and low rest upon each other; Voice and sound harmonize each other; Front and back follow one another.
It means what it sounds like it means: the one owes its existence to the existence of the other. The two arise together, and cannot arise one at a time. Non identical twins, you might say.
The collection of trees exists with or without our conceptual scaffolding around it, but the moment we begin to describe the forest, the opposing concepts are instantly created.
The sunny part above their canopy and the shady part below it. The relative height of them: a tree cannot be tall but it can be taller than.
In fact, a tree needn’t be named a tree at all, except to expediently distinguish between tree and not tree. If we don’t chop that oddly shaped gray thing for making fire and building huts, then we need one word for rock and one word for tree. One word for stone and another for lumber.
We have a word for day because we have both day and night.
We have words like virginity, puberty, and acquitted, because we understand that specific actions and processes irrevocably divide our lives into stages of before and after.
Perspective and position are what gives things their import, are what actually generate entire concepts like having and not having, difficult and easy.
Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
Why does a deep, rather than superficial understanding of this all too basic fact lead to doing nothing and not talking?
Because the end to the futile flailing that we call reactivity comes about by giving up, at least partially, this perspectival relativism that is at the heart of all value judgments.
If something is worse than something else, it requires justification. If it just is, it doesn’t.
Consider, then, a new set of conjoined opposites: judging and accepting.
There is a time for judgment, and a time for acceptance. We are presented with decisions, and this is when we judge. Once the decision is made, we have to work with whatever was chosen, and judgment makes this impossible.
Comparison between the thing we chose and the alternatives, real or imaginary, that we didn’t choose, confuses us. It makes us think we are back there at that fork in the road, when in fact we are already a fair ways down one of the two paths.
If my meaning is unclear, here is illustrative example: imagine waking up one day, 50 years into your marriage, and exclaiming, alas, my wife is old! She is old because you’ve been married to her for 50 years, and she is now 50 years older than the younger woman with whom you fell in love and asked to marry you.
Way back when you made your decision, she was young. Younger by 50 years, anyway. Therefore young and old arise together. You cannot marry a young woman without one day waking up next to a much older one. If you have chosen wisely, and fate is kind, then both situations were created simultaneously: growing old together is a sign of a successful relationship.
If you start on the path of education, of study, of reading and writing, you will grow in erudition, but you will also create philistines. The higher you climb up the mountain of knowledge, the smaller and more distant and unrelatable will be all those who didn’t join you on your journey. The path of study therefore creates both the knowledgeable and the ignorant.
The same can be said of anything: wealth, experience, skills of a particular sort. You cannot have more of anything without increasing the discrepancy between yourself and others.
Only a fool spends years studying esoteric knowledge only to be astonished at the relative ignorance of others. No Olympic weightlifter is truly shocked that someone else can’t make that weight budge an inch.
The sage goes about…teaching no-talking. What is there to say? What is there to point at in astonishment: all pursuits create more of the thing we were trying to minimize in ourselves. A day spent alert and active guarantees deep sleep.
The sage does not react because he sees everything, all subjective experiences and relative qualities, all concepts that only exist perspectivally, as being created by the processes of living themselves. Therefore what is there to comment on, and to whom? It is all feigned ignorance for the sage.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease, Creating, yet not possessing, Working, yet not taking credit. Work is done, then forgotten. Therefore it lasts forever.
Without cease. We do have to make decisions are the path we take in life, but the vast majority of our lives spent walking the path. A decision is made in a moment, but our lives are made by our ability to abide by those decisions.
Being the employer or employee, being the writer or the instructor, the husband, the mother, the neighbor, the keeper of the household: these are about actions, not decisions.
The demand for action is unceasing, and there is no room for standing back as if to say look at me, look at my accomplishments. Because the next moment and its attending demand for action is already here, and you only miss the chance before you now by stopping to evaluate what you’ve just done.
This is why work is done and then forgotten. Forgetting is what clears the workspace for the assignment that is only now arriving.
You may be better or worse than some, you may be sharper or duller in your aptitude, comparatively lucky or unlucky.
