Brave certainty rules in killing
Brave hesitation rules in living
These both either benefit or harm
Nature’s ruthlessness, who knows its cause.
Nature’s way never contending, yet adept in victory.
Never speaking, yet adept in answering
Never sent for, yet there from the beginning.
Indulgent, yet adept in planning
Nature’s net is vast and thin, yet never misses.
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Word for Word
Limits: Translations, even the nearly literal one above, lose some of the original meaning due to the cultural context of contemporary words. Studying the numerous synonym-like meanings of the Chinese characters in the Word-for-Word translation mitigates this.
Fourth Pass: Chapter of the Month
(pandemic era)
Archive: Characters and past commentary
Zoom on YouTube Recordings:
https://youtu.be/Gwu6lrEQvUM is the link to the Zoom video of this month’s Sunday meeting. The shorter first part of the meeting begins with a chapter reading followed by attendees’ commentary, if any. A little later on begins the longer open discussion part of the meeting when those who wish to discuss how the chapter relates to their personal experience.
Corrections?
None this time.
Reflections:
Brave certainty rules in killing
Brave hesitation rules in living
These both either benefit or harm
Brave certainty is a kind of total focus. For example, a hawk employs brave certainty when diving in for a kill. You can see this singular oneness of focused action in all wild animals. Of course, humans also experience this, but our ability to over think the moment’s reality often gets in the way. Perhaps that is why human culture greatly admires feats of focused action in sports, music, dance, and such. In fact, isn’t all action essentially a killing of sorts. Action displaces—kills—the status quo. Action creates space for change. This begs the question, what is non–brave certainty? A wanton arrogant kind of certainty, I suppose.
Perhaps inquiring into non-brave hesitation can tell us something. Non-brave hesitation feels to me like a complete submission to fear. Conversely, feeling fear yet facing it and moving forward in life, but not too quickly. feels akin to brave hesitation. Feeling the urge to act now, but waiting until the right moment would be brave patience—brave hesitation.
These both either benefit or harm
Feeling fear and yet facing it also draws on brave certainty. Mind you, I’m referring to the subtle constant fear—entropy—all living things experience (see Fear is the Bottom Line). Conversely, feeling the need to act now and yet waiting for the optimum moment to ‘strike’ draws on brave hesitation. Even so, like yin and yang, certainty and hesitation are the extremes. It is bravery that connects them. It’s the common denominator. Life is about finding the balance between the extremes. Greater balance results in more benefit. Less balance results in more harm.
So, I guess that begs the question, what is bravery… really? In a way, the idea of bravery smacks of free will, as though one can choose to be brave. Surely, that’s just not possible. See Free Will: Fact or Wishful Thinking? Inquiring deeply here feels problematic. Yet, any quandary resolves itself somewhat when I notice how wisdom is an important aspect of bravery. And ego is the main impediment to wisdom. Putting yourself first, above all else, is neither wise nor brave. And age has a lot to do with how intensely one puts themselves first above all else. The younger we are the more likely we are to put ourselves—our needs and fears—above all else. Thus, wisdom and bravery are both contingent upon life experience.
Nature’s ruthlessness, who knows its cause.
Nature’s way never contending, yet adept in victory.
Chapter 5 sheds another light on nature’s ruthlessness…
Chapter 5 doesn’t say anything about the causes, but it helps shed more light on the idea of never contending. Contending requires a need to win over a challenger, an opponent. Clearly, nature has no opponent… profound sameness rules.
The first three lines of this chapter offer a balanced view of the two main polls of life—certainty and hesitation. In reality, these share a profound sameness—they’re dynamically linked. Interestingly, the rest of the chapter feels somewhat biased toward the hesitation side of life’s coin. Surely, this is because our species is overly enamored by the brave certainty—heroic—side. Why?
Brave certainty counterbalances the outsized role fear plays in our response to circumstances. This role is a result of how fear influences imagination, which is not the case for any other animal. Other animals fear what they fear in the moment, contingent on the circumstances right ‘now’. Humans can, and do, carry around imagined uncertainties and fears all their lives, which has an artificially inhibiting role in life. Hence the glorification of brave certainty, and more particularly, the ideal that one can choose to be brave.
Brave hesitation, on the other hand, is more akin to never contending, yet adept in victory. Of the two, brave hesitation is more akin to the way of nature I feel.
Never speaking, yet adept in answering
Never sent for, yet there from the beginning.
Never speaking, never sent for, and never contending have a more anonymous and subtle quality to them. These all share much in common with brave hesitation. Certainly, nature employs both sides of reality’s coin, but the side we see easiest is the brave certainty—action—side of the equation. For humanity, the secret to increasing emotional balance lies in becoming more aware and respectful of the female brave hesitation side of life. That aspect truly rules in living.
