How is Wu Wei different from laziness?

[Marblehead]

That's a common misunderstanding of wu wei.

For me, wu wei means to recognize that the one who thinks he/she is making decisions is an illusion and to allow life to unfold without interfering. 

But really, sometimes we have to interfere.  We interact with the world and all things within.  We have desires.  Nature will not prevent bad things from happening to us or ones we care about.  We then have the responsibility for preventing such things.

 

I have said this before but will say it again, it's okay to flow with the flow but when we hear the sound of the waterfall we need to swim toward dry land.

[doc benway]

But really, sometimes we have to interfere.  We interact with the world and all things within.  We have desires.  Nature will not prevent bad things from happening to us or ones we care about.  We then have the responsibility for preventing such things.

 

I have said this before but will say it again, it's okay to flow with the flow but when we hear the sound of the waterfall we need to swim toward dry land.

 

I don't think swimming toward dry land is interfering, it is simply doing what needs to be done. It is a natural doing that is part of the way of things. People don't want to drown, no living thing wants to drown. 

 

It only seems like "sometimes we have to interfere" when we see ourselves as a separate self that needs to interfere.

Seeing through that is what I'm referring to. 

[Marblehead]

Okay.  We are singing the same song, just different verses.

[9th]

For an exact study, an exact language is needed. But our ordinary language in which we speak, set forth what we know and understand, and write books in ordinary life, does not do for even a small amount of exact speech. An inexact speech cannot serve an exact knowledge. The words composing our language are too wide, too foggy and indefinite, while the meaning put into them is too arbitrary and variable.

 

Every man who pronounces any word always attaches this or that shade of meaning to it by his imagination, exaggerates or puts forward this or that side of it, sometimes concentrating all the significance of the word on a single feature of the object, that is, designating by this word not all the attributes but those chance external ones which first spring to his notice. Another man speaking with the first attaches to the same word another shade of meaning, takes this word in another sense, which is often exactly the opposite...

 

For every man the meaning of his own words and the meaning which he puts into them changes in accordance with his own thoughts and humors, with the images which he associates at the moment with the words, as well as with what and how his interlocutor speaks, for by an involuntary imitation or contradiction he can involuntarily change the meaning of his words. In addition, nobody is able to define exactly what he means by this or that word, or whether this meaning is constant or subject to change, how, why and for what reason.

 

If several men speak, everyone speaks in his own way, and no one of them understands another. A professor reads a lecture, a scholar writes a book, and their audience and readers listen to, and read, not them but combinations of the authors’ words and their own thoughts, notions, humors and emotions of the given moment...

 

Our wrong use of words and the qualities of the words themselves have made them unreliable instruments of an exact speech and an exact knowledge, not to mention the fact that for many notions accessible to our reason we have neither words nor expressions...

 

The teaching whose principles we are going to expound here has as one of its tasks the bringing of our thinking nearer to an exact mathematical designation of things and events and the giving to men of the possibility of understanding themselves and each other.

 

If we take any of the most commonly used words and try to see what a varied meaning these words have according to who uses them and in what connection, we shall see why men have no power of expressing their thoughts exactly and why everything men say and think is so unstable and contradictory...

 

For example, if we say the word “world” in front of ten hearers, every one of them will understand the word in his own way...

 

This teaching says that if the question of what the world is were approached in the right way, we could establish quite accurately what we understand by this word. And this definition of a right understanding would include in itself all views upon the world and all approaches to the question. Having thus agreed on such a definition, men would be able to understand one another when speaking about the world. Only starting from such a definition can one speak about the world...

 

We live at one and the same time in six worlds, just as we live on a floor of such and such a house, in such and such a street, in such and such a town, such and such a state, and such and such a part of the world.

 

Views from the Real World, pp. 60–67

 

[doc benway]

Okay.  We are singing the same song, just different verses.

 

I agree - that's pretty cool

[9th]

Just keep on asking the hard questions, and eventually you will get some hard answers.

 

[Marblehead]

Only one lick at a time.

 

I have mentioned before that I don't multi-task.