The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 12
The first three lines are simple enough. Stimulation easily becomes overstimulation. Overstimulation leads to deterioration. Engagement and consumption lead to burnout. He takes a step toward something less obvious with the next two lines, however: the idea that both pursuing and obtaining what we want can be unhealthy for us.
Before we get to the concluding lines, I think we already have plenty to discuss.
I think Lao Tzu is caring, not curmudgeonly. I think, and would even say I am convinced, that he wants the best for us. I think his ideas about a good, happy, and fulfilled life are far more elevated than the loftiest aspirations most of us have entertained. I would even go so far as to say that Lao Tzu loves humanity more than most humans love themselves. If I dream of being happy, Lao Tzu dreams of me being happier than that.
He is warning me not to take the wrong path to get there. Not to seek happiness down the road of “more.” More beautiful music, more delicious food, more opulent possessions and surroundings: no, not that. The five colors blind the eye: you are slowly diminishing your capacity for enjoyment, one enjoyable experience at a time. An experience that begins with a high level of novelty eventually fades into familiarity. The search begins again, but now with less enthusiasm, and, in its place, a growing cynicism: this thing I am seeking will eventually fade, just like the once new but now newly faded thing I have just discarded. As we continue on this way, we only become more aware of this cycle, and it becomes a part of our seeking: we now seek something to discard as much as we seek something to first hold. The expectation of discarding it now walks apace with expectation of enjoyment, like an old widow chaperoning a first date.
I don’t think most people begin to consciously seek out the undesirable attendants of a desirable experience, but we do very often continue to chase the things we want knowing full well that they come with plenty of what nobody could possibly want. Hangovers. Indigestion. A loss of vigor and vitality in the mind and body alike. Wasting away on the one hand and ballooning out on the other. A mind dull and indolent upon waking. A body that considers movement and activity a chore. And, most of all: the anticipation of the next experience eclipsing this experience. When you have spent your dinner craving dessert, either literally or metaphorically, the five flavors have dulled the taste.
You might say I am describing the behavior of an addict, and that you are not an addict.
Something Lao Tzu and I have in common, if I may be so generous to myself: we believe that hyperbole makes the point beautifully. The same way he doesn’t really mean you will go blind from seeing beautiful things or deaf from enjoying music (although hearing damage is much easier to inflict now than when he composed the Tao), I don’t mean to say that we all behave like addicts all the time, or that we are not meaningfully distinct from addicts in our daily consumptive behaviors. It is playful hyperbole, not a failure to recognize gradations. And, this is another principle you will see over and over again in the Tao, and have by now already seen: take the tiny thing and magnify it, as a strategy for recognizing something in it and promptly taking action. Moderate language makes the case for complacency, for acceptance. Hyperbolic language justifies immediate and decisive action.
I should point out that this is certainly a sword that cuts both ways: use it with nothing but the utmost of caution.
When you think to light up a cigarette, imagine a blackened corpse pulled from smoldering ruins. When you look at the cream-filled donut, imagine yourself morbidly obese and confined to a wheelchair. When you find yourself flirting with someone who you realize is a bit lonely, imagine the abrupt and irrevocable end of your relationship, and on the worst of possible terms.
Not just with things we know are a bad idea, but with laudable goals as well. When you think of making partner at a law firm, imagine 80 hour work weeks, your children waiting for you to come home and giving up, going to bed neglected. Imagine your wife looking elsewhere to fulfill her needs. In other words, imagine an outcome where the achievement of the goal is not worth the price. Not in the words of someone else, but in terms you find entirely convincing. This is the exercise we are invited to perform when we read the simplest of lines: precious things lead one astray.
Racing and hunting madden the mind. Have you ever felt like something was only moving farther away the longer you pursued it? That you were beginning to forget why you were seeking it, and what you meant to do once you acquired or achieved it? This is what losing yourself feels like, and it disguises itself by projecting itself onto the world: you think the problem is with other people and circumstances. If you are responding to each setback, delay, or obstacle by applying more force, you are living in the experience this line warns you about.
One might summarize the negative outcome the Tao Te Ching is helping you avoid as the following equation: positive feedback loops plus the phase of negative returns equals a hell of your own making. This idea, and its inverse, which we will discuss often and at length, inform almost every single line of the entire text. It is simply much easier to go too far than you probably think. Going too far happens slowly at first. When it picks up speed, that goes almost unnoticed. You condition yourself to something, and you stop checking yourself as you respond to circumstances. You are already lost, already confused, already telling lies to yourself as you only continue the pursuit.
