Connection Is at the Heart of Zhuangzi's Healing: We Have Always Been Seeking Connection

Connection Is at the Heart of Zhuangzi Healing: We Have Always Been Searching for Connection

I. Connection Is the Answer to Healing an Existential Crisis and the Key to Zhuangzi Healing

Lacking a sense of connection means feeling fractured, estranged, alienated, lonely, abandoned, rejected, or invalidated. Add to this what Marx called objective “alienation”—alienation from the products of labor, the labor process, other people, and our human essence—and you have the existential crisis common among people today: loneliness, anxiety, confusion, and meaninglessness. See my earlier articles, “A Common Form of Confusion Among University Students: Existential Crisis” and “The Fundamental Contradictions Facing University Students.”

In earlier articles such as “An Overview of My Marx + Zhuangzi + Psychology Framework” and “How to Resolve Loneliness,” I systematically laid out the many kinds of connection we need: connection with ourselves, other people, society, history, the world, nature, and the universe. Of these, connection with ourselves is the most important, but probably also the hardest.

A lack of connection is a rupture; connection is oneness: realizing that we have always been one, that we have always been one with other people, history, the world, and nature. Connection and resonance on the same frequency bring high-frequency energy, like a flame passed from one generation to the next. Ultimately, we feel innate wholeness and the unity of humanity and nature. Connection is not a matter of seeking and hoarding out of scarcity; it is the fullness of our essential nature connecting with fullness, beauty, and peace.

Connecting with nature is the easiest, though even that is not so easy. See my earlier articles, “Why Hangzhou’s West Lake and Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park Are Less Healing for Me Than a Small County Town’s Park” and “Looking Back on My 35-Year Journey Away from and Back to Nature.”

Connecting with other people is difficult; relationships are a complex subject. My earlier article “Choosing Our Social Connections” offers a summary: choose relationships grounded in mutual appreciation, nourishment, and respect.

Connecting with society and history requires Marxism, a people-centered view of history, and a standpoint rooted in the people, so that we can see everyone’s innate wholeness. See “How to Connect with the Simple Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of People at the Bottom of Society” and “How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness.” This is what helps us break through our own petty-bourgeois karmic obstructions. See my earlier articles, “Petty-Bourgeois Malaise” and “The Small-Town Exam Ace Malaise.”

Psychological counseling emphasizes using consciousness to connect with the unconscious, and the therapist’s essential nature to connect with the client’s essential nature. Mind-body healing approaches emphasize connection with the body and feelings as their point of entry. The object relations and existential schools of psychology already recognize the importance of relationships and connection in theory. But without a Marxist framework, their understanding of other people, society, and the goodness of human nature remains insufficiently clear.

II. The Instinct for Self-Rescue Behind Everyone’s Struggles and Explorations

After returning to Shanghai from Yunnan, I could see my past self more clearly, along with everyone’s instinct for self-rescue and their attempts to save themselves.

I previously wrote “Innate Wholeness: What Poison Drives Us to Seek Outside Ourselves?” Over the past two years, I have often reflected on how deeply people are burdened by karmic obstructions, which drive us to seek outside ourselves in misguided ways. But people are also seeking positive things “outside” themselves.

Back in Shanghai, I revisited places I had frequented more than two years earlier: Century Park, the area around my residential community, and the banks of the Huangpu River. I connected with the person I was then, who had walked, cycled, thought, and read in these places again and again. I saw that my past self had actually been searching for connection all along.

Like someone stranded on a deserted island, frantically holding up a phone and a radio to search for a signal, lighting fires and sending up smoke. We have always been searching for a channel, for high frequencies and high energy. Our deeper feelings and perceptions have been actively at work all along, picking up fleeting signals.

The libido has been working to save itself all along. We have always been instinctively searching for connection, even though our minds have lacked a clear awareness or theory of it. See my earlier libido series, including “My Structure: My Real Self Accompanies My Libido” and “My Inner Child Heals Me.”

I also became aware that I was still using a new ego—see “The Spiritual Practitioner’s Ego”—to belittle my past self, and that I had not fully worked through my past self-rejection.

The very act of seeking, feeling, and establishing a fleeting connection expresses the innate wholeness of our essential nature. Even in a chance moment of petting a cat, we can feel our own tender, childlike hearts.

That is why I am firmly committed to using the “Marx + Zhuangzi + Psychology” framework, and the light of essential nature, to serve as a radio station and a lighthouse. I know that you, too, are searching for high-frequency signals.

