"The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao" (Tao-Te-King).
"All things derive from the Tao, the Tao derives from none" (Tao-Te-King).
"That which is by itself is called Tao" (The Secret of the Golden Flower).
The Tao and Taoism
The Chinese word "Tao" can be translated as "way" or "path", and has the following properties:
It is a primal energy, a power that envelops and flows in all things and in all beings.
It is the regulator of all processes in nature and provides balance to the universe.
It is the power that harmonizes opposites. Yin and yang are the universal opposite principles that are harmonized and made complementary by the power of the Tao.
It cannot be expressed, it cannot be externalized. "The Tao that can be expressed is not the true Tao."
It is not accessible by the mind or by the senses, but manifests itself as the matrix of nature, the hidden and invisible pattern of nature, the invisible fabric of the cosmos.
It is the creative principle and power that guides the evolution of nature. It is the interactive dynamics behind the self-organization of the universe.
It is continuous, it is formless. It is formless form, but it manifests itself in all discrete, discontinuous forms.
It is that which gives meaning to all that exists. It is the "great sense".
It is an omniscient universal consciousness that links all that exists from a timeless, aspatial and immaterial level.
It is the source of all possibilities.
It is the primordial essence from which everything emerges. It is the root of everything, but everything is not the Tao.
It is not limited, defined, formed or manifested. To be something implies being formed, limited, defined and manifested.
It is an inexhaustible energy.
It is the universal principle, the principle of all principles.
The Tao is sometimes called the Nothingness, the Void, or the Zero Point.
According to the "Taoist correspondence principle", the profound is reflected or manifested in the superficial; the macrocosm (the global) is reflected in the microcosm (the particular). For example, the emperor's palace is a homothetic reflection of the whole country. To order the palace is to order (rule) the country. Opening a new door in the walls of the palace can produce great changes in the country. The palace represents the Center, the deep or higher, power, truth, wisdom, creativity and consciousness.
Taoism, the doctrine of the followers and practitioners of the Tao, has shaped Chinese life and culture for over 2000 years. The founder of Taoism was Lao-Tse. His work, the Tao-Te-King or "book of the Way and its Power" is considered the "Bible" of Taoism, a book that combines and harmonizes psychology, philosophy, ethics, mysticism and poetry. The Tao-Te-King mentions the so-called "Three Jewels of Behavior": compassion, moderation and humility. Lao-Tse was a contemporary of Confucius. Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism are the three spiritual currents of China.
Lao-Tse (License Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
From 440 BC until 1911 (the end of the Ch'ing dynasty), Taoism was the official religion of the Chinese state. Today, Taoism has millions of followers. From Taoism have emerged many disciplines: acupuncture, holistic medicine, meditation, martial arts, Tai-Chi, etc.
The Tao Synogram
According to Taoism:
Everything is continuously transformed in an endless process, following universal laws of a cyclic type. For example, death is conceived as the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one.
Things manifest through the spontaneity of that Primordial Energy. Spontaneity is the manifestation of the living; rigidity, the manifestation of death.
All concepts destroy the spontaneity of the human. It is necessary to replace the complex with the simple, natural and authentic.
A person in harmony with the Tao flows with the force of the universe and reaches fullness, without embracing a particular doctrine.
The Taoist Wu Wei
Wu Wei (literally, "effortlessness" or "non-action") is an essential doctrine of Taoist philosophy. It refers to the union of two opposites: action and non-action, to effortless action, to external action from inner repose and harmony. It is the art of acting without tension, spontaneously (not meditated), creatively, with the minimum (or null) consumption of energy (only consuming the necessary energy), of making everything easy and simple; it is acting from the Self, from our Center, from the Tao (not from the ego), with a perfect balance between being and doing; it is acting correctly and perfectly at all times and places, without expecting any benefit. When one lives in perfect harmony with the Tao, one does not use more energy than one needs; neither does one do things that harm the body or the spirit.
Symbol of Wu Wei
The Tao-Te-King refers to "decreasing action" or "waning will", as the key aspects in the sage's success. Wu Wei has also been translated as "creative stillness" or the art of "letting be", an activity aimed at perceiving the Tao in all things, creating the proper disposition to find one's own way.
According to the Taoists, by acting in harmony with the Tao one attains immortality, in the sense that time disappears, for the sage lives in the present, where there is no time, thus attaining long life and good health. Taoists have always pursued immortality and have seen that living in harmony with the Tao is the way to achieve it.
We should act from the Tao, reflect the Tao, be one with the Tao, act from the deepest part of the Self, with harmony, to achieve the maximum with the minimum effort. When we concentrate fully on non-doing, we escape from conditioning and are free to act creatively.
Chung-Tse (circa 300 B.C.) was one of the most tenacious proponents of the Wu Wei philosophy.
