Tao Te Ching XLVIII

In the pursuit of learning one knows more every day; in the pursuit of the way one does less every day.  One does less and less until one does nothing at all and when one does nothing at all there is nothing that is undone.  It is always through not meddling that the empire is won; should you meddle, then you are not equal to the task of winning the empire.

When the people think of doing nothing, they think of it in opposition to doing something—lounging on the beach in Cuba as opposed to meeting with marketing managers in Tucson;  collapsing in front of the TV after work, dinner, and kids; stepping outside the productive workforce through internal or external misfortune or external fortune.  But nothing is not something that happens in response to or escape from something but rather something is a function of nothing.  To give one’s body, heart, mind, and soul over to the world—which is to say, the Tao—is to do nothing other than as a function of the world.  This giving over is the pursuit that does not feel like a pursuit but a return, a falling, or the most natural and easy thing in the world.  To do nothing other than as a function of the world is truly what everyone does, but the people do not think this is what they do and this not-thinking is what distinguishes the people from the sage.

The sage is not some dimwit, some unconscientious objector to reason’s rigors—one who pits the body’s brutish indolence against mind’s ceaseless strivings and finds the latter wanting.  She is more a Socratic flâneur, not doing anything in particular other than not knowing more than the body permits one to know.

The soul is lost through the tyrannies of volition, analysis, knowledge, and cognition.  In the Middle Ages, God was lost through priestly intervention, sacerdotal rites, cheap fire and vision; in modernity, the soul is lost through therapeutic intervention, domestication of that which is feral and divine in humanity, expensive commonplaces and concrete ideas.  Meddlers, by virtue of meddling, assert themselves over the soul and in so doing lose it.  This does not mean that one must be a quietist—when the wind is active, the sage is active; when calm, calm.  The people think the sage acts as they do—asserting herself to obtain more, retiring when exhausted—but the sage acts for no reason other than she acts.

The soul has one organ—the eye:  the eye untainted by mind’s rabid systematizing and the body’s voracious hungers.  It is the eye the sage crawls within and why her own death is no different to her than a leaf falling or the sun performing its routine descent into that which seems to be night.