In classical China, a person who wished to become educated had to first memorize a collection of poetry called the Book of Songs. It became part of a learned person’s repertoire. People memorized the poems so that, in any situation—the passing of spring, a debate over policy, the joy of new love, the death of a friend—they could quote passages that those around them, knowing the same pieces, would understand.
But the point wasn’t to just memorize poems and passively recite them aloud. It was to draw actively upon one’s knowledge of the poems and one’s reading of the real-life situation and rework them both in innovative ways. By learning to assess situations and then quoting a line of poetry out of context, say, or making a counterintuitive allusion, you would elicit certain emotional responses from you and your listeners, altering their moods and thus moving the situation in a different direction. Poetry became another important means of refining one’s response to the world, as people were trained to sense how they could use it to affect listeners for the better.
Music worked much the same way. It was common for music to be both played and performed (like an opera or musical) and to reflect dramatic stories from antiquity. People watched these performances from the time they were children, and the musical repertoire became part of the fabric of their lives. If they found themselves in a situation where they needed to stand up to someone, for instance, they could draw on the emotions they’d felt listening to a piece of music such as the Wu, a popular work about a virtuous man who stood up to the arbitrary power of the Shang dynasty to became the first Zhou king. A piece like this informed their sensibilities; it became a part of them.
Music and poetry were important parts of what it meant to become a learned person because they cultivated certain sensibilities of calm:
To end anger, there is nothing better than poetry;
To set aside worry, there is nothing better than music.
They cultivated qi by allowing a person to draw on them to feel more responsive, more connected, and more resonant with the entirety of shared human experience. They could induce sudden clarity and moving insight into what it means to be human.
We nourish our qi in similar ways when we marvel over a painting in a museum or feel transported by a piece of music. Anything that inspires awe refines qi by training the senses to respond more profoundly to the world around us. When we are more aware of the world in all its dimensions, we are more open to all that we can potentially feel about it and are better able to react well to it.
Listening to a piece of music that moves us helps refine our experience of human emotion. We are taken through all the life experiences that informed the composer as he created his music; his emotions remain a part of us. We learn what it means to feel those emotions without being pulled to and fro. We can listen to, say, songs from throughout Bob Dylan’s career and get the sense of the arc of a life, in both its greatness and pathos. When we find ourselves facing the loss of someone we are close to, a relative’s despair, the exhilaration of entering a new chapter in life, we can have a more profound response if we’ve been listening to music that speaks to us. The music deepens our feeling of connection to our shared humanity.
Poetry and literature work much the same way, allowing us to respond to the world in richer ways. With poetry, certain emotions emerge when we hear words spoken in a certain rhythm and in certain contexts. With literature, we are taken through huge swaths of time or experience from a variety of perspectives that we could never possibly experience in real life. The knowledge we gain provides access to a different way of engaging with the world because it allows us to step outside of our own lives and better empathize with and relate to a vast stream of human experience.
How does this help to refine qi? Music, poetry, art, and literature are composed of discrete elements such as words, notes, sounds, rhythms, and colors. The more we immerse ourselves in them, the more we understand how discrete things resonate with one another, just as qi resonates with qi. They represent how qi relates constantly to all of the other forms of qi around it—for better or for worse.
For most of us, it is worse. Most people interact with one another at an unrefined level; our low-level qi bumps up against other people’s qi. When anger or resentment are bound up inside us, when they become our default mode for moving through the day, they tend to elicit similarly negative energies from others. Our worst emotions play off of other people’s worst emotions, setting into motion a negative chain of events.
Imagine what happens if someone nicks your car in a parking lot, and, already stressed by a difficult morning, you lash out at them, causing them to get angry at you in turn for the poor parking job that made it all but impossible for them to avoid hitting your car. The experience will leave both of you feeling furious. But if you have constantly cultivated yourself to refine your qi, this helps you to transform things for the better. You would respond to the parking lot scenario with grace and empathy, the other person would be far more likely to respond with contrition and politeness, and you would both be left with a feeling of goodwill instead of anger. You would be two discrete beings who had tapped into and responded to the best in each other.
Concentrating the Qi As If You Were a Spirit
Transforming but not altering qi, altering but not changing one’s wisdom;
only the superior human holding fast to the One is able to do this.
When you are impervious to the ups and downs around you, when your senses are refined, and your body aligned and healthy, you achieve a settled heart. This is what allows your entire being to become a repository for essence, or spirit:
With a stable mind at your core,
With the eyes and ears acute and clear,
And with the four limbs firm and fixed,
You can thereby make a lodging place for the vital essence.
Qi becomes so refined and concentrated within you that you are like a spirit composed of qi of the highest order; the kind that allows for a life of vitality and longevity. You have learned to concentrate the qi as if you were a spirit.
