Release Junk from Your Life (Tao Te Ching 48)
48
Seek academic knowledge
and you can accumulate facts
day by day.
Seek the wisdom of the Tao
and you’ll release junk from your life,
day by day.
Let go of more and more so you can surf the Tao.
Surfing the Tao allows you
to accomplish anything
without forcing everything.
If you want to flourish in the world
don’t try to control the world.
Indeed, if you try to control the world
you aren’t ready to flourish in it.
Written Reflection
The melancholic Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once told a story about a fellow who had been labeled crazy by the authorities and confined to an insane asylum. Thinking himself to not be crazy, this patient decided to escape from his institution and head into the big city. As he walked, he wondered how he might immediately convince people he met that he was not crazy. He didn’t want to go back to the asylum after all. Along the road, he noticed a rubber ball that had been left behind, probably by some children. He picked up the ball and put it into his back jacket pocket (they had those in coat-tails back then). He was probably pretty proud of himself and his ingenuity as his scheme worked: as he walked, the ball would swing into him, bump him, and remind him of something scientific.
“Boom. The world is round.”
Awkward conversation? Need a talking point that sane, intelligent people will agree with?
“Boom. The world is round.”
You can surely see how this poor guy was misguided. In thinking the key to sanity was scientific facts, he betrayed his own mental health condition. Facts alone do not bring wisdom. But, according to this chapter, the wise know there is something better than accumulating mere facts—stripping down to the natural reality that is before us, if we have eyes to see.
What is this wisdom: the removal of accumulated junk of all kinds. While most of us complain about what we don’t have most of the time, the extra stuff to which we are addicted is often precisely what is killing us. Money. Power. Glory. Addictions. The idols of our lives are demanding and bad for our health.
It’s funny how obvious this is. And yet I [Jeff] rarely heard this wisdom from our elders growing up in our religious circles. We were told to pack our minds full of theology. Notes in the margins of Bibles was more important than spending silent reflective time thinking about what revolutionary work those words could do upon our minds.
This is why I ended up studying theology as an undergrad. I wanted to be sure to pack as much knowledge about God as I could into my noggin. It felt good. I felt accomplished. Yet God seemed to alternate between being horrifying and impotent, according to the formulations with which I played. Somewhere subconsciously I knew, and suspect many other Christian intellectuals know at times: that the way many fundamentalists describe the nature of things heavenly and earthly seems rather infantile at times, but in the bad sense.
By the “bad sense” I’m thinking of my time around the world with Christian groups trying to talk with people who sometimes have sophisticated understandings of their own spiritual or religious traditions. Too often, I’ve seen well meaning evangelical teens trying to sell folks fourth grade wisdom to gentlemen who are several layers deep into the best sages of their own tradition. Surely, some of them feel like they are shilling something that hasn’t quite worked to bring them peace.
Moreover, many of the young people I’ve talked with who walked away from affiliation with a Christian church have cited that the reason they bailed was that the leaders couldn’t stop bickering about uncertain and irrelevant issues, at least that was how they saw it. In my circles, any time a young person raised their hand and asked why these debates mattered, they were often chided for asking the question. To be sure, I was one of the kids who loved a good debate about ideas. But so are many of the students who’ve complained about religion in this regard. It’s not that they are put off by rabbinic-style wrangling or the banter between Confucians and Taoists. It’s that far too often the bitter fighting in conservative American Protestantism had become the essence of the faith itself.
So, this chapter starts by inviting us to strip down our accumulated facts and start to pare down our lives. It asks us not so much to sullenly let go of our favorite possessions as to joyfully focus on those most valued things, movements, and people and stop worrying so much about the rest of the junk. Minimalism, in this conception is not just good for you. It feels good.
Take it from us: it tastes good too. As I write, I’m well into our summer road life journey. As we’ve been focussing on produce and baked goods from local shops, we realize that focusing on a few great natural ingredients almost always beats store bought, processed food. And it can be less expensive. We’ve too long been distracted by the accoutrements and garnishes and forgot to rethink the main course.
There’s no formula to concoct for this sacred supper. Just eat real food. Share it with those you love. This is what Lao Tzu would agree is what it means to flourish.
And of course, we have to reshare this when talking about scaling back and clearing out the junk: