Chapter 56 is blunt about it:
Knowing not speak; speaking not know.
Subdue its sharpness, untie its tangles,
Soften its brightness, be the same as dust.
This is called profound sameness.
That first line — knowing not speak; speaking not know — reasonably extends to writing and thinking as well. Isn’t speech just giving voice to one’s emotions and thoughts? And for humans, writing is just another form of speech.
Emotion Drives Thought
Seagulls are emotional just like humans. They exhibit anger, fear, need, social bonding. These emotions instigate action in both seagulls and humans. In humans, emotions also instigate and influence thought. This is problematic on several levels. Chapter 71 sums up the problem directly: Realizing I don’t know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease.
Any certainty of belief feeds back into our emotions, amplifies them, which then easily triggers overreaction and stress. It can quickly become a vicious circle. The more certain we are, the more emotional the defense of that certainty, the less we are able to see anything beyond it. Certainty is both a fortress that lends a sense of security for the self, and a prison that keeps the self’s perception locked safely behind its walls. A measure of certainty in the moment keeps an animal steady and on course in a changing world. But certainty beyond what is needed for current real stability becomes dangerous, as it blinds any animal — including humans — to the subtle realities on the horizons of perception.
Fear, Need, Emotion, Instinct
Because I refer to these often, it helps to say briefly what I mean by each.
Fear and Need — I use these terms in the broadest possible sense, to convey the primal biological driving forces of life. Feeling need attracts us toward what ostensibly facilitates survival. Feeling fear repels us from what ostensibly hinders it. Both are often below the threshold of thought. They only evoke conscious thinking once they pass some relative threshold of awareness. After many decades I finally realized that fear is the lynchpin of need. The admittedly subtle sense of insecurity, lack, chance of loss or failure, triggers needs which propel action to answer that subtle silent fear.
Emotion — I use this as broadly as possible to differentiate feeling from thinking. This includes all the experiences, conscious or otherwise, that we are unable to adequately describe through language or portray artistically. Chapter 14 hints at this: This is called the without of shape form, the without of matter shape.
Instinct — We commonly think instinct pertains mostly to animals, as their means of making choices in life. We, on the other hand, believe we have free will and thus operate outside the bounds of instinct. This is more wishful thinking than actuality. Instinct is something innate — along the lines of fear, need, and emotion — and is the biological bedrock upon which all we perceive and act upon originates.
Profound Sameness Cripples Certainty
One’s awareness of profound sameness within each flowing moment results in knowing not speak. Conversely, awareness of differences — names, words, distinctions — naturally results in speaking not know. Typically, our awareness in each moment is a blend of past, present, and future cognitive dynamics. In contrast, the ghostly awareness of profound sameness is by definition inexplicable: the name possible to express runs counter to the constant name. When profound sameness floods perception, past, present, and future blend into an eternal now. Here, knowing can’t speak, think, or write — life just flows.
Why Speaking and Writing Happen at All
Given how thoroughly emotion drives thought, the question arises: why does anyone — and in particular me — speak or write about these things in the first place? The deep social element of speech has nothing inherently to do with knowing. People talk, dogs bark, birds chirp. The innate need to communicate — emotion — is what actually drives speech and writing. The urge to help, to tell a story, to call out a warning. At a deeper level, speech and writing may also be an attempt to convince ourselves — a kind of talking to ourselves aloud.
There is also this, which took me years to fully swallow: we can only really understand what we already intuitively know. Thought leapfrogs reality and cannot fully grasp its subtler aspects. Only years of lived experience can — and even that intuitive knowing is often below the horizon of thought, subliminal. This means that much of what passes for learning is actually a human-see-human-do form of mimicry, awaiting the arrival of genuine intuitive knowing later in life. It also means that speaking and writing fall largely on deaf ears until the listener is naturally able to recognize what is being pointed at. You can’t hand someone an insight. You can only point in its direction and allow their own experience to eventually resonate with it — or not.
So it is deeply true that, as chapter 56 puts it, knowing not speak; speaking not know. I am only telling a story that my lifetime of experience has helped write. I do so to be helpful to any who find what I say helpful, to understand my own perceptions as objects to inspect, challenge, and refine, and probably mostly because it offers me a sense of connection that, if I were a firm believer in and follower of a religion, I would have no need to seek.
Where This Leaves Us
Writing these observations down helps flesh out views that fall outside the mainstream paradigm. That can feel unsettling at times. On balance, seeing life from other angles is healthful, not heretical — at least until a particular view begins to threaten someone’s sacred cow. At that point, need, fear, and emotion carry the day. That is not a criticism. It is simply the chain — biological cause and effect — running as it always does.
If these three essays have pointed somewhere useful, the rest of CenterTao.org explores these ideas further — the biology of fear and need, the evolutionary roots of the self, and the practical question of what to actually do with any of this understanding. The exploration is the point. The questions raised are the treasures that carry us to the next moment of life. Answers only trigger deeper questions, as long as certainty doesn’t stifle the mind. In other words, there is no arrival, nothing to accomplish, no end in sight. If you can find comfort in natural uncertainty, then you can enjoy the flow.