The open-eyed observation that rightly informs action is not aided by comparison to others.
We make comparisons when we are offered a choice. Therefore, it is lunacy to engage in comparison when no choice is on the table, and greater lunacy still when there never was nor ever could be such a choice.
This is why the world, and our selves, require no justification: they were not selected out of any number of available alternatives. If you can show me that you paid a premium for the world and were promised more than you were delivered, by all means tell me more. But the onus is on you.
The sage, the wise person, is busy creating, busy working, with no need to hold onto or receive praise for the results. The only result that matters is the resultant opportunity to continue working, to continue living.
Earlier yesterday morning I finished reading one of the crowning achievements of western literature, The Tragedy of Faust, written by the German polymath Johan Wolfgang von Goethe between 1730 and 1790.
In today’s article, I’m going to give a brief overview of Goethe as a literary and cultural figure, provide a very general outline of the plot, summarize what the play has to say about the nature of good, evil, and redemption, and conclude with some reflections of my own.
Goethe (pronounced, more or less, Gur-ta) was German novelist, playwright, poet, scientist, critic, statesman, and even theater director.
His career is, therefore, beyond synopsis and not reducible to a single work, or even a single genre of writing. In every area of intellectual life Goethe touched, he is considered a master, and, in some cases, unsurpassed.
His influence on the German language and on the trajectory of the western literary world is hard for an anglophone reader to comprehend or relate to.
Perhaps, if Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, and Mark Twain were combined into one person, this might approximate the stature of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
For these reasons, his tragic play Faust holds special significance. It is a life-spanning work, begun early in his life and concluded near its end.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The protagonist, Heinrich Faust, is clearly a representation of Goethe in many ways: a doctor and a scholar, whose studies and achievements have led him to the pinnacle of the European model of enlightenment, has nothing left to conquer.
Alone in his study, his quest for knowledge has alienated him from the world: not only has he not found happiness, fulfillment, or love, but he can think of nowhere else to look. He is experiencing, in the words of the poet Wallace Stevens, “the barrenness of the fertile thing that can achieve no more.”
He has followed the enterprise of truth seeking, as he understands it, to a dead end.
Late into the night, he thinks to turn to occultism. He opens a book of runes and symbols, eventually deciding to summon the Earth Spirit.
Faust may be an impressive scholar, even an authority, but he is out of his depth when the Earth Spirit materializes: he jumps with fright and cowers from it, embarrassing himself and drawing the ire of the apparition who is taken aback and disappointed by Faust’s temerity. He departs, leaving the would-be wizard dejected.
This is Faust’s lowest point: he is in fact contemplating suicide, seeing that he can no more be satisfied with academic knowledge than he can stomach the path of occult knowledge. He has nothing left.
At the last moment, however, he is interrupted by his servant, Wagner. They briefly converse, and his despair is not so much assuaged as it is dissipated. They decide to take a stroll through the town, now that the sun has risen.
It is here that the real plot of the play begins: a black dog approaches them, follows them home, back to Faust’s study, and then reveals his true identity: Mephistopheles, the devil. Or, as he describes himself, “the spirit that negates.”
After some back and forth, the world-weary and disaffected Faust sees in Mephistopheles an opportunity, and strikes a bargain with him: grant my every desire, always at my beck and call, until the moment I say “abide moment, thou art so fair.”
Faust is going to exploit the supernatural powers of Mephistopheles in one final attempt to find that which has eluded him all this time: that magical something that will finally quell his desire for more. If Mephistopheles can satisfy Faust, Faust’s soul belongs to Mephistopheles for eternity: the archetypal Faustian bargain.
The adventures that follow are humorous, grotesque, macabre, and also heartbreaking. He encounters a simple but virtuous peasant woman, Gretchen, with whom he becomes infatuated. Enlisting the dark powers of Mephistopheles, he eventually creates the necessary conditions to seduce her, and they have sex.
Because Faust is searching for the be all and end all of experience itself, however, he is not and cannot be satisfied with this, and abandons her to pursue other strange and dark phenomena with his enabling companion.