III. What Was I Searching for All Those Years?

All those years, I read so many books and watched so many films and television series. What was I searching for, and what did I find?

All those years, I watched 2,900 films and television shows. What was I searching for, and what did I find?

All those years, I spent what must have added up to months, or perhaps years, scrolling through web pages and my phone. What was I searching for, and what did I find?

All those years, I met so many people. What was I searching for, and what did I find?

All those years, I visited countless countries and cities. What was I searching for, and what did I find?

All those years, I explored countless corners of cities. What was I searching for, and what did I find?

Behind the search were scarcity and karmic obstructions, but also essential nature and self-rescue. The libido is itself a unity of contradictions. That is why effort is a false concept: the libido has been working on its own all along. Always on the road, always evolving.

On that journey of exploration, I cried countless times, laughed countless times, and slapped my thigh in recognition countless times. Countless times, I felt pain, confusion, and self-blame.

In books, I encountered people and deeds that moved me and were full of energy: Commander Peng, Marx, Engels, Lenin, ordinary people, Zhuangzi, and Su Shi. Only after developing a people-centered view of history could I see beyond historical narratives centered on emperors, generals, ministers, and heroes to ordinary people, each a vivid, living individual.

On my travels, I encountered people and deeds that moved me and were full of energy, and all kinds of ways of living. Most important were the simple common people, the simple ordinary people. Then, in certain moments, I saw myself, attended to myself, and showed myself understanding. Only after seeing all living beings was I willing to see myself and accept my own ordinariness, limitations, and dark side.

Wang Anshi: “I have read ten thousand volumes and come to know all the principles under heaven. The wise know for themselves; among the foolish, who will believe you? How remarkable, the untroubled seeker of the Way, who steps beyond the three propositions. Alone, he awakens to his own root; it does not arise from anywhere else.”

At the end of my searching, I finally discovered that our essential nature possesses innate wholeness, neither increasing nor decreasing, neither defiled nor pure. When all things are seen as equal, life unfolds; all things and I are one.

There has always been completeness; this very moment is the other shore. Only when we see that the mind itself is Buddha do we find the Buddha we sought. Only when we stop searching for the other shore do we arrive there.

IV. Connecting with Ourselves Is Hard

When we are impatient to go somewhere far away, we are often fleeing ourselves. We are fleeing more than our circumstances, the present, ordinariness, and pain. We dislike ourselves, loathe ourselves, blame ourselves, hate ourselves. One group of egos has had enough of the other egos.

When students escape school and duck into an internet café, or office workers escape their desks and retreat into the restroom to open their phones, we use some dimensions to escape other dimensions, and to escape ourselves.

I previously wrote “Be Grateful to Your Past Self, Be Grateful to Your Present Self” and “I Look Up at the Sky, and My Future Self Is Gazing Gently at My Present Self.” Over these past few years, my growth and the inner practice I use in real life have centered on being able to connect with my past self. To say to that past self, with feeling: It has not been easy, searching all this way. Congratulations. You found it.

Give yourself a hug. I am so much stronger than I used to be. I have already become the strong person you imagined. I have come to bring you home.

How hard it is to connect with ourselves. We are the only eyewitnesses to our past selves, yet we keep refusing to appear in court to testify on our own behalf, always feeling that the day was dim and hazy, and we never got a clear look at the culprit.

I previously wrote a series on acceptance, including “Accepting Karmic Obstructions,” “Accepting Ordinariness,” and “How to Resolve Feelings of Inferiority About Your Educational Credentials.” Acceptance is crucial.

That day, I did not stay by the Huangpu River for very long. A voice inside said: There is no need to force a connection with the Huangpu River. This is not an assignment. See my earlier article, “A New Ego: The Assignment-Doer’s Ego.” Go home and connect with yourself. You are the most important landscape of your life.

V. Gratitude to Yunnan, My Second Home

I am grateful for the beautiful nature, comfortable climate, low living costs and modest material desires, and simple common people—for this high-energy, positive, abundant field of energy. A blessed haven: parched as I was, I found this oasis. It accepted me and gave me a place to be. Wherever this heart is at peace is my home.

It welcomed and bore witness to my rebirth. An overgrown infant born after a difficult labor. Once, I felt like an infant abandoned by the world. Now, I know that we are all children of the universe.

I am grateful for the harmony and beauty of the universe. The great Way needs no acclaim; great beauty speaks no words. I, too, have always been part of this beauty.