The One You Feed - Edward Slingerland

Episode Date: May 5, 2015

This week we talk to Edward Slingerland about trying not to tryEdward Slingerland is a Professor of Asian Studies and Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia, and was educated at Princeton, Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of specialty include Chinese thought, comparative religion, cognitive science, and the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. In addition to over twenty academic journal articles in a range of fields, he has written several scholarly books, including What Science Offers the Humanities and a translation of the Analects of Confucius. His first book for a popular audience is called Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity In This Interview Ted and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.Trying not to try.The tension of trying to relax.The conscious mind vs the unconscious mind.The ancient secrets of Wu Wei.For more show notes visit our website  Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Dan HarrisMaria PopovaTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When you're trying to relax or you're trying to be happy and not think about things, the part of the brain you're trying to shut down is the part you're using to do the shutting down. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions

like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really no really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Edward Slingerland, Research Chair in

Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. Edward is also the Director of Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium, aka CERC, and the Co-Director for the Center of Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture. His new book is Trying Not to Try, The Art of Science and Spontaneity. Here's the interview. Hi, Ted. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm happy to have you on.

Your book, Trying Not to Try, Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity. I was really excited to read it, and I was excited to see that the Tao Te Ching is a part of it that you have in there often, which is a book that I have long been a fan of. And I thought your analysis of it was really interesting. And I also loved the line where you hazarded a guest that more joints have been rolled and incense burned in

the presence of that book than any other. Yeah, I don't have any references for that. It's speculation. Anything about a trade book, you can go out on a limb. I think it's a decent guess. I think it's a decent guess. Yeah. So we'll start with the parable like we always do. So our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather,

which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, well, with regard to the work I do, there's a lot of ways you can see this parable connecting with this paradox of how you try not to try. So you can think about at its most basic, this tension you have when you're not to try. So you can think about at its most basic, this tension you have when you're trying to relax, when you're trying to be spontaneous, is the conscious mind fighting with the unconscious mind. So you want to think of them as the two wolves. You've got the trying part of you that's commenting, it's giving you guidance, it's trying to get you to do things.

And then you've got your embodied mind. You've got your mind that actually knows how to do things, that's trying to take over, and that's the tension between them. I think you see this, I think the best way to understand the paradox is this game called Mind Ball that I talk about in the beginning of the book book where you're hooked up to an EEG monitor and you're trying to push a ball to the other end of the table. And the way you push it is by relaxing because the EEG monitor is picking up alpha and theta waves, which is what we produce when we're relaxed.

And when you're playing this game, you know that you can't try. You know that the way to win it is to let go of winning. And it really does feel as if there are two forces in you fighting for dominance. And one of them is the conscious mind saying, oh, look, the ball's rolling back towards you. What should you do? How do you relax? Oh, you're losing. What are you going to do? And there's a part of you that kind of knows how to relax that you need to focus on. So if you want to think of shifting your attention as a kind of feeding of the internal parts of yourself, I think that's one of the ways in which the way you resolve the tension and

the paradox of trying not to try is by feeding the embodied mind, the part of you that has the skills, has the ability, but needs to be released, if you want to think of it that way, from the clutches of the conscious mind. In your book, you describe a couple of thoughts or philosophies from ancient China. One is wu-wei, and the other is de. Could you maybe tell us briefly what those are in context to your book? And then I want to kind of cycle back to that idea of the unconscious and conscious mind and, and the way that, that, the, that ties to those two concepts. Right. So basically way literally means not, not doing or no doing or no trying

is sometimes translated as inaction. But I think that's too passive a translation because it's about a state where you lose a sense of yourself as an agent, you are relaxed, you don't feel as if you're exerting any effort, and yet everything works perfectly. So you're very skillful in the world, you move through it perfectly. So it's a little bit like being in, when athletes talk about being in the zone, it's kind of like that sort of state. So I translate it if I have to translate it as effortless action or spontaneity. So that's the spontaneity in the subtitle of the book. But it's not, it's, spontaneity is not a great translation because I think in English, it has a sense of almost recklessness, right, or irresponsibility.

