The overall vision
Instead of identifying with this and that thing, Chuang Tzu invites us to identify with our horizon-spanning field of consciousness. When we do this, instead of anxiously clinging to some things and shunning others, we experience being present with the panorama of whatever things are here-and-now spread out before us. Also, instead of anxiously striving to do this and do that, we experience being effortlessly buoyed by the energy that animates all things, including ourselves.
When we identify with awareness and relax into our embodied sense of energy, we experience the freedom of wandering, amiable and aloof.
Wandering—like a vagabond, a traveller.
Aloof—from worldly worries. At ease with others and our circumstances, even bad-tempered folk and unpleasant circumstances. Not dissociated, not disengaged, rather:
Amiable—playful. Good humoured. Fully and creatively engaged with others and our circumstances.
Chuang Tzu presents this vision in the opening chapter of his book: Wandering, amiable and aloof. Here’s the opening and closing stories:
Awaking to awareness, We happy cicadas, and Mounting the world as your chariot
The practical method
Chuang Tzu’s goal is to wander freely, amiable and aloof; to be present with and in playful harmony with things. (See: the overall vision.)
Specific things that Chuang Tzu writes about being present with and in playful harmony with include: our position in society; other people’s opinions and actions; physical injury and deformity; and death.
What prevents us from being present with and in playful harmony with things?
Being identified with our brain’s labels. Instead of seeing things as they are, in all their wordless nuance and wonder, we see them through the lens of our brain’s labels. Our brain’s labels don’t in fact match the world, so it’s no surprise that we bump into things.
So, what to do about our brain’s labels? How can we learn to be present with and in playful harmony with things? Here’s Chuang Tzu’s practical method:
Step 1. De-fuse from (de-identify with) the labels that your brain attaches to things. This frees you to see and be present with the isness of things. (See: The art of harmonising.)
Step 2. Get in touch with your felt sense of energy or spirit (your felt inclinations, urges, promptings), and allow this felt sense of energy or spirit to flow forth, like water navigating a terrain. This frees you to be in harmonious contact with the dynamic process of worldly change. (See: The cook and the ox.)
The cicada and the bird
Chuang Tzu uses the image of a tiny cicada to represent your chirping brain, this tiny brain of yours that theorises about this and that, and which labels things as being this and that. And he uses the image of a fantastically large bird—a bird whose back is countless thousands of miles across—to represent your field of consciousness. Like the wings of this fantastic bird, the wings of your consciousness span to the horizon.
Chuang Tzu is a little cicada who loves chirping with all the other cicadas. At the same time, he invites us to identify, not with the little cicada, but with the large bird. He invites you to identify, not with your chirping brain and its little thoughts and labels, but with your horizon-spanning field of consciousness. Why? Because when we do this, we experience being in playful harmony with the world.
We’re introduced to the cicada and the bird in the opening two stories of Chuang Tzu’s book:
The usefulness of a useless philosophy
Chuang Tzu’s philosophy is useless in the sense that you cannot use it to manipulate others into doing what you want them to do. For example: you cannot use it to implement a political agenda, or to get others to praise you, or obey you. His philosophy is, however, incredibly useful. You can use it as a vessel in which to wander at ease on the currents of the world.
Chuang Tzu discusses the usefulness of his useless philosophy in the following stories:
Taoism? Try instead, the path
Chuang Tzu is classified as a Taoist, but this can be misleading because Taoism means very different things to different people. There are Taoists who believe in supernatural abilities, disembodied spirits, immortal sages, elixirs of health and immortality—a philosophy the complete opposite of Chuang Tzu’s. There are robed Taoist priests, and High Priestesses, and Venerable Celestial Taoist Masters. Chuang Tzu would laugh at such posturing.
There is a type of Taoism that sees the world through complex systems of traditional Chinese psychological-physiological-architectural symbols and terminology. Think yin and yang, hexagrams, feng shui, dragons and tigers, acupuncture points and energy channels. Chuang Tzu doesn’t talk about any of that.
There is a type of Taoism that speaks of a metaphysical Tao, the unnameable mystery of mysteries, the Unmanifest and Source from which all manifest things arise. That’s the Tao of the very famous and popular Tao Te Ching. Make of that Tao what you will, but it is not the Tao of which Chuang Tzu speaks.
To the extent that it makes any sense to call Chuang Tzu a Taoist at all, it is to the extent that the word Tao can simply mean nature. Chuang Tzu’s philosophy is a philosophy about seeing and being aligned with the nature of things.
