Briefly, on the Tao

This morning I was hanging out with my family, coffee and my three dailies, the tri-force as I call them: Journey to the Heart (Melody Beattie), The Daily Stoic (Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman) and last, A Calendar of Wisdom (Leo Tolstoy), and I stumbled and fumbled upon this quote attributed to Lao Tzu in Tolstoy’s collection, and it stumped me:¹

“A wise man innately knows how to act without searching, because he has the divine within himself. The further you search and seek, the less you know.”

I felt activated immediately. Confused and inadequate. I believe this struck a nerve in me because Learning is kind of my thing. Learning anything and everything I can get my hands on to close a self-perceived gap with reality, with Vastitas, my name for the totality, and our observable universe. So anyways, just like I do now with any activations, I try to find the whys and try to… learn… more about the subject matter…

So of course I went looking for the source, which meant leaving the book I started in and going after one I didn’t even own, the Tao Te Ching itself, luckily LLMs make all of this particularly easy, which makes me wonder, were these books in their training data?

It turns out the sentence that stumped me isn’t exactly Lao Tzu’s, or not all of it. Chapter 47 (hah, cool number) opens, roughly, “without going out the door, know the world”, which is a lot blunter than what I had read, and the part about the divine within himself is not in the Chinese at all, it came in later, through Tolstoy’s side of the transmission. What is in there is the freaking line, “the further one goes out, the less one knows”.²

I read that less as a claim that the sage has a private line to the truth and more as a claim about which things are worth knowing. Searching, in this frame, means gathering particulars: more data, more territory covered, more cases examined, maybe some counter-examples. My read is that particulars multiply endlessly and that stacking them up can get in the way of seeing whatever it is that keeps generating them, so you could visit every village and town on earth and end up understanding less about how villages and towns actually work than somebody who stayed put and paid attention to what kept repeating.

Then Chapter 48 gives me something not explained in the shorter daily reader that really opens this nut up for me, which is that in learning there is daily increase, more and more particulars, but in pursuing the Tao there is daily decrease, less and less until what the book calls nonaction.²

Kinda ironic. It’s 12:24pm as I edit this writing, at 7:22am I had become un-baffled, but yeah, I started off at 6:30am today give or take… I can’t make these spirals up.

What is the Tao anyways? We’ve been yapping about it for a bit. Imagine you’re floating on a river. You can splash and fight and try to swim upstream, and you will get tired and go almost nowhere. Or you can notice which way the water is already going and move with it, and suddenly you are flowing fast, and barely trying.

“The way”, is what Tao means, by the way. I started seeing currents everywhere, some things just are and kinda… flow? Yappers yapping, seeds know how to grow up, roots how to grow down, cats landing on their feet, winter turning into spring on schedule, the missus asking me for housework as soon as I sit down, or similarly, Cata or Mia asking for a snack as soon as I sit down, uneducated people voting against their own interests, the dog chasing its tail; none of that seems to need me in charge, and yet things keep moving.

It’s kinda cool that the very first line of this Tao book says that “the Tao I can explain to you isn’t the enduring Tao”, because like the taste of salt, which we can describe in detail but ultimately, you still won’t know how on earth it tastes until you put it on your tongue and taste it.²

“Uneducated people voting against their own interests” doesn’t belong in that list. I put that judgment about people there intentionally. Thing is, I could only plant that line because it was already sitting there, loaded and ready to go, I didn’t have to invent it to use it, which means the contempt is mine, showing up from a deeply philosophical place, which is bullshit, it’s not wisdom just because I can explain it.

So anyways, going back to our original conundrum, it seems that being smart about learning doesn’t by itself help me understand how to flow with things, and it makes all the sense to me now at almost 40. Relationships, of all types, for example, are the place where it makes the most sense for me as my resistance can multiply action and effort, which seems like the antithesis of what the Tao seems to be, like, I won’t figure out my personal relationships just by studying people, I’ll get there with listening, and paying attention (which means I need to stop activity to absorb the person, right?), reading the room, reading whoever is speaking to me and their emotion, and going along with them (is that empathy?), and that’s when I feel the most comfortable.

Why did I get triggered by this quote then? I think it’s inadequacy. I felt attacked because given how I tend to move and work, this seems like I’m being told I’m doing things wrong, and yeah, that was my ego reacting, but my whole self knows that wisdom is these moments where I deconstruct myself, my definitions, my learnings, and possibly drop my guard and in this case, yes, i needed more information, to let go better which is what I feel like, it’s that balance I’m always talking about, it arrives in so many ways, even the Journey to the Heart entry I read today, which I sent my sister, about letting love lead, about embracing our powerlessness (powerlessness against the current of a river?), and i suspect that my search is actually sometimes avoidance… or the reverse… i already acted without searching and now I’m checking whether I applied mastery or a shortcut… which… i don’t even know okay. Maybe it’s a third thing, just a decent ordinary decision that was neither wise nor avoidant…

Here’s a thought for myself which I think is what triggered that feeling of inadequacy with my own ideas after reading what I first took as a quote about the futility of searching… if my ideas are only as good as the pile of evidence and particulars underneath them, will I ever be able to stop stacking information and learning? Because, I think the day I stop, the ideas stop having a backing, security. Aahhh I won’t be able to flesh out this paradox today but now I have another thing to inspect, to learn, to map out… kinda contradictory.

Anyways, the morning was not a total loss of myself. Cata was with Zule getting her hair done. Andre was in my lap, then at my feet, then he went off to mess around with Cata when she was done. Mia had already FaceTimed me, so I had nothing else to do. I read the dailies, I still have the Daily Stoic to finish. Then I was here, working, tending to Andre, thinking about Taoism, I did my PUSH workout, I cooked four lamb chops and ate them, and I’m still here trying to finish this thing. Nothing fancy, just normal writing and working through my ideas.

The whole time, a great morning was already happening. Nobody else in that room was researching anything. Andre doesn’t know what a particular is and he’s doing just fine, and Cata did not consult a commentary before asking for her snack. My learning was the only thing all day going against the current. It gave me this writing, sure, but damn, it was stressful, extra load, artificial and unnecessary. Not the Tao. I spent the morning working out whether a dead man was right that I search too much, and the thing he was pointing at was going on around me the whole time, being loud. I’m not going to tell you that’s the Tao, I don’t get to say what the Tao is, that’s literally the first line of the book. But I think I finally noticed the Tao.

Footnotes

1. Lao Tzu as rendered in Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom, September 13, translated by Peter Sekirin. The inward-heavenly idea already appears in Tolstoy’s Russian selection; its earlier source is not established here. ↩

2. Tao Te Ching, received text in the Wang Bi edition, chapters 1, 47, and 48. The English renderings here are approximate. The explanation about particulars is my reading; Wang Bi’s commentary also discusses common roots and constancy. ↩ ↩² ↩³