So you kind of spontaneously decide to skip work and go to the beach or something. And this idea of wu-wei is in some ways the opposite. It's being perfectly engaged with the world and operating in a kind of peak efficiency, if you want to think of it in that sense. So then this idea of duh, unfortunately it's pronounced duh, maybe charismatic virtue is the best way to translate it, is a power you have when you're in a state of wu-wei. So when you're in wu-wei, you kick off this radiance that if you're a Confucian, it's what attracts people to you. So they want to follow you and you don't have to force them to follow you. They just want to follow you spontaneously. If you're a Taoist, it's what relaxes people and

kind of brings them back to naturalness. So, you know, your favorite book, the Tao Te Ching, the does the power that the Lao Tse and sage has that allows him to kind of bring everyone in the world back to naturalness. So it's a kind of charismatic traction force you kick off when you're in the state of wu-wei. You talk in the book about, and there's a number of other books recently that talk about this idea of, you know, maybe the fast mind and the slow mind or, you know, the, you call it the tacit hot system, and, you know, more of the explicit cold cognition, which is, you know, also another way of sort of the conscious versus a little bit more of the unconscious. Can you describe what those two systems are, how they work, and then you say

that the goal of wu-wei is to get those two working together yeah two systems working together yeah so the you know system so every psychologist has their own terminology for this so people call it system one system two hot versus cold explicit tacit everyone's got their own pet terminology uh i like hot and cold because it gives you this sense of the hot the hot system is fast it's it's all the things we know how to do without having to think about it so the hot system is fast. It's all the things we know how to do without having to think about it. So the hot system is things that are automatic. If you want to think about muscle memory or basal ganglia memory, really, it's stuff we know how to do without having to consciously think about it. And that's most of what we do. 90% of what we do in our daily

lives is run by these hot systems. But we also have this other system, so system two, cold, explicit cognition, which is this ability we have to stop, think. It involves reflection, so our ability to think about, well, is this a good thing to do? What are the consequences five days from now? How does this relate to other goals that I have? It also involves what psychologists call cognitive control. do? What are the consequences five days from now? How does this relate to other goals that I have?

It also involves what psychologists call cognitive control. So the ability to suppress one automatic reaction and replace it with another. So system two is important. It's a really, it evolved for a very good reason. Human beings, it's what allows us to be so adaptable and flexible in our behavior. But part of the point of the book is that one way to understand wu-wei is it's the integration of insights. We need the insights of system two. System two is what keeps us from just being kind of stupid, doing the same thing every time. We need system two to develop new skills and new desires and abilities. But you need to basically download what you figure out through system two onto your hot systems. That's what all of these early Chinese thinkers are trying to get you to do.

This transformed hot cognition, transformed system one, and the elephant being the unconscious and, and the idea of, you know, it's, I've heard it mostly referenced in the ideas of trying to make changes to habitual patterns or different things. And that, you know, that, that, that unconscious system of the elephant is so powerful that, and the rider has such a small amount of power in comparison that if you don't find, and you talk about this through the book, if you don't find a way to get that unconscious system or the elephant going in the same direction that the rider wants to go, that you meet with a lot of challenges. Yeah, I think John Haidt might be the one who popularized that metaphor. And it is his goal in doing so was to emphasize the difference in size. The rider is really small. Our conscious mind has very limited capacity. It's overloaded very easily. And I also walk people through some of the literature on what's sometimes called ego

depletion. So the fact that when you exert cognitive control, it gets depleted. You then are less able to exert it in the next moment. So if you exert cognitive control and focus on a really hard math problem, the next moment you're less able to resist cookies, even though you're on a diet. Your willpower gets depleted. And so any viable system where we're going to actually change our behavior has got to respect the elephant. It's got to take into account that we are this tiny rider and you're not going to make the elephant do something radically different than what the elephant wants to do, but you can guide it and you can nudge it in a certain direction. And the nice thing about the rider is it's farsighted enough that it can kind of see down the line how nudging the elephant a little bit every day can actually get it to i think you talk about in the book is similar to the

