I love to think in metaphors. For some reason, and especially for thick heads like mine, they seem to go deeper than simply reading a literal explanation of something.
It becomes funny, when you start making metaphors about metaphors. And this is one of them.
The one you read in the title is about the metaphor in Taoism where Lao Tzu says it’s futile to try to control the world.
“The wish to grasp the world and control it – I see its futility. The world is a spiritlike vessel; it cannot be controlled. One who would control it would ruin it; one who would grasp it would lose it.” – Tao Te Ching
He’s talking about how by forcing the world, or better said life events, to conform to your wishes, what will happen is you’ll ruin it.
So the most obvious way to unpack this quote is to sort of let the world do its own thing by understanding it’s so spirit like, or I rather like to say to understand the inconceivable complexity it inherently has, it’s better not to even try to force our will on it.
Not only would we not achieve our goals but we’d rather completely lose our grip on them.
Then the question arises, what to do then. Of course we live in a modern society where we need to sometimes exert extreme amounts of mental and physical force to be able to accomplish difficult tasks.
Should we then rather not do it at all? Should be we gentler?
One of the ways I like to look at it recently is that in order to live optimally with this “spiritlike vessel”, the world, all I should actually be is a conduit for everything that wants to happen by itself.
So now we’ve come to it, we’re using a metaphor to explain a metaphor.
A conduit is generally understood as a tube, a channel, through which things flow.
Therefore we can look at ourselves like that. Just helping things flow that want to flow by themselves.
So another question immediately arises. How can I be as effective conduit as possible?
If your goal in your life is to be the most effective conduit for things that want to happen by themselves, then this can not mean forcing something out of the world that’s in a way not on your way (your Tao).
It can mean you need to position your self physically in the world and also do the necessary changes in your mind that will allow you to go with it fully when it wants to happen and not block it for even a bit.
If you’re a conduit for what wants to happen by itself, then being rejected in any capacity – for a job, a business proposition, by a friend or in a dating context, wouldn’t bring you any internal suffering. It obviously didn’t want to happen by itself.
But when you get a nudge that something is happening, a random invite, a quick and odd suggestion from someone or simply an internal idea – then let’s explore it without discrimination and see where it takes us.
In other words, we start giving value to events and goals that are on our way, and by this we unburden ourselves from wishing if things happened another way or reminiscing on why something didn’t happen how we wanted it to: because if we wanted to force it, it wouldn’t ever happen the way we wanted, and if it would, by some coincidence happen, it wouldn’t be worth anything in the end.
Imagine forcing your friend to go to watch a movie with you – usually we can’t force people to do something they don’t want, but when we do, they’re grumpy and naturally complain about it, since they didn’t want to be there in the first place.
We tend to intuitively understand this principle when it comes to people, but for some reason we disregard it when it comes to everything else.
Another benefit is, when we’re simply helping the things to be what they naturally want to be, that we become hyper-responsive to the world.
In a world as complex as ours rigidity is one of the least useful traits.
Rigidity sometimes also means we’re trapped by our own ideas and don’t want to let them go due to the strong emotional dependence we’ve created for them.
This kind of thinking simply can’t exist in a mind that sees itself as a conduit.
I’ve tried something, I’ve given it my best, I’ve tried getting help and it’s still not working? Okay, let’s change our course. There’s no “I’ve failed so I’m a failure.”, because if it’s not happening all I can think about is: “What else would I be a better conduit for then?”
This is a higher level thinking because it’s like a frame that encompasses other thought processes and doesn’t allow them to become irrational.
You can play around with scenarios in your mind and do a test run, and you’ll see it’s almost impossible to act irrationally with this frame in mind.
I go in much more depth on this topic in my book Treasure Of Tao. You can get the first chapter here.