The opening lines of the Tao Te Ching, a foundational text of Taoism, serve as a warning to those who take what is written too literally and to those who believe life can truly be conveyed through words.
The Tao [Way] that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the mother of all things.
Watts obviously agrees with this idea and doesn’t limit this warning to just the Tao Te Ching; he extends it to life in general, contending that words are no substitute for experience itself.
… I have often said that the real basis of Buddhism is not a set of ideas but an experience. This of course is equally true of Taoism as well, which like Buddhism recognizes that experience is altogether something different from words. If you have tasted a certain taste, even the taste of water, you know what it is. But to someone who has not tasted it, it can never be explained in words because it goes far beyond words.
If this is true, it’s clear that the best way to learn is through personal experience. Still, it would be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to just learn from personal experience. So, what can we learn from others?
And what can others learn from us? We have all had valuable unique experiences, but how can we show or teach others what we have learned through those experiences if words can’t accurately reflect what we have experienced?
Watts seems to argue that the first step is to recognize how little we know about how we think.
In fact we really have no idea how we manage to do any of this, no idea how we manage to be conscious, how we actually think, and how we actually make decisions. We do these things, but the processes and the order of the physical body that underlies them are completely mysterious to us. Even though we can do these things, we cannot fully describe them.
Watt’s feels that in order to begin to understand are basic nature we need to follow the Tao, “feeling our way into our own nature” not thinking our way there.
All the time we are actually relying on this strange and unintelligible form of natural order. It is at the basis of everything we do, and even when we try to figure something out and describe it in words, and then make a decision on the basis of that process, we are still unconsciously relying upon an order that we cannot figure out. That order constitutes our basic nature, but we are too close to it to see it — and so following the Tao is the art of feeling our way into our own nature.
According to Watts, the problem is that we have been brought up to understand ourselves and others through the use of words.
Since we are brought up to make sense of ourselves, and to be able to account for ourselves, we are always expected to be able to rationalize our actions in words. When we try to accomplish this we develop a kind of second self inside us, which in Zen is called the observing self. This observing self can be a very good thing for us to develop, and it can also cause problems, and run a commentary on who we are and what we are doing all the time. It asks, “What will other people say? Am I being proper? Does what I am doing make any sense?”
I must admit that there have been plenty of times when I wished that other people had a conscience, that they had a sense of right and wrong and would abide by it. On the other hand, as a teacher I’ve seen far too many students who were limited by their self-doubts and prejudices. I can’t imagine a world without an observing sense, but it also seems impossible to deny that it could cause more problems than it solves.
Watts argues that when the observing self demands an individual must see the world just in the order of thoughts and words he loses naturalness and spontaneity.
Humans get in their own way because they are always observing and questioning themselves. They are always trying to fit the order of the world into the order of sense, the order of thought and words. And therefore the children lose their naturalness and spontaneity. For this reason we admire the people, whether they be sages or artists, who have the ability to return in their mature life to a kind of childlikeness and freshness. They are not bothered any more by what people are thinking or saying. This is the charm that surrounds the Taoist sages of ancient China.
Worrying excessively about what others think or say about us gives control of our lives to others. Only when we can react naturally to the events in our life can we be truly free and authentic.