In the original Taoist texts, Wu Wei is usually associated with water, for several reasons: 1) because water is of a passive and flexible nature, which adapts to all kinds of forms; 2) because it can be divided into very fine droplets or grouped to form an ocean; 3) because it flows downwards always following the line of least resistance.
In Zen calligraphy, Wu Wei is represented by a circle, which symbolizes many things: 1) the Tao, the eternal and immutable, timelessness, immortality, perfection, simplicity; 2) the conjunction of two opposites: unity (symbolized by its center) and diversity (the other points of the circle, which have the center as reference); 3) the eternal cycle of all things, including the water cycle.
Wu Wei and nature
Nature acts according to the principle of Wu Wei, where everything follows its intrinsic nature. For example, plants do not make any effort to grow, they just do; birds do not try to fly, they just fly. In this sense, Wu Wei is connected with the principle of nature's economy that unites (paradoxically) two opposites: achieving the maximum with the minimum effort.
Behind nature is the Tao, the supreme harmony, the essential unity of all that exists, where everything is one and everything is connected. Taoists do not speak of a Supreme Being, but of a supreme state of Being. But when the human being pits his will against nature, he disturbs the existing harmony. We have to live in harmony with nature, instead of dominating it.
Wu Wei and consciousness
Wu Wei unites the opposites, the opposite poles, which is a characteristic of consciousness: action and non-action, movement and rest, the deep and the superficial, achieving the maximum with the minimum. Ultimately, everything is achieved effortlessly, spontaneously, where every thought that arises from pure consciousness (the field of all possibilities) is realized automatically.
Action should always be calm, based on stillness, rest and relaxation. From this attitude, awareness is maximum. When we force something, we create tensions. These tensions block creativity and diminish awareness.
Non-action can be identified with the profound, and action with the superficial. The Wu Wei could then be understood as "think deep and act shallow" or "think universal and act particular". This is reminiscent of the term "glocal", which means "think globally, act locally".
Subtle breathing
When doing without doing, a subtle and deep breath appears, which is hidden behind the superficial physical breath. The subtle breath is the spontaneous and natural vital breath of the human being, the breath that connects us with the Self, with the harmony with the Tao.
There is a school called "school of breathing" which is based precisely on the Wu Wei, on doing without doing. [see Bibliography: Tsuda.]
Jesus, the Tao and the Wu Wei
Jesus evoked the profound (the Tao) to accomplish everything: "Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all else will be added to you" (Matthew 6:33).
He also beautifully illustrated the principle of Wu Wei in:
"Consider the lilies how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, but I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of them" (Luke 12:27).
"Behold the fowls of the air, which neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feeds them" (Matthew 6:26).
MENTAL and Tao
There are analogies between MENTAL and Tao:
Tao is the power that harmonizes opposites. MENTAL is the integral and harmonious union of opposites.
The Tao is creative. MENTAL is creative and its creativity comes from the deep.
The Tao has no limits. The combinatorial power of MENTAL has no limits, it is infinite.
The Tao cannot be expressed. MENTAL cannot be expressed either; it can only manifest itself as particular expressions.
The Tao is present in all things. MENTAL is the abstract matrix of all things.
Regarding Wu Wei:
To practice the Wu Wei is to act from the deep, from the Self.
With MENTAL we "act" (create expressions) from the deepest possible being of things: from the primary archetypes. As a consequence, we obtain maximum performance with minimum effort. And we can apply language to different domains always with the minimum number of conceptual resources.
The practice of Wu Wei develops awareness, intuition and creativity.
The same can be said of MENTAL.
The practice of Wu Wei makes everything easier.
The use of MENTAL makes everything easier and problems are solved in a more direct way, because you act from the deep. For example, developing all kinds of applications (programming, artificial intelligence, etc.) is easier.
Addenda
Hinduism
Patanjali −the Hindu sage, famous for his "Aphorisms of Yoga"− taught that it is possible to synchronize thought and action. When this is achieved, the limitations of space and time disappear and powers such as vibhuti (sacred ash), knowledge of the past and future, reading the minds of others, becoming invisible, levitation, etc., appear.
When effort is combined with non-effort, everything becomes effortless, sahaj in Sanskrit.
The perfect balance between doing and non-doing, between ego and being. Hindus call this ajapa-japa (japa without japa).
Vedic Science and the principle of least effort
In Vedic Science, the ancient philosophy of India, reference is made to the "principle of economy of effort" or "do less and achieve more" [Chopra, 1998]. It is, in essence, the union of opposites:
The union of nothing and everything.
It is ultimately about achieving a state of consciousness where nothing is done and everything is achieved. It is the supreme consciousness, pure consciousness, produced by the union of the opposites: nothingness and everything, where there is no difference between emptiness and fullness.
The union of the inner "I" and the outer "I".
