Alan Watts – Philosophy of the Tao: Flow, Balance, and the Course of Nature

Well now, the subject of these sessions is going to be the ancient Chinese philosophy called Daoism. In ancient China, there were two predominant philosophies, dating apparently from more or less the same period of history, although scholars dispute this to some extent. Confucius, about whom everybody knows, lived shortly after 600 BC. The counterpart to Confucius, one called Laozi, which is spelled L-A-O-T-Z-U, is supposed to have been a contemporary of Confucius but probably lived somewhat later and is a somewhat legendary character about whom we have less historical information. But Confucianism is predominantly concerned with the ordering of family relationships, political relationships, and the language, the ceremonies, the laws of the land. Confucianism is a conception of the order of society, that is to say, a system of social conventions, or what you might call a very elaborate and profound form of etiquette. It isn't just that it's a humanistic system, it has some conception of basic principles of the universe, of a harmonious relationship between heaven and earth, and things of that kind. And this gives me an opportunity to say something about the nature of these social conventions, or we might call them social institutions. Because you see, when we speak of social institutions, we are not simply speaking of things like hospitals, law courts, legislative bodies, public health systems. Included among social institutions are such things as the clock, the calendar, weights and measures, and above all, language itself. Confucianism was deeply concerned with what was called the rectification of names, that is to say, dictionary making, seeing that the people used words in the same way. And we must recognize that a great many things that all of us take for solid realities are in fact nothing but social institutions. They are conventions. For example, your idea of yourself, of the ego. The ego is not a biological existence, it is a social institution. The characteristics that we associate with men on the one hand and women on the other are social institutions. They have very little to do with biology or neurology. All sorts of things which we believe to be really out there are as a matter of fact conventions. Now you know very well that you cannot tie up a parcel with the equator because it is an imaginary line. And in exactly the same way, time, clock time, is an imaginary way of dividing motion, of measuring motion. But it so happens that these social institutions become so convenient and so useful that we start to mistake them for the real world. And that can lead us into an enormous amount of confusion. The same sort of confusion from which you would suffer if, for example, you started eating the menu instead of the dinner. Now as we civilize ourselves, we can only do so through social institutions. In other words, if we didn't have a calendar, if we didn't have an idea of the directions, north, south, east and west, although there are no such directions, the earth being a sphere, if we didn't have these ideas, we couldn't get on together. If we didn't have agreements about the nature of language, we couldn't communicate with each other. And if I didn't know about time and space, I couldn't say, I will agree to meet you at the corner of State and Madison at four o'clock in the afternoon. Therefore, we could never find each other. But because these institutions are so useful, we come in due course to believe in them, as I said. And above all, we come to believe in ourselves as equivalent with the role we are playing in life. Confucianism was deeply concerned with roles. What is the proper role of a father, the proper role of a mother, of an elder brother, of a younger brother, of an elder sister, a younger sister, and so on all the way around. And you know how it is in our own life. We are all role-playing. We play roles according to our occupation in life. We also play roles with respect to our characters. There are certain social kinds of role, for example, which it is acceptable for men to play. There are certain roles which men ought not to play, according to definition. And you very soon are taught to accept yourself as a certain kind of a character. You are told who you are. For example, you may remember as children when you went out to play with other children, and you came home mimicking the mannerisms of some other child. And your parents being disturbed by this, because they said, that's not you, Johnny, that's Peter. Because everybody wants to identify you and tell you who you are. And this grows and grows as you go through life. More and more people are trying to identify you. Like they say, are you a Republican, are you a Democrat? Are you a Presbyterian, a Episcopalian, a Baptist, a Roman Catholic? Come on now, what are you? Give, tell us. And people, in other words, persuade you into accepting certain roles. And it's so effective, this, because you eventually come to believe in it all. One of the funniest things they do to you, this is really hysterical, I told some of you about it this morning again, so bear with me if I repeat myself, but when you're