Nietzsche once wrote, “If our senses were fine enough, we would perceive the slumbering cliff as a dancing chaos.” We would see to the heart of everything; we would see all clearly. Though he conceived of divinity as a singular being with a will to power, this statement hints at the understanding that spirit can emerge from a different place. There is a different way of being alive and of impacting the world: through your sheer clarity of vision and your connection with everything; with your charisma rather than through your domination.
Charismatic people are not born with transformative abilities; they are born with the potential to be so. When that potential is cultivated, the charismatic person becomes capable of drawing others to her through the force of her energy. When we are with someone who is energized in a positive, exciting way—someone who fills a room with her presence and who has a zest for life—we are drawn to her. Her energy is contagious. That charisma comes from spirit. She is charismatic because she is so alive and resonant with those around her. Her refined qi elicits the best of others and draws out their own spirits.
But while the Inward Training is almost entirely about cultivation, it is not about self-cultivation. A charismatic person is not charismatic because she has a uniquely captivating personality all her own. She is not cultivating herself. She is cultivating energy; she is cultivating qi. She is charismatic and full of life because the highly refined qi within her is identical to the highly refined qi that exists around her. It’s by being so resonant with that qi that she becomes able to alter things.
We too can form webs of connection and relationships with people around us by cultivating spirit. People around us can become drawn toward us and enriched by us because of how we energize them. As we become known for being this sort of a person, our relationships and connections grow. We further develop the ability to respond to people at their best. If we encounter someone burning with jealousy or anger, or someone burdene
d with sadness or anxiety, we become able to respond not to those energies but to the person’s other facets, bringing out his or her healthier energies. And as our charisma grows, like a spirit we become able to pull things together, harmonize things, and shift all sorts of situations. The Inward Training would say that this highly energized connection with absolutely everything is the Way.
* * *
This is a different notion of agency and of vitality. Divinities are active by resonating with the world, not by imposing their will on it. They don’t affect the world by doing the things that we tend to think of as active and powerful, but by seeing things with full clarity, behaving flawlessly without falling into patterned responses, and, through small shifts, resonating with everything around them. What these notions of energies give us is a way to think about moving from a world of endless conflicts among discrete things to a world in which things are ever more harmonious. The more resonant qi we have, the more we can do what the spirits can do, even in our messy, disparate world down here.
Confucius and Mencius elaborated upon how humans can live as fully as possible. The authors of the Inward Training tell us that we can divinize ourselves and that is how we live well.
But now comes a philosopher, Zhuangzi, who, rather than trying to divinize humanity, called for transcending the human realm altogether.
7
On Spontaneity: Zhuangzi and a World of Transformation
Zhuangzi dreamed once that he was a butterfly. A joyous butterfly, doing as he chose. He did not even know there was a Zhuangzi. Suddenly, he awoke, and then he seemed to be Zhuangzi. Yet he could not tell if he was Zhuangzi dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. Still, there must be a distinction between Zhuangzi and a butterfly. This is called “the transformation of things.”
In the famous story of the butterfly, Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher from the late fourth century BC, wants to break us from our usual way of seeing the world. We all wear blinders that prevent us from fully experiencing and engaging with the world, and Zhuangzi argues that the greatest of these is our limited human perspective. What if you were not merely a human being but were actually a butterfly dreaming you are a human being? If we could transcend our humanity and know what it means to see the world from all perspectives, we could experience life more fully and spontaneously.
We already know how it feels to experience the world fully and spontaneously. It happens when we experience “flow”: the state in which we become so immersed in an activity that we lose ourselves in the joy of what we are doing, whether we are playing soccer, painting a picture, or reading a book. But we tend to think of these moments in the zone as circumscribed ones, reserved for certain activities. We tend to think of flow as something that happens in specific moments when the right conditions align just so.
We tend to not think it’s possible to train ourselves to feel that same sort of spontaneous excitement about everything in our lives. But Zhuangzi saw things very differently. He taught that if we could learn to see the world from all perspectives and understand the transformation of things, we would gain a deeper understanding of everything in the cosmos. As we began to break out of the way we typically experience reality, we would learn what it meant to feel spontaneity every moment of our everyday, ordinary lives.
The Way As Endless Flux and Transformation
Like Laozi, Zhuangzi was considered a Daoist philosopher, and the Zhuangzi—a text attributed to him and derived from his teachings—a Daoist text. But Zhuangzi would have resisted affiliation with any one school of thought. The only reason that these two very different texts and thinkers have been categorized together is because of their emphasis on the Dao, or the Way.
But the Way meant different things for each philosopher. For Zhuangzi, it wasn’t about becoming calm and still, or about perceiving the world as absolutely undifferentiated. You could never become the Way, just as you could never become the ground from which things grow. Rather, for Zhuangzi, the Way was about embracing absolutely everything in its constant flux and transformation.
The Zhuangzi emphasizes repeatedly how everything in the world transforms into everything else in a constant and ceaseless dance of movement and relationships, flux and shifts. Over time everything spontaneously becomes part of something else. This process of change and movement is happening at every moment.
