But each returns to its root.
On a more cosmic level, the Way is akin to what modern physicists would say existed before the Big Bang, before the stars and galaxies emerged and the cosmos became differentiated. It was after the Big Bang that the cosmos became a series of differentiated elements governed by laws of space, time, and causality. These are laws that appear natural to us and that we cannot change or control. This is a universe that we must simply live in. At some point, the theory goes, all these differentiated things will revert back to nothingness once more.
But at the grandest level of all, the Laozi concentrates on where everything, at every moment, comes from before it becomes differentiated. It compares the Way to a mother who gives birth to “the myriad things”—meaning everything in the universe. Everything in the universe starts out soft and supple when it comes into existence. Those myriad things, when they first arise, are like children. Like a sapling or a blade of grass, they are soft and supple because they are still so close to the Way. But as time passes, they become more rigid and differentiated from everything else.
The more we see the world as differentiated, the more removed we become from the Way. The more we see the world as interconnected, the closer we come to the Way. We gain power by becoming closer to the Way because we can harness the power of suppleness and weakness.
We cannot generate new natural laws for the universe. But the Way is not just about things happening at a cosmic level. At the most mundane level of our everyday lives, new situations emerge constantly, and each is like a miniature world emerging out of the Way. If we understand the process of things emerging from the Way, then instead of simply living within all these situations and worlds, we can gain the power to alter them. In our social worlds, we can successfully generate new interactions, circumstances, and understandings.
When we understand how to do this, we can become more than a child; we can become like the mother. We give birth to new realities:
All under Heaven had a beginning.
It can be taken as the mother of all under Heaven.
Once you have obtained the mother,
you can thereby know the sons.
Once you have known the sons, you can return and hold fast to the mother.
Until the end there will be no harm.
Instead of merely being one of the myriad elements floating about in the universe, when we understand how the world works, we can actually gain the power to re-create the Way all the time, at every moment.
False Distinctions
To re-create the Way in all the situations in our lives, we must recognize the degree to which the distinctions that pervade our experience are actually false. For instance, many people who are familiar with Asian philosophies learn that they advocate a sort of separation or detachment; that in order to achieve mystical enlightenment, say, we need to leave our normal lives behind and head off into the mountains. Only when we are free of our worldly existence can we achieve oneness with the Way as we meditate our way to inner bliss and self-understanding. Perhaps you have a friend who went on a ten-day silent meditation retreat. Perhaps you have long wanted to escape your life and trek the Appalachian Trail. Perhaps you look forward to a long walk on the beach or your weekly yoga class. But those of us who take hikes, go on retreats, and enjoy meditating all have to return eventually to our normal lives, leaving behind our brief feeling of deeper connectedness to the world.
Most of us inhabit such drastically different realms—work and leisure, professional and personal, mystical and practical, weekday and weekend—that it’s not surprising that we see our lives as divided. A weekend walk in the woods feels completely divorced from office work on Monday morning. Though the weekend breaks rejuvenate us, and the effects even linger for a time, they exist in a realm outside of the real life of our workweek.
But by dividing up life and by believing that these aspects of our lives are unrelated to one another, we restrict what we are capable of doing and becoming. The Laozi would say that not only are mystical enlightenment and our everyday lives related, but that by separating them, we have fundamentally misunderstood both.
Although we think that taking a rejuvenating weekend walk in the woods is how we reconnect with the world and with ourselves, this attitude leads us to greater disconnection from both. We need to think of our weekday life differently. The Way isn’t something we reach while walking in the woods on the weekend. It’s something we bring about actively through our daily interactions.
We make distinctions in other realms of our lives as well. Our ambitions and goals often lead us to see ourselves in competition with those around us, separating us from them. Or we may hold strong moral convictions; our certainty that we are absolutely correct in our views on organized religion or standardized testing, abortion or euthanasia can make us less receptive to other people’s perspectives, putting up insurmountable walls between ourselves and others.
Again, making distinctions of any sort goes against the Way. As the Laozi teaches, there are dangers in distinctions, even those that appear moral and right:
When the great Way is discarded,
there is goodness and propriety.
When wisdom and cleverness emerge,
there is great artifice.
The Laozi is so committed to rejecting all distinctions that it regards even canonical Confucian tenets—goodness, wisdom—as dangerous because of how they immediately call forth distinctions. To aspire to goodness means to acknowledge immediately the possibility of its opposite existing in the world as well. This sort of thinking leads us away from the Way, a state in which everything is interrelated, with no distinctions.
We even tend to read the Laozi itself in a disconnected, differentiated way. It is hugely popular, one of the most widely translated works in the world, and yet people almost invariably read it many different ways: as a great text of mystical philosophy, or a political strategy text teaching the secrets of great leaders, or a martial arts manifesto, or a business guide. Even though each of these interpretations is accurate in a sense, all are limited. If you read the text as a great work of mystical philosophy, you focus on mystical-sounding passages about the Way and ignore the passages about how to become an effective leader. If you read the book as a guide to becoming a great leader, you dismiss passages such as “The spirit of the valley does not die” as perplexing and irrelevant. After all, isn’t becoming a mystical sage completely incompatible with becoming a great leader?