the more modern psychological concept of flow except that it's it's a it's a little bit broader than that it's it's a little bit more social and values based than that and we maybe we'll explore that a little bit later but that one of the keys to getting into that state is being able to essentially downregulate that conscious mind. You talk a little bit about some of the science around how exercise has the ability to sort of downregulate that very conscious mind, and that's why people tend to experience maybe that runner's high to a certain degree, And that's why people tend to experience maybe that runner's high to a certain degree, that sense of oneness, that sense of ease and peace with the world. You also talk about how there's science out there about the fact that if we think about and analyze things too much, that sort of rumination can actually impact our ability to experience and identify pleasure. Yeah. So this is, you know, there's a lot of work's been done on the paradoxical effect of conscious intentions. So there are a lot of goals

that we cannot pursue directly. So relaxation, happiness, attractiveness, the kind of creativity, I think is one of these as well. When you pursue them directly, they, they flee from you. And one of the things I talk about is why this would be so. And it's because it is directly, if you think about the two system nature of the human mind, when you're trying to relax or you're trying to be happy and not think about things you're, you're trying, you're the part of the brain you're trying to shut down is the part you're using to do the shutting down so it's like trying to dissemble a bicycle while you're riding on it it just it's it's directly paradoxical and so all of these

early chinese thinkers that i look at try to come up with ways to get around what is a paradox. And so, it's important to realize that it's a real paradox. If there was some kind of solution to it, it would just go away and there wouldn't be all this 2,500 years of religious debate about how to get into these spiritual states. So, the trick is how do you get around the paradox? And that's where the debates happen about, do you use meditative type techniques? Do you use a lot of training and hope the training falls away? Each of the thinkers has their own particular view on how you get around the central tension of using your conscious mind to shut itself down. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like...

Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the

answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really, no, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You talk mainly about three main teachers, Confucius, Lao Tse, did I say that correctly?

Yeah, Lao Tse. Lao Tse, and then Mencius. Mencius, and then also Zhuang Tse at the end, so the second Taoist thinker. So if we could maybe spend, you know, a brief time on the first couple. Mencius is, I found a lot of what was going on there resonated with a lot of things we talk about on the show. So maybe we'll dig a little bit deeper there. But let's start with Confucius. Yeah, so Confucius and also his later follower, Shunzi, at the end of the Warring States, was an externalist, what I call an externalist. So basically, and this is the classic Confucian strategy, which is how do you try not to try

what you try really hard. So it's about training. It's about using ritual training. So you immerse yourself in these religious rituals. You mentally immerse yourself in the classics. So you memorize these ancient classics and you spend time with fellow students and teachers discussing them. You play classical music. You do other cultural forms of dance and archery. And the idea is that

these are all going to reshape you, your inside, in a certain way. And in the beginning, it's going to involve conscious striving. You're going to have to try. You won't want to do it. It won't feel natural. But the claim is that if you do it for long enough, you'll eventually internalize it. You'll download it into that faster hot system, or the elephant will internalize it. Yeah, so you'll basically have a tame elephant. So if you work hard enough to get the elephant going in the right direction, it will eventually want to do it on its own. So the famous description of Confucius at age 70, he says, you know, he goes through all these stages. You know, I set my heart on learning, I did this and that. And then finally, he says at age 70, I could follow my heart's desires and never transgress the bounds of propriety. So he could do whatever came into his heart, mind, and yet it was all ritually perfect and morally perfect. So that's the Confucian strategy. And then you have Lao Tzu and the primitivist Taoist popping

up and saying, there's no way that's going to work. And the center of their critique is really, it's not necessarily exactly explicitly the way they put it, but I think it could be put this way, so you do your scales and you practice, that eventually it's going to be internalized. And the fact that it's not at first is not a problem. Everyone understands how skills are acquired over time. But when it comes to the way the Confucians and Taoists are pursuing it, it's really about moral skills. It's not about really being good at playing the piano. It's about being about moral skills. It's not about really being good at playing the piano. It's about being a good person. It's about being compassionate, being empathetic, being fair. And so there is a tension there. Actually, Aristotle identified this in the West