Indulgent, yet adept in planning
Nature’s net is vast and thin, yet never misses.
These final two lines align closely with the brave hesitation side of nature. The remarkable thing about existence lies in how well it all seems to work out, yet there is no one in charge of planning. Nature doesn’t “personally” care, yet it all goes according to plan. Plan… what plan?
The question, ‘what plan?’ may explain the human need for a creator of sorts. If reality appears to run fairly smoothly, and we have the concept of planning vs. spontaneous, it is natural to imagine there is a planner in charge of the whole thing. We feel that it can’t just be random and spontaneous, for those words represent action without purpose. That is anathema to life. If nothing else, we feel the purpose of life is to not die, or at least not die before we’ve passed on our genetic information. Nature, on the other hand, has a more mysterious ‘plan’ as chapter 4 appears to suggest…
Nature’s net is vast and thin, yet never misses alludes to the extremely subtle influence nature has over the whole of life. In fact, it is so vast and thin—so subtle—that we are certain that we are individuals (the “illusion of self” as described in Buddha’s Four Noble Truths) and that we are in control of our life’s actions (free will). We only notice the circumstances that evoke emotions—fear and need—and little else. Simply put, emotions blind us to the vast and thin net that pervades ever facet of our life. Nature is much more profound than we can comprehend, and so we fall back on names and thought in order to feel we have it nailed down.
Exploring thought, the illusion of self and free will
All animals have an innate visceral sense of self. The human idea of self, or as Buddha called it, “the illusion of self” is simply an emergent property of this universal intuitive self-sense. Thought can’t help but imagine a self in charge of itself. Our sense of ‘free will’ is simply an offshoot of this ‘illusion of self’.
Obviously then, Buddha’s view “the illusion of self originates and manifests itself in a cleaving to things” is not the actual origin of this illusion. However, our cleaving to things certainly bolsters and sustains this illusion. Indeed, cleaving to a belief in an individual self becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, the reality I think I experience becomes my virtual reality. Only by realizing I don’t know, can I pop that bubble. As chapter 71 warns us, Realizing I don’t know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease.
Obviously, just like any animal, humans have an instinctive urge to be in command of their circumstances. Our belief in free choice—free will—is the natural outcome of our ability to think. In feeling quite certain that we “know”, the innate sense of self, which is common to all animals, naturally drives human thought to create stories about our unique ability to choose and thus be responsible for our actions. In sharp contrast to this is the general belief that no other animal, including young human children, have such agency. We believe free will to be a special feature of humanity. Dare I say, our free will belief is just one outcome of a disease unique to thinking animals, i.e., chapter 71’s words of warning. Deeply realizing I don’t know makes any notion of free will ludicrous. And yet…
Naturally the mind can’t help but create and /or take on stories. After all, deep-seated emotion drives cognition deeply. For example, when you feel angry, you think angry thoughts. Interestingly, the stories we embrace are the ones that suit (resonate best with) our emotional landscape. That landscape often changes as we mature through losses we incur over our lifetime. As chapter 40 notes so succinctly, Loss through death, of the way uses. As we mature, the story that resonates with our intuitive and emotional sense of life changes accordingly… yet it’s still just another story. Again, chapter 71 warns us to be wary of the plastic and relative nature of all thought’s stories. Essentially, believing our story to be True is a symptom of the disease chapter 71 refers to. Yet, the mind can’t help but abide the stories that suit one’s emotional landscape. What is one to do?
The answer is simple. Avoid putting all your emotional eggs in your preferred thought basket. This means not placing total trust in any belief what so ever. Always keep open the possibility of another story that may suit your current nature better. Do you notice the serious hitch here? If we have no free will, how can we choose to avoid putting all our emotional eggs in one basket?
Actually, it is not necessary to avoid anything in particular. We emotionally need the story we need—period. It really comes down to how much faith and trust you want to put in your story. Obviously, the less the better, which means this is a gradual process of realization. It is life’s journey to maturity.
Personally speaking, I embrace, albeit tentatively (i.e., chapter 71) the story that shows how both the ideas of ‘self’ and ‘free will’ are simply emergent cognitive properties of innate animal instinct—they are mirages of the mind. The benefit of embracing this story lies in how it minimizes my mind’s ability to make judgments about others or myself. I can’t play the blame game any longer. This is deeply liberating, although it does come with a cost. Namely, I can no longer claim any merit for the actions of others or myself… no credit and no blame. Clearly then, any need to assign merit to one’s self or others precludes the ability to bring free will’s credit vs. blame game to an end.
Chapter Archive https://youtu.be/DEhCLqB4rwo
This is the complete video. It begins with blowing Zen followed by the meeting
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