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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
I remember once, I was looking in the open air, and one of those glorious little thistle down things came. And I picked it up like that and brought it down. And it looked as if it was struggling to get away, just as if you caught an insect by one leg. It seemed to be struggling to get away, and I at first, thought, well, it's not doing that. That's just the wind blowing.
Speaker 1:Then I thought again, really? Only the wind blowing? Surely, it is the structure of this thing, which in cooperation with the existence of wind, enables it to move like an animal. But using the wind's effort, not its own. It is more intelligent being than an insect in a way because an insect uses effort.
Speaker 1:Like a person who rows a boat uses effort, but the man who puts up a sail is using magic. He lets nature do it for him with the intelligence to use a thale, without your using very much effort gets everything to cooperate with you. Look at it in this way. Supposing the president of The United States were as unknown to you by name as the local sanitary inspector, the man who looks after the drains and the sewage disposal and all that kind of thing. This is not a glamorous figure, you see.
Speaker 1:But for that very reason, he probably does his job more efficiently than the president because the president wastes enormous amount of time in interviewing various groups from, the elks and the girl scouts and, conferring, honors and all this kind of thing. The poor man's life must be an utter torment because he's so well known and therefore has absolutely no time to give to the government of the country. So that if he was someone quite anonymous and that we didn't have to think about, he would be a very, very good ruler. In just the same way, for example, you don't have to attend unless you're sick to the government of your own body. It happens automatically.
Speaker 1:It goes on day after day after day, and the the better it is, the less you have to think about it. When you see well, you do not see your eyes. If there is something wrong with your eyes, you start seeing spots, and those spots are spots in your eyes. When you hear well, you'd never hear your ears. But when they start singing, you know, then you're starting to hear your ears, and your ears are getting in the way of their own hearing.
Speaker 1:So on the deepest level, a person as a whole can get in the way of his own existence by becoming too aware of himself. In English, the word heartless has a very bad connotation as does the word mindless. A heartless person is an inconsiderate, unfeeling person. A mindless person is an idiot. But a person who has or no mind or no heart in Chinese is a very high order of person.
Speaker 1:It means that his psychic center doesn't get in its own way. It operates as if it wasn't there. Zhuangzi says that the highest form of man uses his shin like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing.
Speaker 1:It receives but does not keep. And the poem says when the geese fly over the water and they are reflected in the water, that the geese do not intend to cast their reflection, and the water has no mind to retain their image. So the whole thing is, you see, to operate in the world as if you were absent, being absent as a condition of being present. What? Zhuangzi says, when your belt is comfortable, you don't feel it.
Speaker 1:When your shoes are comfortable, it is as if you weren't wearing any. The more you are aware of these things, the less properly they are made or the less properly they fit. Because in the state of being in accord with the Tao, there is a certain feeling of weightlessness parallel to the weightlessness that people feel when they get into outer space or when they go deep into the ocean. This is, of course, connected with the sensation that you're not carrying your body around. What is this than weightlessness?
Speaker 1:It means you cross partly that you're not moving around in constant opposition to yourself. Most people move in constant opposition to themselves because they are afraid that if they don't oppose themselves all the time, something awful will happen. When the human being developed the power to be aware of himself, to know that he knows, in other words, when the cortex was formed over the original brain, he fell from grace. That was the fall of man. When he felt he had the sensation of being in charge, of being in control of himself, and you can only have that sensation when you are aware of what you're doing, he got anxious.
Speaker 1:Am I aware enough of myself? Have I taken enough factors into consideration? Have I done all that should be done? And then he started trembling. And this is the great human predicament.
Speaker 1:The development of self consciousness, the development of the possibility of reflecting upon one's own knowledge. And Lao Tzu says, sir, regard the universe. He says, the stars come out invariably every night. The sun rises and sets. The birds flock and migrate without exception.
Speaker 1:All flowers and trees grow upwards without exception. You, by your talk of charity and duty to one's neighbor, you're just introducing confusion into the empire. Your attempt to eliminate self is a positive manifestation selfishness. You are like a person beating a drum in search of a fugitive. In other words, try to live in such a way that nothing is either an advantage or a disadvantage.
Speaker 1:You never really know whether something is fortune or misfortune. We only know the momentary changes and as it alters our sense of hope about things. The Taoist is wise enough eventually, you see, to understand there isn't any fixed good or bad. And so his point of view is what is called non choosing.