Skip to main content

On Wu Wei and Dharma

 

There is a spontaneous way for understanding the flow of our life experience, a pathless path that comes natural and need no effort. The Taoist call it Wu Wei, doing without doing, or a non-forcing action in relation to our interactive experience with the Universe. Wu Wei starts from an ontological stand but it turns quickly into practical action.


(…) The sage manages affairs without action

And spreads doctrines without words

(The Natural Way of Lao Tzu. #2. )


Wu Wei is not easily grasped. In fact, it is a source of continuous confusion and misinterpretation. Its difficulty resides in its simplicity. We usually think that something is difficult to grasp due to the intricacy of its conceptual frame, but we believe that applying effort and time we will eventually understand it. However, it is much more difficult to grasp simple processes or basic simple concepts, and extraordinary difficult to grasp something that would never be understood applying thinking effort, as is the case with Wu Wei.


Act without action. Do without ado

Whether it is big small, many few, repay hatred with virtue.

(The Natural Way of Lao Tzu. #63 )


This fabulous text strings together two beautiful pearls: Wu Wei and Dharma. Dharma is the principle of Reality-Truth in its practical dimension. Individual life displays a Dharma, an aspect of Reality as the course of things as far as that individuality is concerned. In the concept of Dharma the objective and the subjective approaches melt: they both express analogous formations about the Flow of existence. My Dharma is my active practical perspective in the unfolding of things. Action as a rational mental decision very often collides with the dimension of feeling and volition if we do not incorporate a dharmic orientation to our action and see it from a broader scope than that of mere instrumental rationality that operates only in terms of means and goals. Through dharma, our present action flows in harmony with the past and unfolds its own future.

In the sphere of feelings (our Sensitive or Emotional Soul) Wu Wei occurs if we do not force in any way the emotional action that comes into our existence, neither to complete it nor to reject it, but rather we receive it in our psychic constitution, exploring all its dimensions with interest, letting happening those that best represent our Dharma.

When Wu Wei refers to the present moment, it enters into the sphere of the Volitional Soul. It is then about wanting what is happening as if it were our intention until the independent and automatic action of the Will is unified with our feelings and from there our Dharma directs it. The moment when thinking interferes, flow is interrupted. Voluntarily willing what is happening is the transformation of the present in our creative imagination and we can direct it from our Dharma. But in Wu Wei, this acceptance of what happens is done within the space of our Dharma, that is, we let our Dharma act without believing that we are what acts in that Dharma. With an example. We see that someone is being assaulted. We accept the fact that there is an assault, but our Dharma leads us to help the attacked, without thinking that such defense is a personal action. In fact, that defense would be the action of our Transpersonal Soul in its flow of Beauty.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

Masks and Ego

  The ego is the force of psychic centroversion, that which establishes points or frames of reference. Without the coordinate point (0,0), we cannot orient ourselves or act. The ego is the force that builds an unlimited number of references, of centers around which different formations of the Soul will appear. In Sanskrit, it is called Ahankara. Aham means “I”, kara is “the process of doing or carrying out”. As a compound word, Ahankara means “the process of making or uttering the ‘I’ ( aham ).” The ego is an action, a force that establishes or says the “I”, that lays a fundamental reference stone with respect to another action. For example, the human organism spontaneously performs the physiological action of seeing, the organ of sight is set in motion automatically, and automatically, a force also appears that assigns another action to the function of vision: the action that says “I ”. The synthesis is “I see.” It also happens in animals, for the acti...

Matriarcal or Uroboric Incest

Let us discuss some basic aspect of ego formation: its appearence out of the uroboric round. The uroboric round is the realm of the primordial waters (you can listen to my Podcast on the Primordial Waters). I really recomend you the book: The Origin s and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann. (Princeton University Press). Neumann was a friend of Jung and member of the Eranos Group. We could understand the appearance of the ego from the unconscious through the myth of the emergence of an island from the primordial waters. Its appearance, however, is not permanent and definitive, especially at the beginning. The tides of the unconscious rise and the island is once again covered by the waters. Only a progressive systematization of consciousness leads to its permanence. To keep consciousness awake, a force of determination is necessary, which requires a display of psychic and physiological energy. For the appearance of consciousness it is necessary to exert an energy that moves...