Vision turns to blindness. Hearing turns to deafness. The enjoyment of food ends in tastelessness. Going after what you want leaves you estranged from yourself, your relationships, and even your sanity.
What does Lao Tzu offer as an alternative?
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
We have slowly become very confused about what our emotions are and what they are for. This is a cost incurred by creating a more rational world, governed by processes and technologies enabled by logical, scientific, and mathematical forms of thinking. That which cannot be measured seems to have no place in public life. Everything is about metrics, performance, analysis, and so on. It’s my world, and I’m sure it’s yours, too. So what are we to make of this statement, that the wise man is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees? One word makes sense of it for us: therefore. Because of the precise way in which negative outcomes occur and become the norm, become life outcomes, and even fate itself, the sage lives his life in the opposite way. There is a recipe for failure, and the sage inverts it. That doesn’t work, therefore I do this. What doesn’t work, in the words of this chapter, is the unrelenting pursuit of sensory stimulation and the ding ding ding of scoring points in whatever arena you find yourself. That is what leads you astray, wears you down, and ultimately never satisfies you. It never delivers you to the promised land of peace, wisdom, and happiness. It never turns you into the sage.
What does work, therefore, is to be guided by what you feel. To navigate the world, rather than react to it, by the guidance of your feelings. It should be said right away that this includes negative emotions just as much as positive emotions. Being guided by what you feel is to ask yourself why you are angry. Why the situation on the outside of you was met with an anger on the inside of you. To be guided by what you see is to unquestioningly accept the proposition this is making me angry. A sage sees the same situation in a way closer to this: a moment, a person, some information knocked on the door of my self, and it was an angry me that opened it. Why? Why was it that understanding, patience, care, or curiosity did not come to the door? Perhaps it was unnecessary to come to the door at all. This is what it might look like to be guided by what you feel instead of what you see, to let go of that, which is the reaction-eliciting object, and choose this, the life-navigating hierarchy of values always operating within yourself in the form of emotions.
Nobody is saying emotions are to be obeyed. It does not say the sage is controlled by what he feels, or that he does whatever he feels like doing. He is guided by them. He sees them as information. To slow down and bring yourself to order, to attend to your own needs and your own household, and address the feelings of frustration or agitation within yourself, and then go meet the world, the thing you see: this is the way. Letting go of that and choosing this is a process of rejecting superficial explanations and a reactionary way of living in order to find things within your control, and to then take control of them. That is outside you. You don’t own it. This is within you. It’s yours. That is something you have to go and get, while this is something you already have.
To chase after things your whole life is sad and lonely. A sage is someone who, at some point, learns how to have things. How to have relationships, a family, a household, and a place in the world. A sage knows how to maintain and properly, expertly put to use what he already has. He is someone who understands stewardship and steadfastness. The outwardly-directed drives of youth have mellowed into paternal care: I have built a life, and now I must watch over it. I have expended the energy and other resources necessary to acquire it, and now I must maintain it, appreciate it, and enjoy it.
This ability to have, to choose this after letting go of that, is something that shows up absolutely everywhere in a person’s life. People seek employment, but do they know how to be employees? They seek relationships, but do they fall in love with what it means to be a husband or wife? They want children, but do they want to become parents? They want money and financial security, but do they know how to be stable and enjoy themselves once they have enough? Hunger drives a person to eat, and eating relieves the hunger, but do you truly know how to simply enjoy the feeling of being well fed? Of being satisfied? Or does the presence or awareness of more compel you to continue seeking?
The sage chooses this. The feeling of hunger or the feeling of fullness. Pursue when there is a need to be fulfilled, a need that is felt on the inside. But when the feeling is one of fullness, of satiety, of having something to contend with, the pursuit must end so the care and stewardship can begin. This has nothing to do with asceticism, or moralizing against the world, or devaluing what we have acquired and writing it off as “just stuff.” Rather, it has everything to do with the ability to fulfill the purpose for which we acquire something. The sage lives in a way that dignifies and endows with meaning and utility all that he has, all that he touches. A sage eats a meal because it benefits the body. A fool is someone who eats just because the food looks appetizing. The good news is that the sage doesn’t have any special knowledge that you don’t. You can be sagely today, right now, by simply paying more attention to what you have than what you don’t, by noticing what it feels like to focus on this instead of that.
