The Method of No-Method

All over the internet you’ll find articles on creativity, productivity, and how to build success in 10 easy steps. Everyone’s trying to describe the mysterious path from inception to fruition. In the chaos of conflicting advice it’s hard to find a clear way forward. Instead of reading yet another life coach blog, let’s look at an ancient Chinese source, Zhuangzi.

            Zhuangzi (370-287 B.C.E.) was the best of the Daoist writers and philosophers. Coming a few hundred years after Laozi, he far exceeded his predecessor’s reach in terms of sheer literary power. Laozi’s beloved Daodejing is still the starting point in any study of Daoism. But when you’re really ready to have your mind blown, pick up Zhuangzi.

            At issue is this: what is the best approach to accomplishing any task? Aggressive forcefulness? Aloof indifference? Something in between? Zhuangzi has an answer. And he presents it in a story. It is the story of a cook who worked for Prince Wen Hui. In Thomas Merton’s translation, it goes like this.

            Prince Wen Hui’s cook was cutting up an ox. Out went a hand, down went a shoulder, he planted a foot, he pressed with a knee, the ox fell apart with a whisper, the bright cleaver murmured like a gentle wind. Rhythm! Timing! Like a sacred dance, like “The Mulberry Grove,” like ancient harmonies!

            “Good work!” the Prince exclaimed, “Your method is faultless!”

            “Method?” said the cook, laying aside his cleaver, “What I follow is Tao beyond all methods.

“When I first began to cut up oxen I would see before me the whole ox all in one mass. After three years I no longer saw this mass. I saw the distinctions.

“But now, I see nothing with the eye. My whole being apprehends. My senses are idle. The spirit free to work without plan follows its own instinct guided by a natural line, by the secret opening, the hidden space, my cleaver finds its own way. I cut through no joint, I chop no bone.

            “I have used this same cleaver nineteen years. It has cut up a thousand oxen. Its edge is as keen as if newly sharpened.

            “There are spaces in the joints; the blade is thin and keen: when this thinness finds that space, there is all the room you need. It goes like a breeze. Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years, as if newly sharpened.

            “True, there are sometimes tough joints. I feel them coming, I slow down, I watch closely, hold back, barely move the blade, and whump! The part falls away landing like a clod of earth.

            “Then I withdraw the blade. I stand still and let the joy of the work sink in. I clean the blade and put it away.”

            Prince Wan Hui said, “This is it! My cook has shown me how I ought to live my own life!”

            Zhuangzi’s allegory is a thick slab of wisdom ready for the grill. Whether you’re trying to write a song, navigate a relationship challenge, manage your finances, resolve a workplace conflict, plan your next career move, or cook an omelet, Zhuangzi has laid out the path as only a master teacher can. Let’s unpack the components of the parable.

             Right off the bat Prince Wen Hui gets it wrong. He mistakes the cook’s mastery as the deliberate practice of a specific technique or method. “Your method is faultless!” he says, only to be swiftly rebuked by the cook. “Method?” said the cook. “What I follow is Tao beyond all methods.”

            At the heart of Daoism is the idea of Dao (Tao), a word that literally means “way” or “path.” In Daoism Dao refers to the underlying process by which everything unfolds. All things follow the Dao, the way of nature. Dao is considered the sacred source and the harmony of all things. Unlike God in the west it is not personified or localized in a conscious being. Dao is found within all things, and guides all things to their optimal natural function. The goal of Daosim is to get our interfering egos out of the way and learn to live in accord with the Dao.

            Then the cook describes the three stages of mastery, using the example of butchering an ox. In the first stage, his inexperience and lack of discernment make it impossible for him to distinguish one part of the ox from another. It’s all a blur.

            This is where we all begin in any learning process. It’s a ball of confusion. We don’t even know what questions to ask. Or how to begin. Think back on how you learned a second language, how to play guitar, or how to cook. You didn’t know a verb from a noun, a G from a C, or sauté from sear.

            Then, after a lot of hard work and awkward flailing around we reached the second stage. “After three years,” said the cook, “I no longer saw this mass. I saw the distinctions.” Here the fog begins to lift, and we learn the nouns, verbs, tenses, and contexts. We learn all the notes, scales, and chords. We know the names of all the vegetables, herbs, cuts, prep styles, and cooking techniques.