taught who you are as a child, you realize it's practically impossible for you to resist social persuasion. The general effect of what people say to you as a child is utterly irresistible. But they define you as a free and independent agent. And they say you're responsible, see? And we'll praise you for what you do well and blame you for what you do badly, but you are responsible. That is to say, you are an independent source of feelings and thoughts and actions. And you believe that because you must. There is no way of resisting it. In other words, you are defined as an independent agent because you aren't. And this leads to the most amazing confusions. I don't say that you don't have freedom inherently. I'm saying the way in which you are defined as free is a way which you cannot resist. And therefore, society goes on to say to you, you are required and commanded to behave in such a way that will only be acceptable if you do it voluntarily. That is to say, darling, all nice children love their mothers. And of course, you ought to love your mother too, but not because I say so, but because you really want to. Wowee. When you've had that put into you, you live in a state of confusion for the rest of your life because you are trying to be free as a result of a compulsion which you can't resist. And the thing is completely self-contradictory. So this is some of the problems attached to role-playing. However, when you go on in life, you know, and you realize you're going to wear out and that your role is wearing a bit thin and you begin to wonder about the human state and death and getting sick and decrepit, you begin to ask questions, who am I really? I mean, underneath the role, what is all this? What is a self? What is sensitivity? What is consciousness? What is it to exist? I really don't think I know myself at all. Now in our culture at the present time, we don't have very much to offer for people in that condition. It's true we have psychoanalysis and we have some religions, but our religions, when you consider ordinary standard brand religions in the Western world, and they are now all more or less proclaiming that God is dead, they don't offer very much except social convention and rubbing it in. They say, you should be good. We've made statistical studies of the subject matter of sermons given all over the United States on Sunday after Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, and they all amount to basically the vast percentage of them saying to people, you ought to be good. Everybody knows this, but nobody knows how. You must love. You see, that's what the preachers are saying. And if history tells us anything, it tells us that preaching doesn't work. Nobody ever listened to it, though they love being scolded. A colorful scolding by a good preacher is a great thrill. But by and large, our standard brand religions, so far as leading one to a real deep and experiential discovery of who and what you really are and what your situation in this universe is, they don't go very far. You can, of course, read deeply in theology and go quite a long way, but so far as the fair is concerned, which the ordinary person will get in the average church, it's very superficial. The Chinese devised, however, a philosophy for those who came to this point, and it is, as I said, the counterpart of Confucianism, and it's called Taoism. This character in Chinese is pronounced Dao. T-A-O, you would think it was pronounced Tao or Tao, but we've Romanized Chinese in such a way that only those in the know can decide how it's pronounced. We should have spelled it D-O-W, you see, but it's T-A-O. And this character here means the course of nature, the way, the flow of things. And so this is the philosophy of the way of nature. Now, I must start out by saying that Dao cannot be defined. You may think it's rather strange that I'm going to talk for a whole weekend about something concerning which nothing can really be said. The book that is basic to Daoism, called the Tao Te Ching, that is the book of the way and its power, starts out by saying the Dao which can be described or spoken is not the eternal Dao. And then he goes on to write a book about it, which you may think rather illogical. But this is something very important to understand, that the Dao means that which is absolutely basic. It therefore means the basic energy of the universe. It means what you are really, your true self. But in just the same way as you can't bite your own teeth, and in just the same way that you can't look into your own eyes without using a mirror, you cannot define your real self. The hand can't catch hold of itself. The tip of the finger can't touch the tip of itself. And therefore, I'm sorry, but we cannot make an object out of what we really are. And that is why any conception of who you really are that you may entertain is wrong. So if you think of yourself as an ego, that is to say as a separate center of consciousness and action that is somehow closed up in a bag of skin, this is a false conception. You are not that. You are pretending to be that. You are playing at that. But what you really are utterly escapes definition and therefore comes under the category of something