as well, this tension. He called it the disanalogy between crafts and virtues. But it's basically the case that, so if I'm playing the piano and I play a beautifully moving piece and you are moved to tears and you assume I'm feeling the same thing you're feeling, if you find out later that I wasn't feeling what you were feeling, I was actually thinking about how much money I was going to make. I'm looking out into the audience and thinking, oh wow, ticket sales are good. I'm going to make some money off this thing. It doesn't invalidate the performance. It was still a great performance. Virtues, though, are different. So if I see you doing something that seems compassionate,

so you give money to a homeless person, you help someone in need, and then I find out later that you did it because you saw me watching and you weren't motivated by compassion. You were motivated by wanting to impress me, it's no longer, it's invalidated. Your action is invalidated. It's no longer a virtue. So we have a very strong feeling that virtuous action requires the right internal motivation. And this is really the heart of what Laudz is worried about with the Confucian strategy, is that you train people how to be, so you have a bunch of people who aren't compassionate. So you get them to do these rituals that express compassion. You get them to read about compassionate people, great compassionate sage kings. You get them to play

compassionate music that expresses kind of longing and sorrow about the suffering of the people. But how is all that training ever going to take someone who doesn't feel compassionate and make them really feel it? And what Lao Tzu thinks is going to happen is you're going to get a bunch of fakers. You're going to get a bunch of people who can talk till the end of the day about compassion, but they don't actually have the real virtue. And so his argument is you got to stop trying. And actually trying is the problem. And if you could shut down your conscious mind and avoid entanglements with these Confucians and all their cultural forms and all this kind of hypocritical stuff they're trying to teach you, you can get back in touch with your really virtuous nature, which has always been there.

It's just been waiting for you to uncover it. And that's the Taoist strategy. It's kind of going back to nature and going back to some kind of original goodness. What I found really interesting reading your book about the Taoist strategy, and it's sort of the thing that, it's not my favorite book, but it's a book I certainly enjoyed and was inspired, is a lot of it is like, well, how? How do you do that? What do you do? How do you become of it is like, well, how? How do you do that? What do you do? How do you become that sort of thing? And the other thing I was struck by was how it felt to me a little bit like the Taoist side was that we are all inherently good, and civilization messes us up, which is also very much a Buddhist,

Buddha nature kind of thought. And then there's also, you go to the Western side, which is much more, at least from a Christianity perspective, we are bad, original sin, and we are cultured into being better, which is more the Confucian type ideal. And what I really liked about the Mencius part was that he seemed to have what seems to me, at least the view I take, which is that we've got some of all that in us, and it's a matter of, it's back to that parable. What are we cultivating? And so that's why I thought a lot of what Mencius was talking about struck like the right balance to me between those two things. Maybe you could share a little bit more about his approach. Yeah. So actually Mencius is the other place where I think the parable really applies to this early Chinese material, although not quite in the way Mencius intends. So he's an

interesting figure. So he's a Confucian. He's technically a Confucian. He thinks he's a follower of Confucius. But I argue in the book, and I think it's the case, that he's really trying to straddle both sides. So he's arguing, okay, we have this nature that's, how do we become compassionate if we're not already compassionate? It's because we have the sprouts of compassion inside of us. already compassionate, it's because we have the sprouts of compassion inside of us. And if we're careful and we pay attention to our feelings, we can identify these little sprouts of compassion. So there's a famous story where he interrogates this king, who's a famously evil king. He's oppressing his people. He likes to drink and hang out with his concubines and basically kill people. That's what he enjoys.