            After years of practice at stage two, something deeper begins to emerge. We go beyond merely knowing all the details. We slip out of our intellect with its endless categories, concepts, and distinctions. We see the whole. We feel our way. Now our wisdom is an embodied wisdom, no longer housed just in the mind, but throughout the mind-body. Here’s how the cook said it: “Now, I see nothing with the eye. My whole being apprehends. My senses are idle. The spirit free to work without plan follows its own instinct guided by the natural line, by the secret opening, the hidden space, my cleaver finds its own way.”

            Now we are following the Dao – the method of no-method.

            But as the cook points out, this doesn’t solve all of your problems. Things will go still wrong. They always do. But you have a new way of moving through problems. You slow down. You let it be easy. You trust the process. You have faith in yourself. You let the tools do the work. You feel your way toward the openings. No struggle, no strain.

            In Daoism this is called wu-wei, or creative letting-be; the art of aligning the energies within you with the energies around you into a singular confluence, with minimal interference from the busy-mind.

             In chapter 64 of the Daodejing, Zhuangzi's great teacher Laozi wrote, "Rushing into action you fail. Trying to grasp things, you lose them. Forcing a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe." Mastery, no matter what the project, and perhaps most especially in the most important project of all – crafting a meaningful life – is a curious confluence of effort and effortlessness, allowance and assertion, intuition and deliberation. The preparatory stages are crucial – they cannot be skipped. But when you are ready, allow yourself to slip into the stream of excellence beyond method – the method of no-method.

The Freedom of Work

One of the prevailing narratives in pop culture is that work is for suckers. We wallow in fantasies of winning the lottery, picking the right stock, or striking it rich when our tech start-up gets grabbed by Google. We wish we were sitting on a beach somewhere with our toes in the sand and a drink in our hand as nearly every Kenny Chesney song testifies. Rap and hip hop are no different with their endless stream of imagery equating material excess with liberation. The message is clear – work is something to be escaped. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, work is a four letter word.

            This pervasive escapism speaks to the alienated nature of the contemporary worker. In capitalism, Karl Marx argued, workers are cut off from their essential nature. It is in our nature to create, he argued, to wrest raw materials from nature and fashion them into tools and other beautiful things. In this natural process our essence is contained in the thing we make. But when we work merely for a wage, and own neither the means of production nor the products of our labor, we lose touch with our essential self. We become strangers to ourselves, what T. S. Eliot called “hollow men.” Under these conditions, Marx declared, the only place where we feel whole is in the “freedom of our animal functions.” Sex and material comfort become our obsessions. All we have left is looking good and surrounding ourselves with the trappings of material culture. Listen to the lyrics of pop music and you’ll hear all the evidence you need. Pop songs circle around two principle fixations – sex and leisure. We look divine in the club, but Monday morning we’re back in the cubicle.

            What if we’re wrong about work? What if we’ve misunderstood work entirely? What if work is not the means of our imprisonment, but the means of our liberation?

            I know the animals aren’t talking, but I’m pretty sure if they did, they wouldn’t even have a word for work. They would just call it life. Wolves hunt elk, elk forage for grass, grass grows up through the soil, and birds scatter grass seeds – each inadvertently serving the needs of the other as it serves its own needs. It’s not work – it’s a way of being in the world. Their “work” makes them part of something larger than themselves. So does ours. Through our work we build the world.

            When I was very young, like my brothers before me, I was drawn into the culture of work. It began with a few simple chores, whatever my small hands and feet could accomplish – cleaning bathrooms, sweeping the garage. When I grew a little older, I washed the car and mowed the lawn. Like a lot of kids I received a small weekly allowance. But I was never paid for chores. It was just understood – we all live here, so we all share in the upkeep and maintenance of this home.

            When my mom cooked dinner she’d call me into the kitchen to help her chop celery or peel carrots. I learned the difference between mince, chop, and julienne. To this day the smell of frying onions is the smell of home, a celebration of the alchemical transformation of the earth’s elements into elixirs of life. Preparing food for people you love is not work, it’s worship.

