The Principle of Wu-Wei

“…or “non-doing.”  Wu-wei refers to behavior that arises from a sense of oneself as connected to others and to one’s environment.  It is not motivated by a sense of separateness.  It is action that is spontaneous and effortless.  At the same time it is not to be considered inertia, mere laziness, or mere passivity.  Rather, it is the experience of going with the grain or swimming with the current.  Our contemporary expression, “going with the flow,” is a direct expression of this fundamental Taoist principle, which in its most basic form refers to behavior occurring in response to the flow of the Tao.

“(…) Lao Tzu writes that we must be quiet and watchful, learning to listen to both our own inner voices and to the voices of our environment in a non-interfering, receptive manner.  In this way we also learn to rely on more than just our intellect and logical mind to gather and assess information.  We develop and trust our intuition as our direct connection to the Tao.  We heed the intelligence of our whole body not only our brain.” (Ted Kardash, “Taoism”)

My selection for the title of this blog was not intentional – that is, it was for no specific, life-changing purpose.  I just thought it sounded good, and was an obvious play on titles I’ve seen in bookstores: The Tao of Pooh; the Tao of Piglet – neither of which I’ve read.  I did have a light grasp of some Taoist principles, but they were tenuous at best, which is to say I had an intellectual, or conceptual understanding of them, and not much else.  They read beautifully, that much I would concede, though personally thought the passive way of living a great idea for one who was not so consciously and deliberately going after something – in my case, published writing.  On some subconscious level, perhaps, I wanted that kind of effortless peace, but on the whole considered the contrast to my “driven pursuits” as a given.

Things have changed since I’ve shaken of the “drive for fame.”  Of late, my focus has been on the creative process itself, and it has, again, been slow going.  Though ever since making the connection that good writing is as much emotion-driven as it is logic-driven, I’ve been floundering even more.  If you had to write with an emotive bent, then you listen to what your heart is telling you.  Besides that, I’ve heard (and known) enough about the creative process to know that in many ways, it defies logic altogether, is pretty much mood-based, and comes with its own darn schedule.  So when it does come, you’d almost have to be really busy or embroiled in an emergency in order to justify turning away and shrugging it off.  On the other hand, it’s difficult enough to turn away from the current progress of an ongoing work to address a new, completely different creative impulse.  I’ve made the habit of writing the seeds of those ideas down, but “returning” to those ideas later, absent that creative impulse, just doesn’t do it.

Taoism seems to offer a solution anyway, in its wu-wei principle, and while wu-wei tells you a lot of things, at its most basic level it tells you to just “go along with the flow.”  Surrendering the excessive need for control and trusting that it’s all to the good, in the end, and all a part of life’s grand flow.  The yogis, I believe, call this “mindfulness” (the Sanskrit term escapes me at the moment), but it all amounts to the same thing: stop fighting it.

~ by dwanderingmind on October 15, 2009.