Kind of like my co-host here. Kind of like your co-host, yeah. So he says to him, you know, you can actually be a true Confucian king. And the king says, well, you obviously don't know me. Look at me. This is what I like to do. And then Mencius tells him the story that he heard from one of his ministers about him sparing the ox. And he walks him through what he was feeling. And the king basically admits it. It's a great dialogue through what he was feeling. And the king basically admits, it's a great dialogue. It's psychologically very rich because the king gets very embarrassed. And then he finally admits, yeah, I saw this ox being led to slaughter. And he said,

it had this expression on his face of a look of terror that I couldn't bear. I couldn't bear the sight of this look of terror. And Mencius says that feeling you had then is the sprout of true benevolence. And if you could actually focus on that thing and strengthen it and bring it out and make it stronger, you will start moving down the road toward being a true king instead of being this terrible tyrant that you are now. So he thinks that we have this set of good sprouts. And they don't grow naturally. So it's like agriculture. You have to water, you have to weed, it requires effort. So that's the kind of Confucian side of it, right? You got to do self-cultivation, you need the classics,

you need ritual, but it's all basically pulling out potentialities, moral potentialities that you have within you if you reflect enough. Now Mencius, where it doesn't quite fit the parable is Mencius doesn't think that there are other bad sprouts. But I think that actually, if we wanted to update Mencius, a more plausible modern view of the mind is that we have different sets of dispositions, and they serve, some of them are very ancient ones that serve very good purposes back in our evolutionary history, and maybe aren't so appropriate now the way we live now. Others are ones we've learned that maybe because of a bad environment or bad experiences or bad training. about the two wolves, what self-cultivation is about and getting into the right kind of way is about is figuring out which of these sprouts inside you are the good ones and identifying them

and then focusing on them and trying to strengthen those at the expense of the ones you don't like as much and that don't lead you in the right direction. So that mentions his position in a way as the compromise position. We have these potentialities within us, but they're not going to grow by themselves any more than corn is just going to grow if you throw it in the ground. You got to do some work. But you also are working together with things that are inside you, potentialities that are within you, which also explains how you can get a virtue that you don't already have, because you're actually, you do have it. It's just there in potential form. It's got to be strengthened. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. You talk about the Menchian way cultivation is about feeling and imagination, that you make a reference between analog and digital processes, and that changing our behavior is more of an analog process in the Menchian way.

Could you explain that? This is a contrast with the dominant theories of ethics in the West, the modern Western philosophy, which are about all system too, if you want to think of it that way. They're about cold cognition. So how do you learn? You're not compassionate right now. How do you learn to be compassionate? Well, you either learn a set of maxims. So if you're Kant, you're a deontologist, you learn the categorical imperative and you learn how to use these rules, essentially, and figure out which rules apply in any given situation and then you apply them. You force yourself to act in accordance with the rules. Or you're a utilitarian and you say, well, how do you act compassionately?

Well, we've got to figure out what's going to maximize whatever good you happen to value for people in this situation. You do the math and then you act in accordance with what the math tells you to do. And there were people like this in early China, too. So there were these Moists who Mencius was arguing against who were utilitarians. They were consequentialists and very rationalistic. Mencius thinks that that's actually not going to work. You want to put it this way, because the elephant's too strong. The rider doesn't have

the ability to just go, oh, we need to go over here and just make the elephant go that way. It just is not going to work. And if you try to do it, it's going to piss the elephant off, and things are going to get really ugly. So Mencius actually thinks it's actively dangerous to rely upon cold cognition only. So in his model, you, you do have some help from culture. So you have teachers telling you, you know, these are the kind of impulses that you want to focus on. Uh, and I argue, you can see Manchus in this, uh, dialogue with the King is kind of a moral psychoanalyst. He's like, well, how did you feel when you saw the ox? And then how do you feel when you see your people suffering? And the king's like, well, it doesn't bother me.

I feel pretty fine. And he gets him to see, well, don't you see how there's a kind of a tension there? And maybe you could try to take that feeling that you had with the ox and learn how to extend it, but crucially, slowly. So he says to the king, you know, first try just being a little bit nicer to your family. And then once you get better at that, you can learn how to extend that to people who aren't part of your family. So the idea that the way moral training works is through imaginative extension. emotional experience. It's not an abstract thing. You're remembering how you felt. You remember how your stomach clenched when you saw that ox and you felt really bad. And you're then trying to use your imagination to figure out how you could have that same kind of feeling in a place you should be having it where you're not when you see your people suffering because you overtax them or you make them labor on your palace. So this is the sense in which I think this

Confucian model of cultivating, using emotions and cultivating your senses is much more empirically plausible. It's much more plausible from a modern psychological perspective than these abstract, amodal, digital forms of ethics that we've had for the last couple hundred years in the West. I'm really drawn to that idea because it's that whole idea sort of, you know, you have these sprouts or these tendencies, and then you can start very small and build upon those in a very small way. So that idea of, well, if you don't feel really compassionate in general, and you want to learn that, start with something that's really easy to be compassionate towards, like your dog, right?