metaphysical, that is to say beyond physics, beyond nature in the sense of what can be classified, what can be described, what can be put in a box and said it's animal, vegetable, or mineral. It's either long or short, black or white, temporal or eternal. Any category you choose to apply is inadequate to this. So do you mind if we start out with something we can't say anything about at all? But it's fundamental. You see, look, it's like what's the color of your eyes? I don't mean the iris. I mean the lens. We say it has no color. It's transparent. But you see, the perception of all colors whatsoever and all shapes whatsoever depends on that transparent lens. So then you might ask, what is the nature of consciousness? No one can say because it is common to all experiences and there's no way of isolating it. What is the color of space? It's the same question. Or take when you listen to a phonograph or the radio. Everything that you hear, all the human voices, all the noises of different instruments and anything, they are all vibrations on a diaphragm. But nowhere does the radio announce that this that you are hearing now is nothing but vibrations on a diaphragm. That is basic to everything heard and it's taken for granted. So in exactly the same way, the Tao is the basis of everything that goes on is taken for granted. It is as necessary to everything that happens as the diaphragm is to the news on the radio, etc. But we ignore it because it's common to everything. Every experience is the basis of it. Therefore, we don't notice it. You don't notice anything for which you can't see a limit. And so we can't think about it. But the point is, it's very important to understand that you are it. And if you discover that there is a way of experiencing it, which we will go into later, you become, what should we call it, liberated. You are no longer taken in by the game that you are playing, which is that I am this particular ego that came into this world and will eventually be swallowed up by death. And that will be that. You see through that game and you know that is an illusion or however convincing one. So this is basic. Tao is the course of nature. Now, the beginning of the second chapter of Lao Tzu's book, the first chapter starts out with the words the Tao which can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. And I'm just taking that as a kind of a key phrase to give you the first point. Now, what's the second point? That's the beginning of the second chapter of this book, which is attributed to Lao Tzu and is supposed to have existed from at least 400 BC. When he starts out the second chapter, he says, when all the world knows beauty to be beautiful, there is already ugliness. When all the world knows goodness to be good, there is already evil. Thus, to be and not to be arise mutually. And this is an absolutely important idea for the whole foundation of Chinese thought. The Chinese use this character to arise. It's originally the figure of a growing plant and this one to mean mutuality. And this is completely crucial to everything I'm going to talk about. Do you see that you can't have a front without a back? That you can't have a top without a bottom? That you can't have the idea of long without the idea of short? You don't have long things before you have short things or short things before you have long things. Same way, you don't have a world in which there are bees without flowers or flowers without bees. Because you see, bees and flowers are really the same organism. Just like they look different. Just as your head looks very different from your feet. But you don't have human beings who have heads and no feet or feet and no heads. They go together. Now, of course, they're rather obviously joined by skin and bone. But bees and flowers float apart. Bees buzz and flowers send out smell and color. But they are the same organism because they're inseparable. They require each other. So this is the whole idea of arising together. So that in other words, to be and not to be, the whole notion of is and isn't depend on each other. Now, this is contrary to our common sense. We think that being is really there and non-being isn't. But we are at the same moment afraid that being may end up as non-being. There's so much more non-being than there is being. In other words, there seems to be so much more space than there is solid. And since whatever is solid in the world requires energy, and since energy eventually runs out, we're afraid that it may all end up as nothing. That we may end up as nothing and everything else. And we are scared stiff of that because we don't understand that space or emptiness and solid are two aspects of one reality. Just as front and back, just as bees and flowers, they have to go together. You cannot possibly conceive a solid without a surrounding space. You cannot conceive space without solids occupying it. Because space is as a matter of fact nothing but the relationship between solids. It's like an interval in music. You can't hear melody unless you hear intervals. But the intervals aren't there, there are the tones. The intervals are in a way an illusion. But the hearing of intervals, that is to say the steps between tones, is