When he misses Gretchen and decides to visit her again, however, he finds that she has gone mad, and is awaiting execution. We learn that her encounter with Faust has irreparably destroyed her family, her sanity, and her life.
The sleeping potion that Faust gave to Gretchen’s mother to ensure that she wouldn’t wake up while they were having sex proved fatal.
The man that learned of their illicit rendezvous and died in a duel with Faust in an attempt to defend her honor was her own brother, Valentine.
Gretchen became pregnant with Faust’s baby and, both abandoned by him and left without any family on his account, drowned the baby and went mad. For the crime of infanticide, she is to be put to death.
While Faust is overcome with grief by what has happened to Gretchen, he does not truly love her, and is not prepared to sacrifice anything for her. He cannot save her conscience, but he tries to get her to escape the jail with him (made possible by the help of Mephistopheles). But for Gretchen, it is all over: she cannot live with what has happened, what she has done, and with the total loss of her own innocence and virtue. She stays, and dies. Faust leaves, to continue his quest.
This concludes part 1 of the tragedy. Part 2, heavily abridged in the Walter Kaufmann translation I read, concerns Faust and Mephistopheles traveling through time and to distant regions of the world, interacting with mythological and historical figures.
The play concludes with Faust, now a very old man, with the tragedy of Gretchen far behind him, now engaged in an ambitious project of land development, essentially taking on the work of civilization itself: conquering nature for the sake of human flourishing.
One elderly couple stands in his way, refusing to give up their estate to make room for his designs. He enlists Mephistopheles’ help, but his demonic companion goes too far and burns down their vineyard, killing the old couple.
For the first time, Faust expresses remorse, and is soon thereafter visited by the spirits of Want, Care, Guilt, and Distress. Care alone can reach him, and she immediately takes his eyesight from him.
It is here that Faust undergoes a sudden change: unable to see the results of his actions, he begins to direct the actions of others, not to the fulfillment of his desires, but towards what he intuitively knows to be “right” in a higher sense.
Essentially, he directs the men at his disposal to work at the limits of their ability, even the limits of their safety, in the service of work that is both beneficial and never ending. In the knowledge that men would undertake this task, at his behest, he says at last, verweile doch, du bist so schön! Abide, thou art so fair.
Faust then dies, and, before he can be taken away to hell, the sky opens and the angels remove him to heaven, where his spirit is reunited with the heavenly spirit of Gretchen.
Faust dies a reformed, enlightened man who has attained the true meaning of human life, and has exercised his accumulated power to pass it along. In so doing, his soul is redeemed, and the devil is cheated of his due.
And so the play is concluded.
Analysis
What does Faust get wrong? How does his path lead him from error to enlightenment? In what way does his ultimate realization excuse or redeem his previous errors?
Let’s start with the first glaring error: Faust is mistaken about both the nature of truth seeking and meaning.
Faust sees truth as a thing you can acquire. A commodity or currency that he stockpiles through taking on and mastering various fields of study. This is an incorrect path to truth, and I will now explain why.
The idea of seeking truth, as we understand it, could be said to begin with Socrates. There were pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece, but they did not give us methods, only specific ideas – some of them still inspire us today, most are antiquated, but none of them can be called a system of thinking.
What Socrates gave us was a method by which we could inoculate ourselves against falsehood. A method of probing into facile statements that served a kind of scalpel of logic: whatever is unclear, shallow, or contradictory is cut away by the process of inquiry.
For Socrates, truth is whatever remains after untruth has been carved away by inquiry: resistant to paraphrase, summary, or sloganeering, the truth is subtle and dignified. It is not a possession.
The purpose of pursuing truth, from a Socratic standpoint, is to purge oneself of falsehoods, to say and do nothing that you know, deep down, to be flimsy, expedient, or manipulative.
This is not what Faust has done. Faust has lived his life like a kind of academic imperialist – going from one field of study to another in the hope that his lust for conquest will one day be sated.
In other words, what he is really seeking is technical mastery. Expertise. It is fundamentally acquisitive: something is missing in his life, and he believes that once he reaches a certain threshold, or perhaps unlocks one specific secret, that he will finally be at peace.
