Wu Wei | Hacker News Reader

Wu Wei

zettl.blog

40 pointsfreediver17 comments

Open articleView on HN

There is this concept of the "Four stages of competence":

- unconscious incompetence

- conscious incompetence

- conscious competence

- unconscious competence

At first you are unable to do something, but you don't even know it. Then you learn about your incompetence and begin to work on it. Eventually due to conscious effort you achieve conscious competence. Doing it long enough you don't need to spend conscious effort to be competent - you just do it, and you do it well.

I think this unconscious competence is very similar to Wu Wei.

This tracks roughly with the 4 categories of unknown and know, as in the Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns". To me the most interesting is the "unknown knowns", those ephemeral things you know but don't consciously think about that knowledge until it's pointed out, like the ability of native language speakers to stack adjectives in just the right order (e.g. "big old yellow ball"). For most people this is one of our unconscious competences, though I'm not sure it ever passed through a period of conscious effort to get there.

>For a long time, the West has accused the Chinese of being lazy because of misinterpreting this term.

This statement struck me as odd. Interesting contrast to what I experienced as a kid growing up I guess, since I’ve never heard this before. I always heard the way asshole kids talked about Chinese kids was to make fun of how hard they worked (same way they made fun of the Mexicans like me) and how they weren’t allowed to talk to girls or something like that. I remember feeling like “yeah I know it’s weird man, they say the same crap to me. How is being hard working an insult?” I blame it on my autism for not understanding at the time. I didn’t know how creative assholes could be.

>For Zhuangzi, the concept of Wu Wei was not just a way of acting, but a way of BEING.

Snoop said something similar:

~It's not just a dance, it's a way a' living. Now if ya C-Walking, ya best to "see" Crippin'~

Great minds…

> Great minds...

Fo' shizzle.

I also think of these lines when I read the Zhuangzi, and it's message to stay grounded in reality and not to over-intellectualize (not to say that's is only message).

    I don't have time for your petty thinking mind,
    Son, I'm bigger than [that]

Mobb Deep, "Shook Ones Pt. 2"

    Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined

Nas, "NY State of Mind"

On a second reading, I do think substituting "[that]" for "...those that pack heat, but are scared to hold" is forced enough to be a misquotation. I was mostly joking, but as far as that factually quote from the song, I retract that.

I can say that in all the reading I've done about Taoism, I've never seen this accusation. I bet OP can't name 3 examples of blaming wu-wei, by name, for 'Chinese laziness', which span at least 3 decades (much less 'for a long time').

The article quotes a story from the Zhuangzi. Here's a free audiobook of the first 7 chapters (the "Inner Chapters") of the Watson translation on YouTube.

I quite like this translation, and I think this voice actor reads it well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCQYEeHlXOY [2 hours]

It's fun to compare the story of the cook with the renaissance concept of Sprezzatura - the art of doing hard things, while making it look effortless, so as to attract the attention of the ruler.

I really like how they combine art and these concepts. They deserve imagery and are hard to visualize without them.

Alan Watts has a number of talks on Wu Wei and visualizations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeD3wS4fGEY

Additionally the metaphor through "The Tao of Pooh" does a great job as well.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Pooh

They might be Western bastardizations of what it really means, but they inspired me to write a take on it:

https://jondouglas.dev/youre-trying-too-hard/

Alan Watts talks are awesome, I often listen to them when dozing off, I'm sure I wake up feeling more refreshed when I do. Like some type of drug. I generally hate sleeping and going to bed, but listening to his talks on Taoism actually make me want to go to bed early and just "zen out" on them.

Wu wei is the natural state, where it's clear that no separate doer of the action ever existed.

Asian cultures are far more advanced spiritually. The concepts are so much deeper and refined.

Depends what you mean by spirituality. Ken Wilber describes a system of “wake up, grow up, clean up, show up.” In terms of the first dimension - awakening the mind to its true/original nature of non-dual awareness - easterners have far out-developed westerners in this regard. However in the other dimensions it’s less clear and possible to argue westerners are more developed in these other dimensions. For example in the East i don’t think you’ll find anything near Jung’s work and subsequent psychology for cleaning up. So it depends how you define spiritual advancement.

In Wilber’s system he describes the follies of advanced waking up without growing up (the many scandals re sex money & power), a thing that’s common in cultures that have spiritual gurus.

So you're saying they are deeper but incomplete. Interesting thought.

I don't know if I fully agree with that. It's more like they have a much stronger and more cohesive spiritual lineage to draw on, so that their starting point is where many of us find ourselves only after years of struggle.

Doesn't make it more right or better, and it doesn't by default mean that they are on the right path, only that it's more likely that they are.

Besides, taking your first step on the "right" path as a free action of your own heart is better and more valuable than a million years of knowledge carrying you towards enlightenment, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com