absolutely necessary for being able to hear melody. If you don't hear the intervals, you only hear a succession of noises. You are then tone-deaf or tune-deaf. So you see how important the interval is. And any architect, any artist knows that space is real. We talk about the functions of space. Astronomers and physicists talk about properties of space, curved space, and so on and so forth. But in the ordinary common sense that most people have, they think space just isn't there. Solids are there. Reality is therefore identified with the solid, with the energy, and unreality with the emptiness. And there is this therefore basic dread which existentialists talk about as angst, fundamental anxiety, that arises from the fact that the moment you know you exist, you know you could not exist. And therefore, all through one's life, there is a sort of sword of Damocles hanging over you that at any minute you might not be. Wowee. And that's a real scare. See? Until you understand that to be or not to be is not the question. Because to be cannot be without not being, just as not being cannot be without being. And so for Chinese thought, these two aspects of the world are called the yang and the yin. And they mean, these two characters respectively, the yang means the south side of a mountain, which is in the sun. And the yin means the north side of a mountain, which is in the shade. And so they come to mean positive and negative, black and white, male and female. And they are represented in this familiar diagram, an S-curve inside a circle, like two interlocked commas, one black, one white. And each one has, as it were, the eye of the comma or the eye of a fish or tadpole or something, the opposite color. And this yang-yin symbolism is sometimes also represented, as in the Book of Changes, by broken and unbroken lines. Here is the yang, here is the yin. And actually, from this symbolism of the Book of Changes, which is earlier than any of the literature I'm talking about, Leibniz read it in Latin, and from it he figured out binary arithmetic, which is now basic to all computer techniques, zero and one. All numbers can be represented by zero and one. So zero is the yin, and one is the yang. But you see, the whole secret is that the yin and the yang are inseparable. Let's say, when we were little children, and everybody taught us one, two, three, and A, B, C, they didn't teach us the lesson of black and white. This belongs, in a way, in our culture to the hushed-up side of things. Now, you see, the lesson of black and white is this. If you realize that all your senses are really one sense, a kind of touching, you touch light with your eyes, you touch air vibrations with your eardrums and get sound. Then smell is touching gases and dust in the air. Taste is touching the texture of food and things. The touch with the epidermis is perhaps the and sight the most subtle. But do you realize that all sensation whatsoever is a vibration? It goes on and off. It's a yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, yang, like this. But if it goes fast enough, you don't notice the off. You only notice the on. An arc light, for example, is going on and off with terrific speed. So much so that you shouldn't use an arc light in a sawmill, because the on and off can synchronize with the speed of the saw, and the circular saw may appear to be still when it's actually moving. But all things are like that, you see. On and off. And you can't have the vibration unless it's a wave pattern. The crest of the wave is on, the trough of the wave is off. Now, you can't have a wave which is half a wave. In other words, no wave exists with a crest alone. There must be a trough. A half wave cannot be manifested. So also, if you sit next to a girl in the movies, and you put your hand on her knee and leave it there, she may cease to notice it. But if you pat her, she will notice it. And you hope she may value the on more than the off, but she will notice it. Because there is... Being, you see, is at work. Because being is constantly being non-being, being non-being. Now you see it, now you don't. Now, if you don't understand that, if you don't realize that on-off constitutes a unity, and although they are different, they're inseparable, like the two poles of a magnet. If you don't realize that, you get scared that off may win. And if you get scared that off may win, you start another game, instead of the game of black and white or on and off, the game on must win. And then the game degenerates into a fight. It becomes serious. Wowee, the awful-awfuls might get the better, in the end. They won't. They may appear to, but they won't. But if you don't see that, you see, you get mixed up. And you don't understand the relationship of yang and yin. So it is the inner connection, or rather the inseparability of yang and yin, which is what is meant by Dao. That's why Dao cannot be explained. And the reason, again, if I may put it in another way, is that all thinking is classification. It's asking, is you is or is you ain't? Is it this or is it that? Because after all, if you want to say something is inside, it requires an outside. You can't have an inside without an outside, or an outside without an inside. Which is it? You say, choose. And of course, Westerners are always choosing. Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, in the strife twixt truth and falsehood for the good or evil side. Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, you see. You must choose. Which are you? And we've magnified this into a nightmare, where the ultimate consequence and destiny of the cosmos is, are you saved or are you damned? Forever. What a thrill that decision is. See? What people don't understand is that you don't know you belong to the saved group unless there's also a damned group. In every American town, there are the nice people who live on one side of the tracks, and the not so nice people who live on the other. In my town, which is Sausalito, there are the people who live on the hill, and they are the nice people. And then there are the people who live on the waterfront, who are bohemians and beatniks and goodness only knows what. Well now, when the nice people on top of the hill meet for their cocktail parties, the main thing that they discuss is how the whole town is deteriorating, and how the awful people are proliferating, and fouling the bay up, and so on. And they feel that this boosts their collective ego, because they know they're the nice people. Meanwhile, the bohemians and beatniks get together at their parties, and they play like they're the real in-group, because all those squares of bourgeoisie who live up on the hill are engaged in a business rat race, doing work which is of no interest, in order that they may buy toy rocket ships, and have wall-to-wall carpets, and horribly clean houses, and may be snobbish. And so they, bohemians and beatniks, boost their collective ego, you see, by arguing against the people on top of the hill. What neither side realizes is they need each other, because you don't know who you are if you want to belong to an in-group, unless you define an out-group. It is the same with philosophy. There are only two kinds of philosophy in all the history of philosophical debates. One side is called prickles, and the other is called who. And prickles people are people who like things to be sharp, and clear, and definite. And they are the sort of people who become scholars, and engineers, and scientists, the type that always like clear statistics, and discipline, and everything well in order. And they look upon other people who they think are vague, and sloppy, and who are romantic, and so on, and unrealistic, and wishful. And they say, ugh, you're just goo. But the goo people turn around and say to the prickles people, why, you're just bones. You just rattle. You've no skin on you. You know the words, yes, but you don't know the music. You have no finer feelings. And so this goes on forever. Prickles people want to believe that the ultimate constituents of the material universe are particles. Goo people prefer to think of it as waves. In classical philosophy, prickles are nominalists. Goo are realists. So it goes. They're always fighting. The thing is that they don't realize that you wouldn't know the standpoint of prickles unless you knew goo as a contrast, and vice versa. Because the real world is gooey prickles and prickly goo any way you look at it. So you see, that's just the yang and the yin. The yang is prickles, and the yin is goo. And they're inseparable, but quite different. And the thing is that to see the wisdom is to understand the secret conspiracy between the opposites, that you wouldn't know one without the other. That is, it were Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle. That, in other words, under all explicit opposition, there is implicit unity. Only, there's no real way of saying it, and in a certain way, it should remain implicit. And in a way, offstage, don't give the show away. So you might say to me, well, why are you talking about this? You're giving the show away, aren't you? Not really, because not everybody will believe it. Most people won't. The opposition between life and death, between good and bad, between pleasure and pain, is extraordinarily impressive. And though one may point out that it is underneath a unity, only those with a certain innate intelligence will ever be able to believe it. So one cannot really give the show away, except, as Jesus said, to him that hath shall be given, and he who has ears to hear, let him hear. So this is the point of Darwinism. In other words, the world, people involved in practical affairs, in business and family raising, are all upset because black might win. And they really are involved, and they know they have to do something to survive. Survival is the important thing. You really must go on living. But the knowledgeable people, when you get to a mature position, and everybody as they get older and has raised a family or whatever, you know, has to eventually get ready for death. The second half of life is a preparation for death. That, to Western ears, is a very gloomy enterprise. We pretend death doesn't happen. We sweep people under the carpet. When you're dying in hospital, everybody comes around and says, oh, you'll soon be better. And then, you know, the poor dying patient has a kind of a, notices there's a