Why is this the correct understanding of Faust? Because of the terms of his agreement with Mephistopheles. He is willing to pay the ultimate price, the eternal fate of his soul, in exchange for the one experience that will make him say “abide! Thou art so fair!”
It should be said that Faust is intellectually arrogant. He believes himself to be above his fellow man, and believes the world to be incapable of offering him anything up to his standards.
Mephistopheles frequently mocks him for this, and we see that away that the promise of instant and total wish fulfillment is instantly and totally corrupting for Faust: he becomes so infatuated with Gretchen that he begins bossing around Mephistopheles in a way that almost elicits sympathy from the reader.
This poor little devil, made to do the bidding of this petulant and impetuous man, who has lost all sense of proportion of over the prospect of, pardon me, getting laid, and who senselessly lavishes a modest peasant girl with entire treasure chests of gold and jewelry, on a scale that brings her more embarrassment, suspicion, and social alienation than delight.
And, why is Faust so obsessed with Gretchen to begin with? Because Gretchen is good, simple, and pure. She has substance, but is not learned or sophisticated. She has a simple way of life, working with her hands and caring for immediate family.
She has what he lacks: dutiful, honest work and human connection based on love and mutual interdependence. She has a real life and real relationships.
An already enlightened Faust would have met Gretchen recognized this. Would have committed himself to her and gone through the necessary steps of winning her over, and winning the approval of her family.
But Faust wants to have her, not commit himself to her. This is the entirety of the difference between Faust and Gretchen: she has commitments, he has conquests.
If we are to learn anything from what happens to Gretchen, from her sorrow and madness at having been reduced to a vehicle for sexual experience while being left to deal with the real consequences of that – her brother dying in an attempt to vindicate her honor, her mother dying from a sleeping potion, her pregnancy and subsequent act of infanticide, and all of this happening without Faust by her side – it is that the promise of effortless wish fulfillment leads to tragedy and disaster.
What is it that ultimately redeems Faust?
Let’s hear it in his own words:
This is the highest wisdom that I own, The best that mankind ever knew: Freedom and life are earned by those alone Who conquer them each day anew. Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives, Childhood, manhood, and age lead active lives. At such a throng I would fain stare, With free men on free ground their freedom share. Then, to the moment I might say: Abide, you are so fair! The traces of my earthly day No aeons can impair. As I presage a happiness so high, I now enjoy the highest moment.
Let’s break down what this isn’t. He doesn’t find faith. He doesn’t commit himself to a woman. He doesn’t find meaning, necessarily, in charity or “selfless service” either.
What he finds is a categorical change in where meaning is sought, rather than in what. There is no longer any what at all, but a how. Not in acquisition, not in knowledge, not in experiences, not even in the nature of the rewards or consequences.
Redemption is found in the process of giving the moment one’s all, one’s total effort, with nothing held back. “Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives.” Real activity, with real stakes. Work that must be renewed daily. The opposite of accumulation, and, actually, the opposite of achievement in the way we think of it.
Faust comes to understand that no single experience or achievement or acquisition relieves the need for daily exertion toward worthy ends: his error, all along, was the belief that there is such a thing as satisfaction, cessation, or arrest.
Oddly enough, his final understanding is an echo of one of his musings early in the play:
It says: “In the beginning was the Word.” Already I am stopped. It seems absurd. The Word does not deserve the highest prize, I must translate it otherwise If I am well inspired and not blind. It says: In the beginning was the Mind. Ponder that first line, wait and see, Lest you should write too hastily. Is mind the all-creating source? It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force. Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen, That my translation must be changed again. The spirit helps me. Now it is exact. I write: In the beginning was the Act.
Faust speaks these lines moments before the black dog reveals itself to be Mephistopheles, reinforcing the blasphemous nature of the statement. What Faust’s final speech makes clear is that his emphasis on action was right all along, but not the spirit in which it was undertaken.
The deluded Faust of this early monologue dreams of the power to hold dominion over his world, but the enlightened Faust sees that only in the performance of the action is redemption to be found.
