Education and Spontaneity

Initially, knowledge acquisition, especially through formal education, snuffs out imagination & spontaneity. This leads many people to decry education. They see the dulling of imagination as a wrong that has been done to them. A part of them has been brutally neglected by the powers that be. But that is not a completely honest telling -- while it is true that imagination and spontaneity decrease during the time of your life devoted to acquiring knowledge within school walls, this is a necessary step to bring your self into the rational world space. The person who mourns the death of their imagination and blames 'the system' has wrongly assumed that personal growth ends when formal education ends. Formal education is the beginning, it provides the rather dull foundation upon which the rich colorful world you tasted as a child can be rediscovered.

The good life

"For Taoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skilfully. It has no particular purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realise any ideal. Everything we do can be done more or less well; but if we act well it is not because we translate our intentions into deeds. It is because we deal skilfully with whatever needs to be done. the good life means living according to our natures and circumstances. There is nothing that says that it is bound to be the same for everybody, or that it must conform with 'morality'. "

"Seeing Clearly means not projecting our goals into the world; acting spontaneously means acting according to the needs of the situation. Western moralists will ask what is the purpose of such action, but for Taoists the good life has no purpose. It is like swimming in a whirlpool, responding to the currents as they come and go. 'I enter with the inflow, and emerge with the outflow, follow the Way of the water, and do not impose my selfishness upon it. This is how I stay afloat in it,' says the Chuang-Tzu. "

"For people in thrall to 'morality', the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonising over alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. Such a human being has the perfect freedom of a wild animal -- or a machine. As the Lieh-Tzu says: 'The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement is like a machine. He knows neither why he is at rest nor why he is not, why he is in movement nor why he is not.'"

John Gray's, Straw Dogs, p.112-115