Wu wei and Words
January 31st, 2023
Dreams
In Tao Te Ching, one of the important concepts called wu wei is aptly summed up in this quote:
The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone
It's a paradox.
When I first read this, I saw a cryptic description of passivity.
When I first got drunk, I realized what Lao Tzu really meant.
It's is a state of magic where the world is flowing. When you wake up from the magic, you realize you were flowing with the world too. But while in the magic, you can't know that you were flowing with the world. Conscious knowing breaks the magic.
It's a dream that lasts as long as you don't remember you're dreaming.
Mountains
But why exactly does the dream end? And how do you maintain the flow like state?
I think words stop dreams. To etch "words" is to "know." And knowing distracts from the here and now.
The ego's words are sweet. "I should be doing this." "That's good." "That's bad." "Oh, I would be happy if I just had..." All these cloudy thoughts stop the magic, but they are addictive. They never stop coming.
Even the observations of the ego cloud the mind. Words are reductive. Thinking "I saw a mountain" hardly captures the experience of being engulfed by one. Staying stuck in the realm of words stops the magic of existence.
And likewise, The more I try to explain wu wei, the more I'm tarnishing the idea with words. It's no wonder why Lao Tzu spoke in such cryptic poems. Like giant mountains, "words cannot do it justice."
In other words, I don't believe much in words. Yukio Mishima best describes it in his essay Sun and Steel:
In its essence, any art that relied on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid.
Next Steps
So yeah. I'm going to think less. Be more. And if you've read any of my older posts, you'll know that's probably a good idea.
So am I actually an angst-ridden techno babbling loser? No. Those are etchings in the sand, not what I actually am. But to feed the ego its ideas, I'll go ahead and write it down.
But for as I am in existence, I simply am. I'm just a person.
