A Tao te Ching Teaching Keeps Kicking My Butt – But I Keep Working at It
Quitting isn’t an option.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned these past fifteen years, it’s this: Spiritual growth ain’t easy. In fact, it’s the most difficult work I’ve ever done.
And that’s coming from a guy who has devoted an outsized portion of his attention to all things spiritual.
It reminds me of an HBO documentary I saw roughly 25 years ago that chronicled Jerry Seinfeld putting together material for his comedy act.
A Seinfeld revelation
One scene left an indelible mark on my memory. In the middle of his quest to create a new routine, the camera caught Jerry in a riveting, private moment.
He sighed and said, to no one in particular:
“It’s just so fucking hard.”
Yes, that’s right. Jerry Seinfeld, one of the most successful comedians of the past fifty years, was lamenting how excruciatingly difficult it was to write comedy.
My tortured former boss
The same held true for my old boss, Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, and thought by many to be the preeminent dramatic writer of our time.
Aaron constantly groaned about how painful it was to churn out a script. I remember him saying, half-jokingly, that the only reason he wrote was the feeling he got when finishing a piece.
Not that I am the spiritual equivalent of Seinfeld the comedian or Sorkin the screenwriter, but I have put forth a ton of effort on a sustained basis…
And it’s still really hard.
My big, fat ego
What, specifically, is really hard? If I had to sum it up in a sentence it would be that the strength of my ego makes it brutally hard to remain present and not beholden to the whims of my often frenzied, deranged mind.
But what prompted me to write this article is a teaching from the Tao te Ching that spins this in a positive direction.
In Chapter three Lao Tzu writes:
“Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.”
That’s the one that has me so perplexed. Now, and for many years.
Why? It’s that whole thing of everything falling into place…if only I could be and not constantly be doing I would be golden.
Or, in my case, constantly thinking about what I should be doing. Which has been my central problem for the better part of two years.
From Hollywood to Medium to Substack
The quick back story is that I left my Hollywood screenwriting career in 2018 to focus on all thing spiritual, mostly writing these articles. For the first four years I was in a groove writing on Medium.com, writing two articles a week and amassing a decent following of just under 200,000 people.
Then Medium altered their algorithm in a way that made writing there no longer feasible.
So for the past year I’ve been writing on Substack. And liking it. It’s a great platform.
But I’ve been feeling on and off stuck these past few years, feeling a bit stale. And that has led to the omnipresent hovering in my head of the same question, over and over…
“What should I do?” “What should I do?” “What should I do?”
Should I write a book? Do YouTube videos? Resume teaching meditation and mindfulness classes? Do something entirely different?
I expend so much psychic energy on this. Why? Because my ego is stronger than Hercules.
The core of my ego
My life, like most everybody on this planet, is governed by the sum total of my past experiences. For me, I can winnow a sizable part of my psyche down to: Grew up in successful family, therefore felt pressured to measure up.
So all these decades later, and after all this spiritual work, that egoic record player inside my head still relentlessly plays the same song: “What should we do? What should we do? What should we do?”
And it hit me a few days ago, for the umpteenth time, that all the psychic energy I’ve been devoting to the “What should I do?” question is thoroughly, completely, one hundred percent misplaced.
And wasted.
Which brought me right back to good old Chapter three of the Tao:
“Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.”
What resonated more deeply than ever wasn’t part one of the teaching. I know that I need to practice not-doing and simply being.
No. What slapped me in the face this time, in a positive way, was that if I continually do that work of not-doing…
Everything will fall into place.
What does it mean for ‘everything to fall into place,’?
I will wind up doing what the Universe wants me to do and will be at peace within myself and with the world.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty darn good to me. And yet…
Time and again I find myself slipping back into “What should I do?” mode, my indefatigable ego refusing to let up.
My Gatsby dilemma
It’s a predicament evocative of that iconic final line of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
What to do?
JK Zinn’s teaching
We take stock of a teaching from the great Jon Kabat-Zinn, offered in one of his guided meditations.
He urged the usual; that is, keeping attention on the breathing. And if our attention wanders into thinking, simply bringing attention back to the breath.
But then he says this:
“And if your attention wanders a thousand times, simply bring it back to the breath a thousand times.”
So if my overactive ego implores me a thousand times to think about ‘what to do,’ I simply need to become aware of that, bring my attention back to the moment and practice not-doing a thousand times.
That is my path to doing what the Universe wants me to do, not wracking my egoic mind for the answers.
Spiritual growth gets easier
Let’s end with some good news. While Seinfeld and Sorkin, the best of the best at comedy and drama writing, respectively, struggle as hard now as ever, we spiritual seekers can take solace that with repeated practice, we will become more present and conscious.
In other words, things do get easier.
Yes, I bemoaned at the outset how hard it has been for me. But I have made progress. No doubt about it.
And you will, too. If you simply keep at it.
Because nowhere is it truer that slow and steady wins the race than with spiritual work.
The takeaway
So keep meditating. And practicing mindfulness. And doing yoga, praying and any other activities that strengthen your consciousness and chip away at your ego.
Slowly but surely, things will start falling into place.
Great question, Shelly. I think it's an individual thing. For me, I know if a directive is "Do YouTube videos and see if you can amass thousands of subscribers." it's coming from ego.
J. Krishnamurti would have nodded in agreement with you, David.
He wrote about the notion of “choiceless awareness”—a state that allows the whole of experience to be as it is without interference or identification with the self.
He also argued that any activity of the will or conscious effort to become mindful actually prevents true seeing. He wrote that these actions become “time-bound, rooted in the known.”
Finally, my favorite quote from him is what some call his ‘secret’ to living mindfully: “I don’t mind what happens.” Which echoes your thoughts about nonresistance to this moment.
So, it looks to me that to both you as Krishnamurti, mindful awareness IS life— with no division between practice and living.
Thank you for sharing your insights.
Bob