Effortless Living: Wu-Wei and the Spontaneous State of Natural Harmony

Lao-tzu’s essential teaching of wu-wei, on the other hand, illustrates the futility of our attempts to control life. He emphasizes that it is only when you give up forcing or controlling anything that you begin to get the kind of control you always wanted, but never knew existed.

Dialectical thought is in some ways the opposite of logical thought. It seeks not to decontextualize but to see things in their appropriate contexts: Events do not occur in isolation from other events, but are always embedded in a meaningful whole in which the elements are constantly changing and rearranging themselves. To think about an object or

ANTHONY PEAKE, AUTHOR OF THE INFINITE MINDFIELD AND OPENING THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION AND COAUTHOR OF THE IMMORTAL MIND

We are always interfering with each other’s natural sovereignty. Many people arrogantly and ignorantly do this daily and then proclaim that they know what freedom and love are. How can we listen and help each other if it is merely from our own cultural, social, or religious perspective? If we have a set of beliefs to sell another, then we are surel

DANIEL REID, AUTHOR OF THE TAO OF HEALTH, SEX, AND LONGEVITY AND THE TAO OF DETOX

Richard Nisbett articulates the essence of the paradoxical Middle Way of language and thought in his book The Geography of Thought:

Psychologically, the intellect is the masculine principle of the universe, or in Chinese yang (陽: Wade-Giles yang, Pinyin yang), and its habitual tendency is geared toward force and control. On the other end of the spectrum, the feminine principle of the universe, or in Chinese yin (陰: Wade-Giles yin, Pinyin yin), is the intuition and heart of our

Understanding and following the mystery of wu-wei does not mean that you lose your intellectual faculties. Instead, your intellectual life and the apparent use of force begin to be refined into a changeful openness toward life. Actually our intellectual life begins to thrive when we relinquish the habit of force.

This analytical, active part of our mind in the prefrontal cortex is physiologically expensive if it is not supported by the more primal regions of the brain that we associate with the unconscious mind. The function of the unconscious regions of the brain is known in cognitive science as “hot cognition” or “System 1.” Hot cognition is the function