This realization stands outside of any commentary on what one should do, and toward what ends. It leaves the question of ends off the table altogether. And, it must be so: Faust has gone to the ends of the earth, backwards and forwards through time, in search of what, and has found nothing. Nothing real, nothing final.
What he finds is not quite the act, in the sense of cause and effect, in the sense of agency and mastery, but action itself: primal, atemporal, total, immersive, vigorous.
It can be said that this understanding is redemptive because it leaves no room for the corruption of one’s motives, because there is no motive. There is no reward. The total immersion in the action itself is the reward:
Freedom and life are earned by those alone Who conquer them each day anew.
Thank you for reading, talk to you soon.
-Jas
PS – I explore ideas like this because it brings my life into alignment with my ideals. My inner picture of who I am and how I want to live in the world.
I share my thoughts publicly because I want to encourage others to do the same: to make the necessary changes that will bring the outer into harmony with the inner. This is happiness, self respect, and purpose.
To that end, I also create short form content on X/Twitter dealing with psychology of self development, and I’ve recently created a free 5 day educational email course on the same topic, “Self Development Cheat Codes.”
It goes over the 5 biggest mistakes people make when they decide they want to get their lives together, and I provide 15 specific frameworks to guide people along their journey. If you’d like to have more of a concrete method at your disposal, get the free materials here.
I’d like to begin by inviting you to join me in a little thought experiment.
Despite all the complex, nuanced ideas about life you’ve accumulated over years of experience, observation, and reflection, I’d like your permission to talk about it in simplistic, reductive language – provisionally, for the sake of making a point.
We can agree right now that life is indeed more complex that the conversation we’re about to have,
But we agree to shrink life to the size of a framework for the next few minutes for the sake of, ironically, expanding our range of options in the real world.
Why am I speaking in this strange way?
Because this is how the process of thinking works: suspending not disbelief but objections and appeals to irreducible complexity:
Yes, life is complicated. Yes, there is too much information that we don’t have for us to ever be sure,
And no, that is not an excuse for inaction and failing to develop a philosophy about life that governs you.
Growing in intellectual capacity means frequently shrinking life to the size of a single framework so that you can learn it, apply it, and confirm its uses and limitations for yourself.
Do this a few hundred times over a 10 year period and you will be a beacon of wisdom.
Today’s Framework:
Positive Feedback Loops.
Let’s begin with a definition,
and then follow that with some brief examples of how they can be used both for good and for ill,
and then, the real gem for today, how to use the philosophy of Epicurus to regulate and, when necessary, break positive feedback loops in order to maximize your personal well-being.
Firstly, what is a feedback loop?
The shortest definition is to say that a feedback loop occurs when outputs are used as inputs.
Have you ever held a live microphone, and suddenly heard a loud squealing sound? That’s feedback. The microphone is picking up sound (inputs) that are then being amplified through the speakers (outputs) – feedback is when the microphone is picking up sound from the speakers. This creates a continuous loop, causing the sound to lose control quickly.
(Normally, there is no loop at all: only the unamplified voice goes into the microphone and through the speakers – a straight line, or process that is begun anew with each word spoken into the mic.)
Here’s the kernel of wisdom to take from this: when the rate of a process accelerates over time, it’s often an example of a positive feedback loop.
The chemical reactions involved in blood clotting, apples ripening, labor contractions, the greenhouse effect – these are all positive feedback loops: the longer it goes on, the faster the effects multiply.
Not everything is like this: it’s not true that the longer I run the longer I want to run, or that the more I eat the more I want to eat: I get tired, or full, and I stop.
What are healthy feedback loops?
Some feedback loops are good!
The more information I have about a topic, the more interested I am in it: my questions become more specific, the gaps in my knowledge more frustrating, and the drive to complete the picture intensifies. I say this is a virtuous cycle.
Creative expression is a positive feedback loop: the more you explore different ideas, the more it takes for an idea to feel different: the more I write articles, or songs, or improvise and perform with my band, the more ideas I have, and the more quickly they come to me. Positive feedback.