            I learned how to find pleasure in a well-set table, a communal meal, a beautiful garden, a clean bathroom, a made bed, and a well-organized garage.

Around the age of 12 the range of my work expanded. I began mowing lawns for neighbors. It was a pleasure to bring order to their chaotic yards, and a few dollars in my pocket felt exciting. Work was allowing me to wrest power and freedom out of thin air with the tools of my intention and will. Through these labors I came to embody the unshakable truth that no matter what became of me, I would always be able to offer my time, talent, and energy in the consciousness of service and be rewarded for my efforts. That’s a lot for a twelve year old to take in.

The week I turned sixteen I rode my bike to a supermarket a few miles from my house and applied for a job. An older friend who worked there vouched for me, and I was hired. I worked my way up from grocery bagger to stock clerk to cashier. I often worked till midnight, then got up at 6:00 in the morning to surf before class. The crazy schedule didn’t exhaust me – it energized me. Even in the cold winter rain I rode my bike back and forth to work. It never occurred to me to bother anyone for a ride. One day I missed a shift. I’d been struck in an intersection by a red light running drunk driver. I wasn’t hurt too badly, but I did get a new bike out of the deal.

I ended up working at Vons for twenty two years – through high school and college and grad school, through a few girlfriends, the last of which I married, and even into the first few years of my early teaching career.

You learn a lot of good things at work, like how to do things you don’t feel like doing, and how to be around people you don’t like. You can’t cut and run when things get unpleasant. Instead, you dig deep, honor your team, and push through. You learn that perseverance is more rewarding than preference. What you want to do is not nearly as important as what you should do.  Duty is not a dirty work. When we offer our time, talent, and energy in the consciousness of service, we are drawn inevitably into the fabric of our interconnectedness. And our own joy inexorably increases.

What if far from alienating us, work is the cure for our alienation? There were so many days, and there still are, when I don’t feel like working, but I suit up and show up anyway, and it happens every time – it turns out that when I drop my selfish resistance and give myself over to a purpose larger than myself, namely, the needs of others, I feel the weight of alienation lifting off of my shoulders. To be of service is to become intimate with life’s innermost secret – that none of us is ever alone, and that when we join forces together we affirm our true, authentic nature as beings of infinite value. This is a pleasure a self-absorbed hedonist can never experience.

I brought all of these dawning insights into my work as a musician, a writer, and a student of the world’s wisdom traditions. Playing guitar as well as I heard it in my head was going to take time, intention, will power, sacrifice, discipline, and commitment. Same with writing and academic pursuits. I knew it wasn’t mysterious. I knew that if I simply intended excellence and got to work good things would come. And they have.

When we protect our children from work, when we do everything for them, or when we pay them for chores, we rob them of this life-long storehouse of embodied wisdom.

All work is service. All work is an opportunity to be a part of healing of the world. And anyone with eyes can see that the world is in dire need of healing. When we finally understand the real source of our joy, power, and freedom, who among us would ignore the call and hide away from the world of work?

Intention vs. Attachment

It’s important to have goals. How can you build or create anything without first envisioning it, imagining it, wanting it?

Yet clinging too tightly to a specific outcome is destructive to the living, breathing evolutionary process that any real growth entails. How can we make peace with this paradox? How can we simultaneously hold fast while letting go?

An essential quality of wisdom is the ability to discern between intention and attachment.

Intention is a powerful condition of consciousness, a thought-action that reverberates out into the surrounding field re-ordering the elements of the field. Like radio waves, intention travels unseen at the speed of light, bending around corners and influencing the fabric of space and time. Our intentions draw things toward us the way magnets attract and align iron filings. In true intention there is no attachment to any particular outcome – that would be hubris and ultimately destructive to our aims. We simply set intentions, take the next indicated step and let go.

Attachment, on the other hand, is a pathological, egoic, fear-based need to control the people, situations and events in the world around us. Imposing our private preferences on the uncarved whole of the world robs life of its spontaneous, evolutionary energy. Our short-sighted craving places limits on the unlimited potential of the now moment – limits that ultimately restrict the flow of the universe’s infinite abundance into our lives. It’s a terrible irony – by craving we push everything away.

Intention is a state of deep receptivity. Attachment is an impenetrable shell.