But really, the word Tao is just an abysmal failure of translation. In English we hear the word Tao and we think, Ooo, mysterious. But in Chinese this word is no more mysterious than, in English, the words ‘path’ and ‘way’. The Chinese don’t wax lyrical about some exotically foreign word ‘Tao’; they speak about ‘the path’, ‘the way’. What path? Well, each of the different Taoists I’ve just mentioned has a different philosophy in mind, but what they all have in common is this general metaphor: similar to how a path is a thing that we can walk on to navigate our way through a landscape, nature is a thing that we can align ourselves with to navigate our way through life.
For Chuang Tzu, the path (nature; the tao) is the presenting isness of things. He writes about how our brain’s labels blind us, how they prevent us from seeing the path (nature; the surface isness of things). Instead of seeing things as they are, in all their wordless nuance and wonder, we see them through the lens of our brain’s labels. Instead of seeing and walking the path, instead of being immersed in and in direct contact with the world, we are lost in a dream of labels. Our brain’s labels don’t in fact match the world, so it’s no surprise that we bump into things.
Chuang Tzu’s solution to this problem is to de-fuse from (de-identify with) your brain’s labels so that you can see the path (the presenting isness of things), get in touch with your felt sense of spirit or energy, and allow your felt sense of spirit or energy to effortlessly navigate things. (See: The art of harmonising and The cook and the ox. Also, When the springs dry up.)
Freedom
For most of us, freedom means being free to do what we want. Vote, speak, move about, touch so-and-so, carry a gun. To the extent that we can do what we want, we are free. But as the Stoics point out, this is a very limited notion of freedom. There are always vast swathes of the world that simply do not comply with our will. For various reasons, we often find that we are not free to vote, or speak, or go where we want to go, or touch who we want to touch, or carry a gun. Almost everywhere we look, we lack freedom, we are constrained.
Like the Stoics, Chuang Tzu shows us a different sort of freedom: an unconstrained freedom that is always available to us.
For Chuang Tzu, freedom means being free from constraint. He points out that if you are present with the isness of things and go along with change, then nothing constrains you. (See: Mounting the world as your chariot.)
This sort of freedom is available to you right now. It is available to you regardless of your worldly situation, for it does not depend on anything in the world; it depends only on your own frame of mind.
You might be thinking: That’s a big ‘if’. If I were present with the isness of things and going along with change—easier said than done!
Chuang Tzu provides a method for doing this. First, de-fuse from (de-identify with) the labels that your brain attaches to things. This frees you to see and be present with the isness of things. (See: The art of harmonising.) Second, get in touch with your felt sense of energy or spirit (your felt inclinations, urges, promptings), and allow this felt sense of energy or spirit to flow forth, like water navigating a terrain. This frees you to be in contact with the dynamic process of worldly change. (See: The cook and the ox.)
Notice how the concept of free will vanishes in Chuang Tzu’s philosophy. When you’ve de-fused from your brain’s labels and are in touch with your felt sense of energy or spirit, the question of choice doesn’t arise. Instead, you see that your responses to things arise of themselves, and in harmony with things. (See: Penumbra and Shadow.)
When you’ve found the freedom that Chuang Tzu describes, you see that free will really just means wilful. When we believe in free will, we cause ourselves and others no end of trouble. We make ourselves literally insane, like a man yelling at an empty boat to change its course. (See: Empty boats.)
Identity and change
The things we typically identify with include our body, beliefs, possessions, social status, achievements, and plans. This causes us no end of grief. When any of these things are not what we want them to be, we must feel that we are diminished. So we fight shamelessly to keep them, or to get them. We despair and rage when we lose them, or don’t have them.
Chuang Tzu has no interest in being impoverished. He’s all for enjoying his body, beliefs, possessions, social position, achievements, and plans. But he doesn’t identify with any of these things. He identifies with awareness, the here-and-now field of consciousness in which all the mere things of the world exist. And he identifies with energy—his felt sense of aliveness, his felt inclinations, urges, promptings—here-and-now engaging with the world. This frees him to be present with, and to playfully engage with, whatever circumstances he finds himself in.
In one way or another, all of Chuang Tzu’s stories are about freeing yourself from identifying with this and that thing, and thus freeing yourself to be fully present in the world and to go along with change. The following stories make the point particularly well:
The one-footed cripple Majestically Decrepit
Four friends facing death together
Insects that live in water don’t hate having to change ponds
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