You know, being compassionate to Chris over here might be a stretch for me. It sounds like it. But his dog, Charlie, but that's a common theme that we talk a lot about on the show is starting really small. And if you do that, you can build. And I really like also that thought of imagination, emotion. And I think you talk about in the book, because it's something you know, one of the reasons that I think literature or movies can be so powerful is because there's a, call it moral training if you want, but they're teaching us about the human condition in a very emotional way, which is a lot different than, like, as you said, sort of being taught, here's the right thing to do, thinking the right thing

versus feeling what feels right. Yep. And they're kind of, it's like exercise for your moral emotions. Especially because literature and now movies allow you to be in a situation that you would not normally be in. So it allows you to experience extreme moral situations, especially in some cases, hopefully you'll never experience in your real life. situations, especially in some cases, hopefully you'll never experience in your real life. But being put in that position and empathizing, having to think your way, feel your way into someone else's position, strengthens your moral intuitions and extends them in various ways. And that's precisely the way Mencius is using the classics, for instance. He thinks that these,

you know, the poems and the stories about the sage kings are like reading great literature, where you actually learn to feel the right kind of things because you're being exposed to these emotional experiences vicariously through literature. up by talking about the reason that we tend to be interested in wu-wei and da is that, you know, wu-wei is that feeling of being completely engaged in what you're doing, being very effective. And then the da is more the charisma or the drawing people towards this. And you say that these different Chinese philosophers, what they recommend may work differently in different situations. And could you maybe extrapolate a little bit on that? Like what are some of the types of things if I was trying to do this sort of thing I might think about this approach? And again, I like what you say in that, look, this is a genuine paradox. Trying not to try is really hard to do and achieving some of these states is hard, which is why people are still

thinking about it and talking about it. But you've got a couple of guidelines that people might think about. Yeah, well, one of my arguments is the reason we have these different strategies, and none of them ever go away, and no one ever wins. So, you know, when Zen Buddhism comes into China, Zen Buddhism takes a really hard kind of Zhuangzian Taoist line. So we're not going to do any practice. If you're going to be a Zen Buddhist, you know, we're going to just do nothing and just, you know, see your Buddha nature and that's it. But very quickly they start setting up practices and you get the split between these different schools of Zen, Chan, Buddhism. One of them starts to look very gradual.

different schools of Zen, Chan, Buddhism. One of them starts to look very gradual. It's like, yeah, we want to see our Buddha nature. We are Buddhas, but we got to sit, saw Zen for 30 years and do all these rituals. So why is it that none of them ever win? And it's because I think, so first of all, there's differences in people's inborn personalities. So I really think some of these strategies work better for some people than others. So people who tend to be over-structured and tend to not respond flexibly to the world probably need the Taoist techniques a bit more. And I think that's why I've always loved Zhuangzi, this Taoist text. And probably because I'm kind of a creature of habit. I'm kind of uptight.

I like my things the way they are. I don't like new experiences. And so I think people need different things to break them out of the types of bad habits that they're into. undisciplined, this Confucian training, giving yourself some structure in your life and having rituals and having particular ways you structure your physical space, how you set up your room and how you set up your office, and doing things at certain times every day could be exactly what you need to kind of liberate yourself into spontaneity because you need that kind of structure. So, there's interpersonal differences, and it really, I think, depends on the individual. You're also going to expect life stage differences.

So children are going to be doing more of the Confucian stuff than the Taoist stuff. Kids are kind of natural Taoists. They don't need more Taoism. What they need is a lot of Confucianism, right? Because you just don't have the right dispositions yet. Nobody's arguing that the kind of way you want is the way of a three-year-old. Anyone who's had a three-year-old realizes that that's not who we want to be. So they need Confucianism. They need structure. They need training. They need to acquire new skills.

