Our need for the answer plays a core role in our disease. And the connection between food and this need for answers reveals why. For a hungry empty stomach, food is the ‘answer’. For a curious empty mind, answers are the food it seeks. The promise of food, and by extension answers, attracts us like moths to light. Biology biases us to favor answers over questions, food over hunger. Indeed, questions are the unknown that can quickly terrify us and push us to grasp for any answer that fulfills. This naturally produces the disease that chapter 71 reveals.
We grasp for any answer to fill our mind’s space, especially if we lack a sufficient sense of intuitive connection. Much of our intuitive sense of connection in the world deepens as we mature, (i.e., We only understand what we intuitively know, p.254). This is one reason why children soak up experience and why it’s harder to teach old dogs new tricks. In addition, the deep intimate social connection common in ancestral times is not sufficient in civilized circumstances, making us all the hungrier for friends, both literally and figuratively… yes, answers are among our dearest friends.
Where does desire fit into all this? Desire is the hungry urge to fill up the emptiness, whether food to satiate hunger, friends to satiate loneliness, or answers to satiate uncertainty. Desire drives the journey from empty to full, question to answer, problem to solution. Fasting and meditation are two spiritual practices that help push back on the incessant urge to fill the space. As chapter 16 begins, Devote effort to emptiness, sincerely watch stillness. Done with some consistency, chapter 16 ends with this desired result: The way therefore long enduring, nearly rising beyond oneself. In a sense, we learn to sit with the unknown… even embrace it.
Hunger and the ‘more is better’ instinct
I’ve long felt that our inclination of feeling ‘more is better’ was instinctive. Google [People systematically overlook subtractive changes] for recent research that proves this is the case. This ties up a few loose ends when you think about it. What is desire, for example, but the urge for more? In the wild, hunger drives us to get food, and the urge to get more of it would be a beneficial instinct. Only in civilization can we get to accumulate more and more without apparent end. Thus, only in civilization is the idea ‘less is more’ or devote effort to emptiness make any sense. In a way, the main thrust of the Tao Te Ching is a push back on this ‘more is better’ instinct now run amuck.