But to read the Laozi solely as a guide about leadership or a mystical text is to see only part of the picture. A mystical sage and a leader are not actually two separate things. The mystical sage is also an effective leader; the effective leader, a mystical sage. If we don’t read these seemingly disparate passages as interrelated, we are missing a crucial part of the Laozi’s argument: that we are most effective when we refrain from seeing this text, ourselves, and the world as separated and distinct.
We can try to grasp cognitively the idea of connectedness, but how exactly does avoiding false dichotomies work in practice? Consider these exceedingly mundane examples in which, without realizing it, we are doing something Laozian.
Imagine you are dealing with a difficult supervisor at work: someone who is demanding and mercurial. He seems to have irrational expectations of you and yet doesn’t provide you with the guidance or feedback you need. But if you start by trying to figure out what lies behind his behavior toward you, you can think about how to shift the entire relationship in a different direction. Even if he is acting arrogantly or demeaningly toward you, for example, this is often motivated by insecurity. By quietly observing the bigger picture, you can think through whether there is something about you that draws out that insecurity: maybe you have a skill he is feeling competitive about or a weakness he feels he can exploit. What might you be doing unwittingly that feeds into that dynamic, and how can you do it differently? You might notice he is particularly grudging or difficult after you’ve giv
en a great presentation—even if it’s one he had assigned you. But, of course, holding yourself back so he doesn’t feel threatened is not the answer. To continue doing well without playing into his competitiveness, before your next presentation, you could try seeking his advice on some small aspect of it, so that he sees you as someone looking to learn from his greater experience. Things like this help you slowly and deliberately shift the relationship over time, making him feel less like an older person in danger of being usurped by a sharp and promising subordinate, and more like an experienced mentor helping a colleague to flourish and grow.
Or say you are a parent, and your three children are home from school on a snow day. Two of them are squabbling, and the atmosphere in your living room is tense. You could urge them to be nice as you talk them through their dispute. You could offer them a bribe or distraction, or simply send them to their rooms. But instead of responding directly to the quarreling—a strategy that would immediately call forth distinctions and create divisions—you can be effective if you work to understand what’s happening among everyone, and then shift the attitude of the room to alter what’s going on. This means looking past the presenting emotions (the irritation and crankiness) to understand the underlying emotions causing all this to happen: maybe your daughter is acting out because she misses her friends at school, or your son feels ignored because you were distracted all morning. You take a deep breath and then use your calm demeanor, the soft inflections of your voice, and reassuring body language to create a different atmosphere. When you get down at their level and really grasp what they are feeling, it becomes easier to begin to understand what you could do to elicit a different side of one child that will in turn alter the dynamic between him and the others. You become able to address the entire context behind the situation.
Or maybe you have a teenager who has been shutting you out. You’re wondering how to be more influential in his life without being overbearing, which would only drive him further away. If he feels the connection between you, instead of seeing the two of you as being at odds with each other, he will respond more to you. By being conscious of the need to build that connection over time in order to have any influence at all, you will start to become aware of what you can do: texting him more often; having casual, nonjudgmental conversations about the music he’s into; or making time regularly to do something he really enjoys. You are introducing new rituals in the Confucian sense: as-if rituals that alter this unhealthy dynamic and provide opportunities for the two of you to relate to each other differently. In doing so, you are creating a new status quo for your interactions. What you are doing is Laozian in that no one else is aware of what you have done. The break should feel seamless.
When your aim is to reconnect disparate things, emotions, and people instead of addressing the overt problem directly, you begin to sense how to change the environment and the relationship both at this moment and in the long term. You understand better what it might take to forge a workable relationship with your capricious boss, bring out the connections between your squabbling children, or start to reach your distant teenage son. If you had approached all these situations thinking primarily about a tactic to address the problem directly, you would have missed the answer. Your actions—confronting, coaxing, bribing, scolding, cajoling, being overbearing or intrusive—would have created distinctions between you and those you were dealing with, pitting you in a power struggle that would have deepened divisions.
Of course, all this is common sense. We know that going head-to-head with difficult people rarely results in better relationships with them. We know that sound parenting techniques include calming down, calming others down, and not allowing your own stress to increase the stress already there. But the reason a Laozian approach works is not just that you are being less overt or that everyone is calming down. It works because you are actively reconnecting things, these disparate people, in new ways. These different connections you’re making create a different environment. You are smoothing over the distinctions that had divided you from others.
Certain factors govern how people act in a given situation. Understanding them gives you a certain degree of influence by helping you to grasp the whole situation, but even more power comes from being the one who starts generating new situations altogether. Other people then act within the scenario you have created, not realizing that you generated it.