It is necessary to act with the external "I" (the ego) from the Self, from the inner or deep "I". If we do not do so, tensions and imbalances appear. Tension is only a manifestation of the disconnection with our inner "I", with our Self. When we are established in the Self, immediate use is made of the law of least effort. From that state, life ceases to be a struggle or confrontation and becomes harmonious.
The union of the past and the future, in the present.
One must at all times be aware of the present and accept it, without struggle. "When you fight against the moment, you are really fighting against the whole universe" [Chopra, 1998].
Eliot and "the still point"
We must act from the center, from what the poet T.S. Eliot called "the still point" (the still point), where he captures the Taoist essence: a point where movement and non-movement meet, where past and future meet, where there is no ascent and no decline, no movement from and no movement to. Eliot compares it to dancers. He sees them dancing in slow motion, split second by split second. The poet sees this point of stillness: it is the point, the moment when even though the dance exists, it is the precise instant when it ceases to exist. There is no movement, everything melts away. "Without the still point there would be no dance."
The Tao of Physics
"The Tao of Physics" is a work by Fritjof Capra [2007] that had a great impact by relating the mysterious behavior of matter at the quantum level and the characteristics of the Tao.
MENTAL goes beyond "The Tao of Physics" by establishing the 12 opposing principles, which are present in the physical and the psychic. With these principles everything is possible.
Some phrases of Tao-te-King on the philosophy Wu Wei
"The Sage knows without going, sees without looking and achieves without doing".
"By doing nothing, you achieve everything."
"When you do nothing, nothing is left undone."
"Work is done and then forgotten. Therefore it lasts forever."
"The Tao does nothing, and yet nothing is left undone."
"The Sage deals with the ineffable and acts without effort."
"Teaching without rhetoric, producing without possessing, creating without considering the result, claiming nothing, the Sage has nothing to lose."
"The Master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything."
Other phrases about Wu Wei
"He who sees inaction in action and action in inaction is wise among men" (Paul Twitchell).
"Your effort is bondage" (Ramana Maharshi).
Do Easy
"Do Easy" is the name of a short story by William S. Burroughs. Based on this story, Gus Van Sant made the short film −the first after leaving film school− entitled "Discipline of Do Easy" (it is available on the Internet). It calls for making things easy and being "like a Zen master who can hit the target with his arrow in the dark." "The easiest, most relaxed way is the fastest and most efficient way." "Every object you touch is alive with your life and your will." "In the details is the mastery." "The easier we make things, the less we have to do." "He who learns to do nothing with his whole body and mind, will have it all done."
The principle of least effort, by Zipf
The principle of least effort, stated in George Kingsley Zipf's work [1972], also called "Zipf's law," helps explain many outcomes of human behavior.
Zipf, a Harvard linguist, applied statistical analysis to the study of different languages. Zipf's initial discovery was that by counting the number of times each word is used in different English texts, and ordering them from most frequent to least frequent, it was found that the frequency of the i-th word (the rank), multiplied by i, was equal to a constant C, a constant that depended on the text chosen. The most common word, "the", appeared twice as often as the second, "of", three times as often as the third, four times as often as the fourth, and so on. In other words, the frequency of occurrence of a word is inversely proportional to the position it occupies in the hierarchy of the most used words.
It has now been established that it is necessary to raise i to an exponent t greater than 1 for many existing texts. Graphing this curve using a logarithmic scale on both axes, it becomes a line with negative slope t. The larger the t, the smaller the vocabulary used. Currently, the value of t is around 1.8 for English texts, indicating a tendency for the richness of the vocabulary used in writing to decrease.
Mathematically, this is expressed as Pi ∝ 1/it (∝ means "proportional to"), where Pi is the frequency of a word at position i and t a parameter that depends on each text. In the case of t=1, the second word will be repeated at about half the frequency of the first, the third at one-third the frequency of the first, and so on.
Zipf's law states that a small number of words are used very frequently, while a large number of words are infrequently employed. Zipf interpreted these empirical results as the application of the law of least effort, since it is always easier to write a known word than a less known word. More frequently used words are shorter and contain less information. And less frequently used words are longer and contain more information.
Similar phenomena appear in other fields such as: citations in scientific articles, cities ordered by their populations, companies ordered by their size, most used moves in chess, the number of visits to individual Internet pages in a given time interval, the number of connections to a web page, individual donations for victims of natural disasters, etc.
These results reinforce the existence of a universal law, highlighted by the so-called "Global Scale Theory".
A non-empirical, but more precise and generalized law was discovered by Benoît Mandelbrot, who showed that Zipf's law is verified also for random phenomena, such as, for example, a purely random language. If we imagine a chimpanzee in front of a keyboard with the letters of the alphabet and a space bar, if the chimpanzee types randomly, the text will verify Zipf's law, although in this case the monkey's "vocabulary" would be very limited.
Zip's law in nature was studied by Ramon Margalef. Zip's law is also fulfilled in nature.
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