Intention is a state of deep cooperation with what is. Attachment is a futile struggle against what is, characterized by resentment, fear and victim-consciousness.

Intention roots deep in the consciousness of gratitude and savors the journey. Attachment is a childish sense of entitlement fueled by grandiose fantasies and fixation on selfish and arbitrarily contrived expectations.

So how do we put this into practice?

Let’s start with a vision. If money were no object, and if the path was wide open, what would you be doing with your life? In other words, if the how were taken care of, what would you be? It’s vitally important to separate the how from the what because once you really commit in full intention to the what, the how takes care of itself. Intention is an aligning energy that orders the surrounding field. Fixating on the how – the logistical complexity and all the hurdles – draws precious energy and resources away from the womb of intention, the great Mother that gives birth to the what.

So you want to be a large animal veterinarian, or a professional musician, or publish a book, or create a non-profit service organization, or work to reverse environmental degradation, or write the next great app. How do you begin?

Let’s talk about farming.

A farmer intends to raise a crop of tomatoes. But she knows she doesn’t really control the process. She merely cuts the channel through which the power of life flows, fully aware that she is not the source of the power. Her stance is one of deep cooperation, not imposition.

It begins with the end in mind – a vision of a bountiful yield. Then comes all the hard work – learning everything you can about every aspect of your endeavor, preparing the soil, finding the right seeds, putting the right kind of team together, co-creating the best possible conditions in which your seeds can unfold from the core of their essential nature, willingly and reverently sacrificing your time, talent and treasure in the singular focus of your aim, all the while knowing that anything and everything could change, and at any given moment you might have to start dancing.

Then you wait.

Remember, you are as much witnessing this process as creating it. A state of deep humility is far more productive than arrogance. We don’t control the weather – the frost, the rain, the heat, the drought – nor do we control the caterpillars or the blackbirds that come and pluck the caterpillars away. We do everything we can to prepare for all likely situations, but in the end our only sane stance is complete and utter surrender. When our fists are clenched we feel only our own fingernails digging into our palms. When our hands are open we feel the sun and the moon and the wind and we are more readily able to receive what is given. And when the harvest is ready, a budding joy comes to fruition along with our tomatoes because there is nothing more satisfying than aligning our energies with the larger forces around us.

This is the great paradox – it is only through surrender that we grow strong, it is only through generosity that we receive everything we need, it is only by emptying out that we become full, it is only by letting go of our slavish attachment to a particular outcome that the highest possible good is able to manifest itself in our lives. Yet there must be intention and clarity of vision. Cooperating with what is already unfolding is different than sitting back and waiting for something to happen. The first requires a state of great alertness. The second looks a lot like napping.

When we fail to discern the difference between intention and attachment, two confusions emerge. The first confusion is the mistaken belief that intention and attachment are the same – that intention is just a fancy word for self-centered craving and hence is to be avoided. People who hold this mistaken view tend to hide from the world, hide their own light, shun success and see ambition as a dirty word. They distrust powerfully creative people while secretly envying them. They bad-mouth the trappings of success and cop an attitude of smug superiority to ward off the chill of their own poverty of spirit.

The second confusion is the mistaken belief that self-seeking and clawing your way to the top is the highest good. Here the line between healthy growth and selfish craving is blurred. The empty pursuit of fame, wealth and glory may result in an accumulation of the outward trappings of success, but the hole inside is never filled. In both of these mistaken approaches, our authentic joy is never realized.

That’s why discerning the difference between intention and attachment is so important. It may be the most important thing of all. Otherwise, all our work is muddled and confused, lost in the dark and far away from the light of the truth that our deepest joy is inexorably intertwined with the joy of others, and only when we work in the consciousness of service are we liberated from cage of our own ego.

Have a vision. Feel deeply where your heart wants to go, and cultivate the courage to follow. Be truthful, have clarity and be specific. But keep a loose hold on the reins and let the road show you where to go. The end is secured by the confidence of the intention. Attachment, on the other hand, constricts the flow and leads only to stagnation. Stay open and highly alert. Perception and awareness are more important than cleverness and guile. Answer the call of your soul – begin now to do the important work of discerning the difference between intention and attachment.