hollow look in their eyes, that they're just consoling. And that's terrible. When somebody is dying in hospital, you ought to come around and say, listen, you're going to die. You want to die. It's an occasion for an immense celebration. Because if you accept that you're going to die, you can let go of yourself. And you won't be a nuisance to yourself anymore. And so we should have a champagne party, or we should have sacraments. According to taste, there should be some very special conscious entry into death of letting go of oneself. Because you only die once, and it should be a very important event, instead of being something. I mean, look, the morticians come around, and they pretend it hasn't happened. They have all sorts of ways of glossing it over. You know that passage in Henry Miller's essay, The Staff of Life? He's talking about that dreadful food, and he says, throw anything down the hatch and swallow a dozen vitamins. If that doesn't work, see a surgeon. If that doesn't work, try a Hollywood funeral. They're the duckiest, cutest funerals in the world. You can have your beloved one propped up, smoking a cigarette, reading the Bhagavad Gita, or something uplifting. Cigarette guaranteed not to rot away before the lips or the buttocks. Oh, death, where is thy sting? Oh, grave, where thy victory? Jolly what? End of quote. You know, this is this terrible American way of death, which does not accept it, which pretends it doesn't happen, and doesn't see that death is the most life-giving thing there is. Except the Irish, yes, they can have a wake. But even then, I don't think that in this general tradition we really get down to seeing how revivifying death is. That, in other words, if in the course of life you die, before you die physically, now that means if you accept the fact that you are completely disintegrating, and there's nothing you can do to hold on to yourself, and nothing you can do to be safe or secure, you come alive. Now, everybody imagines they can be secure. You have investments, insurance, etc., etc., etc., regular medical examination. But this doesn't make the slightest difference. Any minute you can slip on a banana peel, have an automobile accident, because the whole world is falling apart. When you were born, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice. And it's pure illusion to console yourself by clinging on hard to a rock that's falling down with you. There's no way of not disintegrating. The whole thing's falling apart, and people have been saying ever since 6000 BC, when we've got records going back there, that the world was going to the dogs. It is. Life is something that's always falling apart. But if you get with it, in other words, you accept the situation, you flow with it, you come alive. Because you acquire courage. You're not defending yourself all the time. You acquire energy, because you're not all locked up wondering what's going to happen next. You get the capacity to take risks, and you can't have a free people unless you're willing to take risks. It's all gambling. So to know this falling apart of everything, which incidentally is what makes it alive, change is life. This is the Tao. And to flow with the Tao and not fight it. You see, flow with the stream. This is the next great principle of Taoism, which is called Wu Wei. So you remember your principles. The first is Tao, which can't be defined. Second is mutual arising, the inseparability of the yang and then we get as the next third principle, Wu. This means in Chinese, negative, not. And Wei means interfering, clutching, busyness, aggression. So the principle whereby a person may come into accord with the course of nature is by Wu Wei, not clutching. It's sometimes translated not doing, but in English that is misleading. It's sometimes the right translation. But Wu Wei means not acting against the grain of nature, acting in accordance with it. And the best possible example of Wu Wei is the art of sailing. You see, it's much more intelligent to put up a sail than to use oars, because you don't have to work so hard. So a higher form of intelligence would erect a sail, a lower form would just row. But when you sail, you cannot sail directly against the wind. If you want to sail in the direction contrary to the wind, you must tack. So in the same way, if you get caught in an overwhelming current when you're swimming, you can't turn around and swim against it. You'll drown in a hurry that way. But what you can do is you can swim with it and edge out. So this is the basic philosophy of what is called in Japanese Judo. Do is the Japanese way of pronouncing Dao, the gentle way. And in Judo, you overcome a violent opponent, not by direct opposition, but by using the opponent's strength to bring about his own downfall. So, you know, there's a basic kind of Judo slow motion stuff that's called Judo Kata, which exhibits the fundamental ideas of Judo. And the first lesson in Judo Kata is that there are two people, the attacker and the defender. And the attacker does this. And the defender, you see, he's coming straight at you with a blow. The defender, instead of pushing him away, does this. He, in other words, pulls the hand in the direction it's going and