Innate Wholeness: What Poison Drives Us to "Seek" Outside Ourselves?
The essence of Zen: Do not seek outside yourself; you have innate wholeness.
The essence of Zhuangzi: Innate wholeness, without desires or demands.
Zen is clearly a prescription for intellectuals and people with “spiritual practice syndrome.” Zhuangzi is clearly more at ease with, and more confident in, innate wholeness. He takes this as his starting point and works backward to examine the whole world: What exactly harms our lives and our nature, making us scramble for petty gains and keep ourselves endlessly busy?
As children playing with pebbles and leaves beneath a tree, watching ants and butterflies, we were already good enough, whole, and peaceful. What made us feel “not good enough,” incomplete, and restless?
From elementary school to high school, there are only 3 years; from elementary school to university, only 6 years. What exactly happened to turn a group of energetic elementary school children into dejected, bewildered university students?
The first factor is clearly private ownership and the threat of starvation. This is the problem Marxism explains.
The second is the alienation of labor: alienation from the products of labor, the process of labor, other people, and our human essence. This is a problem that arises from private ownership.
The third is traumatic karmic obstructions.
- A toxic, harmful environment of object relations prevents the self from developing healthily, even leading to dissociation, collapse, toxic shame, and CPTSD.
- Inferiority, arrogance, and self-attack sever our relationship with ourselves, leaving us unable to love and care for ourselves, driving us to seek “omniscience and omnipotence” and force ourselves to “try even harder.”
- “Conditional” “love” makes us crave “love” and pursue the “conditions,” “high achievement,” and “omniscience and omnipotence.”
- An obsession with “changing” or “saving” our parents drives us to seek “omniscience and omnipotence.”
- Insecurity makes us seek “control,” pile on defenses, retreat into avoidance, and seek “omniscience and omnipotence.”
- Dependence on, worship of, and anxiety about intellectual knowledge drive us to seek omniscience and omnipotence.
- “Ability,” “effort,” and self-attack drive us to seek to “try even harder.”
- Existential karmic obstructions: loneliness, meaninglessness, freedom and responsibility, and death. These drive people to pursue high achievement, elite status, and omniscience and omnipotence, and to flee freedom, clinging to “divine” power and grand narratives.
So Zhuangzi invites us to accept being ordinary, limited, incapable, and non-striving; to accept our dark sides; and to abandon cleverness and renounce sagehood. Return to nature, make friends with plants, and see that we have always been a harmonious part of the universe, that all things are children of the universe.
The skillful toil, the wise worry; those without abilities eat their fill and roam at ease.
“Not Wanting to Work for Wages—Having Limited Abilities—Having No Capital—Facing Starvation: The Human Predicament, the Theme of Marx and Zhuangzi”:
The pursuit of ability and capital intensifies our anxiety and insecurity. Yet we forget that our original reason for pursuing ability and capital was to resolve that anxiety and insecurity. People become subordinates and slaves to the labor process, such as Taylorism, and the fruits of labor, capital.
Labor turns from human praxis into an individual prison. Ability turns from human agency in the philosophical sense into the reins and saddle placed on the individual (*Zhuangzi*, “Horses’ Hooves”).
Not wanting to work for wages—having limited abilities—having no capital—facing starvation: Marx and Zhuangzi deeply understood this tragic human fate. This is not an individual predicament; it is the human predicament.