Chapter 12: Not Wanting
“Racing, chasing, hunting,
drives people crazy.
Trying to get rich
Ties people in knots.
So the wise soul
Watches with the inner
Not the outward eye,
Letting that go,
Keeping this.”
~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)
The French writer Blaise Pascal would beg to differ: he thought that we prefer the hunt to the capture. It’s not the chase that drives us crazy; we are driven to chase because we are crazy. More precisely, the bookends of the chase are beset by boredom, restlessness, anxiety. As Pascal put it, the sole problem with man is that he cannot sit alone in a room with his thoughts. In recent years we’ve gotten empirical support for his claim: in one study, most people preferred to administer a painful shock to themselves rather than sit quietly alone for 15 minutes. People often don’t like what the inner eye reveals. We prefer the diversions offered up by the outward eye.
Here we touch on a subtle seam that separates the Christian and Daoist perspectives. Like Luther, Pascal regarded humanity as a walking contradiction, both “wretched” and “great”: wretched in that we are sinners and, like every other creature in the universe, fragile bodies easily snuffed out; great in that unlike every other creature, we are spirits aware of our condition. Doing stuff doesn’t tie us up in knots—we are knots. And we cannot untie ourselves.
The Daoist has more confidence in humanity and reality. If we are knotted, then all we need do is gently tug at one of the loose strings, and trust that it will serve as our thread of Ariadne to lead us out of the labyrinth, as the unseverable umbilical cord tethering us to the 10,000 things.
And because they are all part of the same web, any string will do.
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”