has the opponent off his balance. So that's the fundamental thing. Go with it. So in, say, in a clever artist, when he is using wood, he studies the grain. And he looks at the grain in a block of wood and asks, what does it want to be? There was a competition some years ago in sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it was won by a woman. The competition consisted in each contestant being given a square foot, a cube of plaster of Paris. Do something with it. And this woman looked at it and said, it is entirely indifferent. It has no texture. It doesn't want to be anything. So she picked it up and flung it on the floor. Then it was all chipped and full of cracks, and she looked at it again. Then she decided that it wanted to be something. She saw, in those cracks and chips, a form. And she brought out that form and won the competition. So great potters don't simply impose their will on the clay. They feel the texture of the clay, and they have the sense that when they throw a pot on the wheel, the pot grows of itself. And when you perfect the writing of these characters, you get the sensation that the brush is doing the work. When you skillfully make music, you feel that the music is singing through you. There was an occasion once when a great choirmaster in England, Sir Walford Davies, was with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, who was a great theologian. And he was training a choir of workingmen, factory hands or something, in singing. And he first gave them some hymn to sing that they all knew very well, and because they wanted to impress the archbishop, they sang it with utmost vigor, and it sounded terrible. So then he got a professional choir, which he had there, to sing the same hymn, so they could really listen to it. Now he said, I want you to sing it again. But look, one point I must make clear is you must not try to sing it. Don't try. All you have to do is to think of the tune and let it sing itself. And then they did very well, and he turned to the archbishop and said, that's good theology, isn't it? I got the story from the archbishop. So apparently he approved. So this is the principle of Wu Wei. We have all kinds of common expressions, like roll with the punch, things like that. Like Shakespeare saying, there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at its flood leads on to fortune. We have an innate folk wisdom, which realizes that this is a fundamental principle. So whereas the emphasis in the Confucian tradition in China is on interference to a large extent, keeping things in order, there's a certain anxiety about the whole thing. The emphasis of Daoism is to trust in the course of nature, about which I have to tell you two Chinese stories. One is the farmer, both about farming, and their son. One evening, the farmer's son came in very, very late from the fields, after all the rest of the family was late for dinner. And they said to him, what are you doing? Oh, he said, I've been helping the corn to grow. Next morning when everybody got up, they found that all the corn was dead, because what he had done late the night before was that every new shoot of corn, he had pulled it up a little to make it higher. Another story that is told is about the farmer who lost a horse, ran away. And all his friends came around, said that's too bad. And he said, maybe. The next day, the horse returned, and it brought seven wild horses with it. And they said, my, that's great. And he said, maybe. The next day, his son, in attempting to train one of these horses, was thrown and broke a leg. And everybody came around and said, oh, that's too bad. And he said, maybe. The next day, the conscription officers came around and rejected his son, because he had a broken leg. And everybody came to congratulate him, and said, isn't that great? And he said, maybe. So you see, this farmer was with the course of things. And he knew it goes this way, and it goes that way. It goes up, and it goes down. Because if it didn't go down, you would never know you were up. And if you try to be permanently up, or always right, you're trying to arrange everything in this room so that everything is up and nothing is down, or that everything's on the front and there's no back. And that is an impossible state of affairs. But now, I'm going to stop here, because I don't want you to take in too much at once, or to try to. Just to rehearse it, we've discussed essentially three principles. The one that we can't discuss at all, because that's basic. That's the Tao. The next is the principle of the mutuality, the interdependence of the opposites. That they are different, but inseparable. And that goes, of course, for you as self, and the world as other. You can't understand what you mean, or sense, or experience as self, without the contrasting sense of other. That means self and other go together. They're really one, but they look different. And the third principle is the wu-wei, the art of coming into accord with the course of nature, by flowing with it, and not resisting it. Not trying, in other words, to make white exclude black, or black exclude white. Now all that's very simple, but I'm sure it will create lots of questions in your mind.