What is Driving You will Dictate Your Life

Today in class we had a discussion on love.  Can we really aim at attaining love and acquiring love or love is something that happens to you?  Do we do everything in order to get love and can we? Can love be achieved or is it something that has to happen on its own time within the right environment?  A couple of students stated that love has to happen.  I know a couple of people who is obsessed with gaining love.  Perhaps I'm one of them.  The lesson learned is that perhaps it is being liberated from our obsession with love may be the only way to find and experience that touch of love.  Chuang Tzu shares his wisdom:

"When you're betting for tiles in an archery context, you shoot with skills.  When you're betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim.  And when you're betting for real gold, you're a nervous wreck.  Your skills is the same in all these cases--but because one prize means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your mind. He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside" (Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, trans. Watson).  

A Bad Review is a Good Review

Today I happened to look into Amazon and found a non-agreeable review of my book "Do Nothing." Although I have numerous positive responses from various sources who have read the book, some how I was feeling uneasy. And then I thought how ironical. When you look at the stars attached to the book, it is but Chuang Tzu's the 'this' and the 'that.' We are caught within a world filled with categories and we do naturally gravitate toward drawing lines and circles and grouping people and naming names. Sometime reflecting on my feeling evoked by these stars is a reminder that I'm still caught within the cycle. The things we do, the task we work toward, the form of ideas we expressed just is. And at times this isness can feel negative or positive. I think this is what it means to be P'eng. You can fly only when you can remain in the deepest and the darkest of life. In sickness and health, in life and death, in success and failure, in connectedness and the disconnect. These stars are reminder that life exists beyond the many circles people gravitate toward drawing. The Way is everywhere. It is in the lowest of the low and the peak of the highest point. Life is that journey toward a place beyond names and perhaps in this place we may be able to find people who forget words so we can have a word with them.

Simplicity, Stupidity, and Spirituality

I have to do a presentation on simplicity  to a group of middle-age professionals.  While it is an opportunity to share, it is also pretty difficult to speak of simplicity.  But here's a thought from Chuang Tzu that I find helpful.

"The sage leans on the sun and moon, tucks the universe under his arm, merges himself with things, leaves the confusion and muddle as it is, and looks on slaves as exalted.  Ordinary men strain and struggle, the sage is stupid and blockish.  He takes part in ten thousand ages and achieves simplicity in oneness" (translation by Burton Watson).  

Chuang Tzu seems to rely heavily on the view of nature as organic.  Nature lives, and moves, and drives, and orchestrates reality and hence within this existential understanding of that which is, one is able to lean on the sun and the moon.  Leaning on the sun and the moon also suggests the ability of its believers to take life as it comes because the sun is not always kind and the moon may not always shine.  It shrinks and reshapes itself and if life is to be lived, one may have to merge oneself with things and leave the confusion behind because if we try to understand that incomprehensible, we may not get anywhere.  The Way is not known.  Not only do we not know, we do not understand how the Way operates.  It does what it does.  

The way of the world places slaves in the lowest rank within societal hierarchy.  But the Way has rank life differently.  The slaves may be exalted because the Way does not interpret life within the categories that the norm decides.  The wisdom of the slaves may be that which we have to seek and understand in order to find us along the Way.  This goes along really well when Chuang Tzu speaks of the blockish and the stupid.  Who's stupid?  When stupidity is not even a category, one achieves simplicity in oneness.