Remember that for Laozi, everything emerges from the Way. By helping to generate certain outcomes around you, you are not merely following the Way. By resetting the attitude of the room and recalibrating the relationships in your life, you literally become the Way.
Strength Lies in Weakness
Weakness overcomes strength,
Softness overcomes hardness.
When we persist in perceiving the world as a collection of completely disparate things (this room, that dog, my cup, your book, you, me, them), we alienate ourselves from the Way. If, on the contrary, we sense how everything is interrelated and recognize that everything we do immediately impacts others, we become more effective. Once we understand how everything is interconnected and appreciate how, paradoxically, there is more power in weakness, we understand the workings of influence.
This might be disconcerting; after all, our culture places such a premium on strength and ambition. It’s no surprise that we end up believing at some level that the most effective way to “get ahead” is to get ahead of the next person. Without at least some competitiveness, we worry we will get left behind.
Here again we tend to fall into a false dichotomy: ambition versus passivity, will and strength versus weakness. In fact, although many who read the Laozi think it’s telling us to get rid of all ambition and be passive and weak, that’s not the case at all.
The Laozi is very much in favor of effecting change, but it provides an alternative way to fulfill it. The way we typically manifest ambitiousness is by imposing our will. This leads us to overreach, focus on the wrong things, and create the conditions for our own downfall. Our view of ambition and the way we usually pursue it is actually our undoing.
When you’re blustering about, when you’re trying to gain power by imposing your will on others, it’s not that you’ll fail. You may succeed, even for a long time. But the degree to which you can succeed is based only upon the amount of actual overt power you have over people to make them cave in. In the end, they will be deeply resentful and will seek ways to try to break your power. Perhaps most important, it takes only one person who understands the real nature of power to overthrow you. It took only one Mohandas Gandhi to end the British Empire, in 1947.
Think of Rosa Parks, the forty-two-year-old woman from Montgomery, Alabama, who, in 1955, at the end of a long day working at a department store, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger. As Parks recalled, a sudden determination covered her “like a quilt on a winter night,” and she chose that moment to refuse to move. This one person understood not just that the time was right to act. She sensed how a quiet response would be more effective than an aggressive one. Her strategy—to sit quietly—inspired fellow community activists to gather behind her in a movement toward equality.
Think of who is most effective in the workplace: the office bully who is always throwing around his weight, trying to dominate everyone else, or the one who is attuned to people’s emotions, to how they receive things, who uses humor and laughter to connect, and who stays ever aware of the atmosphere of the place. Think back on the teachers you had as a child. Who was most effective in the classroom: the teacher who used a loud voice and threats to intimidate everyone? Or the one who kept the classroom ticking along harmoniously through the judicious use of silence and small strategies such as drawing in a distracted class with a quiet, low-pitched, slow, and calm voice? Of course, we understand which person has the most influence in the end. But how often do we apply these principles to our own behavior?
True power does not rely on strength and domination. Strength an
d domination render us incapable of relating to others and the things around us. The instant we see the world as a set of overt power balances, the instant we have differentiated ourselves from others—whether through imposing our will, competitiveness, or estrangement—we have lost the Way.
We can see how this works on many levels. Say you are being attacked by someone who is trying to hit you. We think we know the right response: hit him back harder than he hits us. But if you understand the Way properly, you do the opposite. You know that the person attacking you will inevitably overextend himself at some point. Your best hope is to try to stay quietly aware of the other person and to guess the precise moment when the overextension occurs. That is when you make your move and attack, by exploiting your opponent’s weakness; the momentum of his overextension is what helps you to prevail over him. This concept is the basis of judo and other martial arts. In Laozi’s terminology, you’ve played weakness against strength.
Anyone trying to dominate you is by definition making distinctions and going against the Way. Weakness, as the Laozi uses the term, is on the contrary based upon connecting, sensing, and working disparate elements: this is where its power lies.
Those who would take all under Heaven and make it theirs, I see that this will be in vain.
All under Heaven is a divine vessel, and it cannot be made their own.
Those who make it theirs, destroy it.
Those who grasp it, lose it.
In the early nineteenth century, Napoleon of France was creating the most powerful army the world had ever seen, and the strongest European empire since the days of Rome. Ambitious and power-hungry, the emperor decided to invade Russia.
Now, the Russian generals had never read the Laozi, but they clearly understood the principles behind its vision of power and weakness. When Napoleon invaded their country, they did not try to counter power with power, strength with strength. They retreated. When the French armies drove farther into Russia, the Russian armies retreated once more. The French marched deeper and deeper into Russian territory. Slowly the supply lines from their home country became more and more extenuated. The French army made it all the way to the outskirts of Moscow. At this point, the Russian generals retreated again, leaving the city, burning key buildings, and taking with them all of the food. In September 1812, Napoleon captured Moscow and declared himself ruler of the Russian Empire—the greatest imperial figure in all of human history. He sent to the Russian czar, Alexander I, a set of conditions for his surrender. The czar did nothing.
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