Relationships are positive feedback loops. If you like someone, and you start spending time with them, that eventually bonds you to them to the point that being apart feels abnormal. Friendships, romantic relationships, creative collaborations; all driven by positive feedback.
A more general term for this might just be momentum.
When are positive feedback loops bad for you?
Don’t let the word “positive” fool you: think of it more like “uncontrollable increase.” That sounds a lot scarier, and, sometimes, that’s appropriate.
Addictions create positive feedback loops: using substances to cope with the shitty feelings following the high.
Lying creates positive feedback loops: it’s really hard to answer a probing question about a lie without having to create a brand new lie, and a bunch of lies now create a huge liability for you, requiring even more lies to conceal them. If you want a profound meditation on the uncontrollable spiraling effect of lies, watch the television series Sons of Anarchy.
The biggest positive feedback loop of all, however, is the loop of social norms:
Why do I need an iPhone? Because everyone else has one. So, the more people use them, the more pressure there is on everyone else to use them.
Can you be the one person in your company who doesn’t have slack on his or her phone?
Can you be the one person using public transit when everyone else is driving or using Uber?
Can you be the only athlete who isn’t using steroids when all of your competition is?
Positive feedback loops can drive curiosity, exploration, refinement, innovation and creativity.
They can also normalize unhealthy behaviors, attitudes, and delusions: giving things a foothold when they should have been staunchly opposed from the beginning. Everything insidious, everything that exploits half-truths, exploits our aversion to conflict, our desire to be seen as open-minded and tolerant, or keeping up with the times – depends on positive feedback loops.
For those looking to break out of the loop, the echo chamber, the confirmation bias, the vicious cycle, and tribalistic group think, let me now refer you to the 4th century Greek philosopher Epicurus.
Epicurus lived in Ancient Athens, and founded a commune organized around his ideas. He valued simplicity, productive activity, and friendship. He saw that doing things brought more happiness than having things.
While Epicureanism has never become a widespread movement, it, like its cousin Stoicism, distills timeless insights into compact, pithy maxims.
Of the 40 doctrines of Epicurus, I believe I can offer one, the 21st, that summarizes his philosophy as well as reading them all:
“He who has learned the limits of life knows that that which removes the pain due to want and makes the whole of life complete is easy to obtain: so that there is no need of actions which involve competition.”
Let me paraphrase: it’s easy to have enough. What’s not easy is to have more than someone else (or everyone else).
To “learn the limits of life” is to understand that your limits are set by your body’s needs, not society. Not the perceived competition. It means understanding that if you are not suffering from privation (“the pain due to want”), you don’t actually need any more of it, whatever it is.
So, let me just speak to you from this mindset for a few moments:
Is your body starving, or does a sense of social standing (competition, driven by positive feedback loops) make you feel diminished because you can’t afford to eat at that restaurant?
Are you really so unhappy with your job, your pay, your home, and your lifestyle, or do you feel less than others who appear to have more?
Do you try to be someone you’re not, holding up an illusory facade, while concealing, neglecting, and devaluing the person that you really are, all because you think this is necessary to present yourself to others?
In short: are your activities guided by your needs, or the need for mimicry?
See what happens when you take Epicurus’ words to heart: “that which makes the whole of life complete is easy to obtain.” Realize that “good enough” is real, and represents a standard that originates from within yourself, whereas “the best” only has meaning in comparison to others.
Let me phrase it another way so that “good enough” seems less like resignation, and “the best” seems more ridiculous:
The goal of being happy versus the goal of being the happiest.
“Good enough” is not for those unfit for the best: it is for those with an internal locus of self worth.
Let something be good enough for it to cease to be a source of preoccupation: if you’re strained from having too little, or stressed from having more than you can manage, this is not what you want.
You want the amount that allows you to forget about it: neither starving nor stuffed.
The point is that YOU are the source of that limit, no one else.
Where do we go from here?
In all things, be the one who chooses. Choose the areas in your life that you wish to pursue to the ends of the earth, and choose the ones to leave at the level of good enough.