Grass grows, and when it dies, it decomposes, and its qi is channeled into other things. Worms and bugs in the grass are eaten by birds, which in turn are eaten by larger birds or animals. Those larger beasts, too, die over time, decay, become part of the earth, and transform into soil, grass, and other elements. Everything slowly becomes everything else in a cycle of endless change and transformation.
Grass does not plan to become something else when it dies. The transformation just happens. The seasons do not plan to change. The change simply happens.
Birds fly because of their natural endowments: their wings. They float about depending on the shifting winds and the topography below them. They are spontaneously following the Way.
Fish swim. They too are gifted with natural endowments: gills and tails. They use these to shift and move according to the currents. They, too, are spontaneously following the Way. They don’t stop to think, Now I should turn this way because the current is moving this way, and now I should move that way, because I have to maneuver past that rock. They just swim.
Zhuangzi referred to the terms yin and yang, or darkness and light, softness and hardness, weakness and strength. The Way, he argued, is a process of constant interactions between these two elements that seem to stand in opposition but actually complement each other. They must revolve constantly to balance each other. In the winter, yin, the cold and dark element, prevails. Then things change, and summer, the season of yang, of heat and light, arrives.
The constant and inevitable interplay of the energy of yin and yang does not just create seasonal change, but also characterizes all the transformations we see throughout the cosmos.
Those Who Do Not Follow the Way
There is just one exception, Zhuangzi argued, to the teeming, transforming world; just one thing in the entire cosmos that does not spontaneously follow the Way. That thing is us: human beings. We alone do not spontaneously follow the Way. In fact, we actually spend our entire lives battling against flux and transformation: we declare our opinions to be right (and others indisputably wrong); we work ourselves up over the accomplishments of a rival; we remain stuck in a dead-end job because we’re fearful of change. In the process, we disrupt and block the interplay of yin and yang. That is due to our own natural endowment: our minds.
What should we do instead? What does it actually mean for a human being to spontaneously follow the Way?
We hear this word spontaneity, and we might think we know what that means. After all, we live in a culture that reveres spontaneity. We find predictability boring. We find too many rules stifling. We admire the free thinker, the person who dares to be different, the lone genius who dropped out of college on a whim and founded a start-up. We equate spontaneity with authenticity, increased happiness, and personal fulfillment.
So you might think, Well, I’m going to just be spontaneous and do whatever I feel like doing. You could stop what you’re doing and dance; you could quit your job, cobble together your savings, and take off on a trip around the world. Isn’t that being spontaneous? Actually, no, not for Zhuangzi. Our ideas about spontaneity are almost the opposite of Zhuangzi’s. Spontaneity, for him, isn’t about doing whatever we want whenever we want.
What we think of as natural spontaneity is the unfettered expression of desires, and there’s no way we could embrace that sort of a life all the time. So we go hang gliding, make an impulse buy, or take up a new hobby. We save our spontaneity for the weekends and leave the rest of our lives the same.
True spontaneity requires us to alter how we think and act in the world, to open ourselves up to endless flux and transfor
mation all the time. It requires that we imagine something called trained spontaneity—which sounds like an oxymoron but, as we’ll learn, really isn’t.
Consider one of Zhuangzi’s most famous parables: the story of Cook Ding, a butcher. Cook Ding’s initial approach to work is to pick up his cleaver and hack away at the meat in front of him. At first, this is just tedious. But over time, the more the butcher does this, the more aware he becomes. He notices that instead of working against all the different muscles and tendons in a chunk of meat, he can find all sorts of flowing channels within each piece. Each is different, and yet they all have lines and joints and paths—places where it is naturally easier to cut. With familiarity and training, he can sense these universal patterns in any piece of meat. He cuts in perfect rhythm, as though he were dancing; the meat falls apart effortlessly before his blade.
But to do this, he can’t think too much or approach the task analytically, since each piece of meat is different. According to Zhuangzi, he must value “the Way, which goes beyond technique.” He must tap into his divine qualities, those that enable us to resonate well with the world by being connected with it. When the butcher uses his spirit instead of his conscious mind, he senses the Way: only then can he sense the different fluctuations in the meat.
A good cook changes his knife annually, since he uses it to cut. A half-decent cook changes it monthly, because he uses it to chop. But there are gaps between the joints, and there is no thickness at all at the edge of the blade. By using what has no thickness and inserting it where there is no gap—there’s lots of space to move about in. That’s why even though I’ve been at this for nineteen years, the blade of my knife is as sharp as if it were just sharpened yesterday.
Cook Ding has understood trained spontaneity.
Note that he did not achieve spontaneity by throwing down his knife and dancing in the streets. He did not cut through slabs of meat on the weekdays but cut loose on the weekends. He achieved spontaneity through the humble activity of cutting the meat over and over until he could just flow with the process. And he was not passive. He flowed with the heavenly pattern of the Way, but he also created something new each time he cut up a slab of meat. By doing so, he found satisfaction and spontaneity in the simple activity that made up his everyday life.
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