But then the converse is as you get mature and as you've acquired the types of skills you need, that's when maybe you need to shift into more of the Taoist strategy of letting go or making your mind empty or not trying. Because you've now trained your dispositions. You have everything on board that you need. And the trick now is actually stopping thinking, letting go. So life stage is going to matter. And then the particular situation is going to matter.

And this is something you really have to kind of diagnose on the fly or have your own. You know, the King Xuanzhi is lucky because he had his own personal Wei advisor next to him in the form of Mencius telling him what he needed to focus on. But in any given situation, there are times when if you reflect, you'll realize, okay, my problem here is that I'm just flailing around. I don't have structure. And if I actually really want to get into the zone and whatever activity is I'm doing here, I need to be more organized about it. I need to have a schedule. I need to have forms. I have to have physical forms given to me to act in the right way. Whereas there are other times where the problem is you're just thinking too much and you're second guessing yourself or you're thinking about irrelevant things. So you're thinking about the famous story in the Zhuangzi is that when people are shooting, having an archery contest, and they're just

shooting for, you know, basically buckles, belt buckles, their skill is perfect. They start betting for beer money, and their skill gets a little shaky, and they start betting for serious money, and suddenly they don't have the same skill they had in the beginning. It's because external considerations are invading your mind and interfering with your ability to focus on your embodied skill, which is something you already have. I think some of the more Confucian approaches, the idea of putting structure in your life, we talk about, you know, I think there's a lot of different readily available information there. What are some of the ways to, as we said earlier, sort of down-regulate that thinking mind? We talked a little bit about exercise. Alcohol is really... You referenced meditation throughout the book. Yeah, alcohol you talk about at a few points, which is remarkably

effective. Are there other thoughts there emerged from from some of this learning yeah i think i so there's you know there's chemical means so one of the reasons i think we like alcohol and drugs is they they down regulate our prefrontal cortex that's physiologically what they're doing and that's the seat of our cold cognition so it's a kind of fast and dirty way to get into a form of way and actually people like dwangzi use drunkenness as an analogy for what the spiritual state he wants you to get into. But the problem is alcohol wears off, and it has other side effects that aren't that great. So most of the strategies that the Taoists use I think could be summed up as using your body to distract your mind. So you're using your body in a way that is either going to distract you from your thoughts so that your thoughts kind of peter out

on their own, or you're using your body in such a way that your thoughts just naturally damp down, they naturally fade away. And so these people are probably the ones who invented these sitting practices. So they don't talk a lot about them in the Warring States text that I study, but there's hints that people are sitting meditation. There's one artist says before he goes off to carve wood stands, he sits and forgets. He forgets about his body and everything. So it seems to involve some sort of seated meditation. And the idea is you can use breathing exercises or objectless meditation, so sitting in a certain position and letting your mind clear itself, as a way to re-empower your body, if you want to think about

it that way, and let it take over when it needs to take over. But this is, of course, you know, people saying 2,500 years longer than that coming up with all sorts of techniques for doing this. Excellent. Well, I think we are kind of at the end of our time, but what I found interesting, you know, kind of coming back to, there were two last things. One was I was struck by that sort of Mencius sort of walking what we would think of as sort of the middle way, which I thought was really interesting. But I really liked the way you tied that up at the end that, hey, there's no one size fits all, depending on all those different circumstances, which I thought was really helpful, because it's easy to get locked into thinking if we just do this thing. And the other thing I thought was

interesting is that a lot of times something that works for us today doesn't work for us tomorrow or the week after. And I think that's really, really important. And then I thought the best example of what Uwe is really like, and duh, was when you referenced Jonathan Richman's Pablo Picasso as the perfect example of that. So I thought that was a great way to describe that for the modern punk rock lover, I suppose, for anybody who's familiar with that. But Ted, thanks so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed the book. Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. All right. Take care. All right. Bye. You can learn more about Edward Slingerland and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash Edward.