I know what lights me up, and what pains me to fall behind on. I know the things I’m simply maintaining as constants, and I know the things I don’t really care about very much at all. And, that evolves over time! It should evolve. It’s good to evolve. But make it a conversation with yourself. Be conscious of it, intentional about it. Don’t be swept up in the perceived expectations of others, what psychologists call “introjection.”
Recognize that it takes so little to supply you with your real needs, and just about everything else after that can be chalked up to social norms. Don’t be led by the nose by them, and don’t childishly rebel against them, but look at them, and choose for yourself.
Today, I want to make a case for the reluctant hero. The person who doesn’t seek glory, but is nonetheless dragged into a conflict by circumstance. This is someone who wasn’t looking to get involved, but whose conscience will not permit him or her to walk away.
In other words, a person motivated by principle, by a sense of duty, rather than their passions.
I’d like to clarify exactly what I mean by this by first making a distinction:
This is not exactly the same thing Kant meant by saying an action has to go against inclination for it to have moral worth.
That statement, found in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, meant that moral worth requires conscience triumph over instincts to the contrary, in the same way that bravery requires, by definition, the overcoming of fear.
When you overcome your prejudices to give someone your full attention and a fair shot,
When you hold yourself back from temptation, knowing you’d likely get away with it,
When you stay up late or get up early to take care of something important, fighting the urge to blow it off all the while –
These are examples of conscience winning over inclination: acts of moral worth.
And what I’m going to advocate for today is something five degrees off from that:
Doing something despite having a lack of interest in the outcome.
Maybe a better term for what I’m talking about isn’t actually “the reluctant hero” but the disinterested hero.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t just say that in the beginning, some ideas are discussed so rarely that you need to explain what you don’t mean before you can say what you do mean.
The concept of the disinterested hero is summarized perfectly in chapter 68 of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism, a school of Chinese philosophy that started roughly 2500 years ago.
I’ll reprint Gia-Fu Feng’s iconic 1972 translation below, and then proceed to expound upon it –
You could very well just take the 55 words of this chapter and meditate upon them daily or hourly for a year or so, and I’m sure you would come up with all kinds of deep insights. I’m sure because that’s what I did, and I want to tell you what came to mind for me, and how I applied it to my life.
SIXTY-EIGHT
A good soldier is not violent. A good fighter is not angry. A good winner is not vengeful. A good employer is humble. This is known as the Virtue of not striving. This is known as the ability to deal with people. This since ancient times has been known as the ultimate unity with heaven.
“The virtue of not striving.”
That sums it up, and yet I know it only raises more questions than it answers. As a first step in answering those obvious questions, read it again, and see how quickly your mind starts to clear up like a stuffy room once the windows are open.
What do these repetitive stanzas reduce to?
A good person is unemotional.
The skills of warfare do not require or benefit from the anger of the soldier.
The fighter is not better at fighting because he is angry with his opponent.
The person who triumphs is not enhanced by feelings of antipathy toward the person who lost.
The person who is in charge does not become a better boss by gloating over his or her authority.
Striving, then, is equated with the extra emotions: angry, violent, vengeful, proud or arrogant.
Lao Tzu says there is a virtue in not striving, a virtue in lacking the animating force of intense emotions.
In the very next line, he says something that sheds some light on exactly what he means by all this:
This is known as the ability to deal with people.
Again, his answers are puzzling, but they are answers.
In the absence of striving, in the absence of strong emotions that take us over, we have the ability to deal with people.
Well, I have to say I find that very interesting. What is implied here is that emotions make us forget that we are dealing with other humans. Emotions blind us by making us unthinking, lacking in sympathy, and myopic.
Let’s keep paraphrasing the lines until they become even less cryptic:
A good soldier/fighter/winner/landlord has the ability to deal with people.
Are you shocked yet? Because this is nothing short of shocking if you have truly grasped it.
Being good is less about having to be better than other people, and more about being good with people. With them! This can only mean that these sorts of strong emotions actually disconnect you from others, and turn you into someone trying to get something from others.
The angry soldier needs to kill the enemy, the violent fighter is trying to do as much damage to the other as he can, and the vengeful winner doesn’t want to win as much as he wants the other to lose, and the arrogant employer loves that his employees are dependent on him for their livelihoods.
All of these asymmetrical dynamics are actually quite unfortunate: wars, fights, stressful contests of skill, and the mutual interdependence of the fortunate and the unfortunate.
But for people animated by these violent emotions, they relish in the destruction, denigration, and subordination of the lesser, the loser, the weaker, the poorer of the two parties.
This is not virtue, because this is not how you deal with people.
The implication here is that, yes, life drags us into conflicts all the time, but something is wrong with you if you are happy about that. You have your duty to produce results, and that very fact stratifies the world into winners and losers, masters and slaves, those who eat and those who are eaten.
But are we required to be sad about it? Nothing to that effect is said here. It is enough to emphasize the fact that an enthusiasm for life’s inevitable moments of destruction is pathological and by definition antisocial, and that something of profound importance is lost when you are so excitable by the prospect of gain at another’s expense.
The ultimate unity with heaven is what comes to those who do what must be done, to the best of their ability, because anything that must be done must be done as well as possible, if it truly must be done at all. Unity with heaven is what you get when you understand that the best you can do is not the most you can do, the farthest you can go.
To do the best you can also means you must not do any more than is necessary: this is known as the virtue of not striving. It goes without saying that an angry, violent, vengeful person does not know when to stop, and this requires no elaboration on my part at all.
How did I apply this to my life?
To put it simply, the 68th chapter of Tao Te Ching taught me to focus on the person I’m dealing with, instead of trying to be true to the emotions aroused in me by the situation at hand.
I never questioned the emotions, and I never thought seriously about what it was I was trying to accomplish: I would capitulate to my feelings, thinking that this was “authenticity,” and that there was something noble in refusing to betray my feelings for the sake of superficial social conventions.
What I gradually came to understand is that my intense emotions were born of immaturity, even petulance, not “authenticity.” I saw that I was dramatizing my own emotions because I lacked the ability to deal with people. The moment I began to focus on creating the best possible outcome between myself and the other party, and therefore began to cultivate the skill of dealing with people, the emotions began to disappear altogether.
I still have emotions, of course, but they are speaking in their inside voices, so to speak – they are not shouting, feigning urgency, and attempting to hijack the conversation. They inform, rather than insist, because I no longer believe that emotions excuse anything, and because I now understand that emotions can function as a smokescreen that conceal the inability or simply the refusal to analyze.
Does that make me, as I implied before, disinterested?
I think that when you start to see your life as an aggregate of relationships, there is both so much more to be done and almost nothing to react to: you are action itself, and nothing is happening to you as much as you are the activity that is happening, the conduit through which moments of contact and exchange occur.
I think the examples of soldiers, fighters, winners, and employers are used to make the point clearly: often enough, we are called upon to enter into dynamics where not everyone can come out feeling like the winner, and there needn’t be any emotion involved at all.
In that moment, there is something that needs to be done. Our purpose, yours and mine, is to be calm and clear enough to perceive it, participate in it, and fulfill it.
The virtue of not striving means the virtue of not being on a crusade – some goal above and beyond the actual humans you share your life with. There simply is no life without others, in the most basic sense.
For this reason, nothing that comes between you and the continuity of your relationships with others can be called virtue: the only way forward is together, and this must inform and temper the moments when, yes, we must fight and militate against and dominate each other.
I cannot stress enough that these asymmetrical dynamics cannot be avoided, and, when I say that a communitarian ethos should temper our behaviors, I mean they should cleanse us of stupid, unthinking brutishness.
In no way am I saying, as a general principle, to become a pushover, without a spine and without boundaries. I am actually saying something quite opposite: become perfectly capable of delivering on what is demanded by life, unclouded by trite ideas of both pacifism and heroism.
What is there to strive for? Life has placed an entire life, an entire world, right in front of you: simply fulfill the roles you have been granted. This, since ancient times, is known as the ultimate unity with heaven.
Make Beautiful Choices 