Excerpts from ‘What is Tao ?’
by Alan Watts
We have been brought up in a religious tradition, that to a great extent has taught us to mistrust the nature around us and to mistrust our own selves as well. But the irony here is that if u cannot trust your own basic nature, then how can you trust your own mistrusting ? Isnt your mistrusting a part of your nature ? How do u know that your mistrusting is not wrong as well ? If you do not trust your own nature, you become as tangled up as anyone can be.
Confucius was the first to say that he would rather trust human passions and instincts than trust human ideas about what is right, for like the Taoists he realized that we have to allow all living things to look after themselves.
We always have to divide the world into opposites or categories in order to be able to think about it.
True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward. In this way, rest and movement are in agreement with the demands of the time, and thus there is light in life ..
The heart thinks constantly. This cannot be changed. But the movements of the heart – that is, a man’s thoughts – should restrict themselves to the immediate situation. All thinking that goes beyond this only makes the heart sore.
Why is the Tao inexpressible ? We cannot have any system of thought – whether it be philosophical or mathematical or logical or physical which defines its own basis. In other words, I can pick up the brush with my right hand but I cannot pick up my right hand. My right hand picks itself up. There always has to be something, as it were that isn’t picked up, that picks itself up, that works itself and is not worked upon.
In this sense, in trying to say anything about the Tao is like trying to eat your own mouth and of course you cannot get outside of it to eat it. Or to put it another way, anything that u can chew is not your mouth. There is always something we do not know.
The Five principles of Taoism :
1. Tsu-Zan :
It means : that which is ‘of-itself ’, ‘by itself’ or ‘itself so’. It is almost what we mean when we say that something is automatic or that something happens automatically. What it means is that all that is nature operates of i self. There is nothing standing over it and making it go on. In the same way, one’s own body operates of itself. You cant get outside yourself to define yourself or to control yourself.
A corollary here is related to sustainability, it is that since man is an integral part of the natural universe, he cannot hope to control it as it were an object quite separate from himself. You cant getoutside your nature to be the master of nature.
We have come to terms with nature, by wooing her rather than fighting her and instead of holding nature at a distance through our objectivity as if she were an enemy, realize rather that she is to be known by her embrace.
Another corollary is that the way your heart beats ‘self-so; or ‘by itself’, your mind too can function ‘self-so’ but we are most afraid to give it a chance. We therefore don’t allow ourselves to be fully spontaneous.
2.Wu wei :
That is ‘not forcing’ : Since things are self-so, they are self-controlling. So ‘not forcing’ becomes the next principle of Taoism. Obstruction can happen if there is an external controller, so it also means that the activity of nature is not self-obstructing. We should apply the same in human activity.
We shouldn’t stand in our own light, just about the way, a student misses the whole subject if he is trying very hard to listen.
In this context, Wu Wei can also mean what our proverb goes :‘ Easy does it ’ . The best way to do a thing is the one with maximum economy of effort.
There are two aspects to Wu Wei :
a) Un-self-consciousness
Self-consciousness is the self-obstruction. Self-consciousness or awareness is not all bad. There is an obvious advantage to it because one must ask, if you are enjoying life without knowing that you are enjoying it, are you really enjoying it enough or as a matter of fact, enjoying it at all? And here of course, consciousness offers its enormous advantage.
But there is also a disadvantage, even a danger, in developing it, because as consciousness grows, and as we begin to know how to look at ourselves and beyond ourselves, we may start over and over again and cause much interference with ourselves. This is when we begin to get in our own light.
And so, the secret in Taoism is to get out of one’s own way and to learn that this pushing ourselves, instead of making us more efficient, actually interferes with all that we set about to do.
How is self-consciousness born?
By nature, we are ever-changing, spontaneous. Non-sense is basic to the world and so is inconsistency. However inconsistency is a no-no in our world. Since we are brought up to make sense of ourselves and account for ourselves, we are always expected to be able to rationalize our actions in words. It is in this process, that we develop the observing self.
The difficulty here is that although it is exceedingly important for all purposes of civilized intercourse and personal relationships to be able to make sense of what we are doing, and of what other people are doing, and to be able to talk about it all in words, this nevertheless warps us.
There are three stages to liberation :
a) There is first what we might call the natural or the childlike spontaneous stage of life in which self-consciousness has not yet arisen.
b) Then there comes a middle age which we might call one’s awkward age, in which one learns to become self-conscious.
c) And finally the two are integrated in the rediscovered innocence of a liberated person.
b) GIVE
Another aspect of Wu Wei is the aspect of ‘Give’. Give is an engineering term which means just about ‘giving in’. Not to oppose strength with strength. It is best seen when a cat is trying to climb a tree and falls off a tree again and again. It lets itself loose into a relaxed gentleness.
In the same way, it is the philosophy of Tao that we are falling off a tree, at every moment of our lives. And as a matter of fact, the moment we were born, we are kicked off a precipice and there is nothing that can stop it. And so instead of living in chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat. Don’t resist it.
3.BALANCE :
The philosophy of Tao has a basic respect for the balance of nature and if you are sensitive you don’t upset that balance. Instead, you try to find out what it is doing and go along with it..
4.Li ( Patterns of energy) :
We do not figure out in words or ordered thoughts how we grow our own bodies, structure our bones, or regulate our metabolism. In fact we have really no idea how we manage to do any of this, no idea how we manage to be conscious, how we actually think, and how we actually make decisions.
We do these things, but the processes and order of the physical body that underlies them are completely mysterious to us. Even though we can do these things we cannot fully describe them.
All the time, we are actually relying on this strange and unintelligible form of natural order. It is at the basis if everything we do, and even when we try to figure something out and describe it in words, and then make a decision on the basis of that process, we are still unconsciously relying upon an order that we cannot figure out. That order constitutes our basic nature, but we are too close to it to see it – and so following the Tao is the art of feeling our way into our own nature.
This Li is the principle behind I CHING : The Book of changes.
The logic behind I CHING
The West may believe that something like I Ching is too arbitrary but the East believes that the way we make decisions in the West – by analysing the pros and cons or by weighing the data makes little sense. This is because :
1. What is the guarantee that an aspect yet unconsidered or unexpected wouldn’t spring up out of nowhere ?
2. How do you decide when to stop collecting data ? You generally stop collecting when you are tired of it or are running out of time and have to close the decision.
And one could present a very convincing argument that because you decide when to stop investigating in a very arbitrary way, this method is just as arbitrary as flipping coins.
The system of I CHING is very suggestive to the West of a new way of looking at information and is in accordance with certain points of view that are now developing in our own science. It is a way of looking at life that focuses on not so much the causal relationship between the events, as the patterns of events as a whole.
In the West, we based our decisions on causality. When we think of causality, we think chiefly of the way events are determined by the past, and by extension the behaviour of the people is determined by their past.
The point of view that underlies the I CHING is that instead of trying to understand events as relationships to past causes, it understands events by relation to their present pattern. In other words, it comprehends them by taking a total view of the organism and its environment instead of what we might call a linear view. Modern science too now allows for this kind of an approach.
We can find a suitable analogy for the Western way of looking at things by saying that we are attempting to understand events in accordance with the order of the words.I can say, ‘This dog has no bark’ and then I say ‘ This tree has no bark’ and the meaning of ‘bark’ in these two sentences is determined by what went before them – so if I want to know what ‘bark’ means, I have to go back to what happened in the past.
If you look at what I would rather call the order of design, however, and not the order of words, you find a rather different situation because elements of the design come at you together. They are as we would say, ‘ of a piece’, and you see their relationship to their context and meaning all at once, much as you see the image appear when you develop a photographic plate.
The meaning of each part of the design is relative to the rest of the design just as you see it at this moment. We do not understand something by what went before so much as we do by understanding it in terms of what goes with it. So the idea of the book of changes is to review through its symbols the total pattern of the moment when the question is asked, and the supposition is that the pattern of this moment governs even the tossing of coins.
The interesting comparison that arises out of this comes about because we in the west have tended to understand events in accordance with linear or sequential orders like the order of words. However in Chinese language, we come again to Li, the word for natural law that originally meant the markings in jade, the grain in wood, or the fiber in muscle, which is really the basic fundamental pattern of things.
Images such as the marking sin jade or the grain in wood are used because they have an extremely subtle, complex pattern that shows a large area of events all happening together at once. These patterns have to be taken in and understood at a glance, in the same way as we take in a design at a glance.
The fundamental Chinese idea of the order of nature is not compatible with formulation in the order of words, because it is organic, and is not, linear pattern.
5.THE MYSTERY OF LIFE & UNKNOWABILITY :
Ultimately,of course, it is absolutely impossible to understand and appreciate our natural universe unless you know when to stop investigating.
In our restlessness, we are always tempted to climb every hill and cross every skyline to find out what lies beyond, yet as you get older and wiser, it is not just flagging energy but wisdom that teaches you to look at mountains from below, or perhaps just climb them a little way. For at the top, you can no longer see the mountain. And beyond, on the other side, there is, perhaps, just another valley like this.And this leads one to the startling recognition that in the place we are now, we have already arrived. What we are seeking is,if we are not totally blind, already here.
If you were to follow that trail up the mountain to its bitter end, you will discover that it leads eventually right back into the suburbs. But only an exceedingly stupid person will think that is where the trail really goes. For the actual truth is the trail goes to every single place that it crosses and leads also to where you are standing and watching it. Watching it vanish into the hills, you are already in the truth beyond, which it leads to ultimately. Every stream and every road, if followed persistently and meticulously to its end leads nowhere at all.
And this is why the compulsively investigative mind is always ending up in what it believes to be the hard and bitter reality of the actual facts. The stars in heaven are, after all, only radio-active rocks and gas. But this is nothing more than the delusion that truth is to be found only by picking everything to pieces like a spoiled child picking at its food.
So it is not by pushing relentlessly and aggressively beyond those hills that we discover the unknown and persuade nature to disclose her secrets. What is beyond is also here. Any place where we are may be considered the center of the universe. Anywhere that we stand can be considered the destination of our journey.
Our human senses are not knives, they are not hooks; they are the soft veil of the eye, the delicate drum of the ear, the soft skin on the tips of the fingers and the body. It is through these delicate receptive things that we receive our knowledge of the world. And therefore it is only through a kind of weakness and softness that it is possible for knowledge to come to us.
To put it another way, we have come to terms with nature, by wooing her rather than fighting her and instead of holding nature at a distance through our objectivity as if she were an enemy, realize rather that she is to be known by her embrace.
In the end, we must decide what we really want to know about. Do we trust nature, or would we rather try to manage the whole thing ?
Do we want to be some kind of omni-potent God, in control of it all, or do we want to enjoy it instead ? After all, we cant enjoy what we are anxiously trying to control. One of the nicest things about our body is that we don’t have to think about them all the time. If when you wole up in the morning, you had to think about every detail of your circulation, you would never get through the day.
It was well said : ‘The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.’The song of birds, the voices of insects are all means of conveying the truth to the mind. In the flowers and grasses, we see messages of the Tao.
The scholar, pure and clear of mind, serene and open of heart, should find in everything what nourishes him.
But if you want to know where the flower comes from, even the God of spring doesn’t know.
