I’m always amused how, despite the ‘blinding glimpse of the ****** obvious’, we get things upside down.  Take the Autumn – what do we see around us: trees losing their leaves, squirrels gathering nuts, fruit falling from trees etc.  What does this suggest but that we are moving from the Yang time of year to the Yin; a time when we should be winding down and conserving our strength for the Winter.  And what do we do?  START A NEW ACADEMIC YEAR!!!

Anyway, what can I offer those of you who are new to this or, indeed, those returning?  Maybe a little something Taoist ….

Uncarved Block

Here you are, on the spring-board, ready to start a new term at the College.  What are your hopes and aspirations?  What are your fears and concerns?  What sort of shape are you about to be carved into as you start this new academic year?

P’u, the Uncarved Block, is a concept expounded by the ‘Tao te Ching’.  Taoist thinking values those things in their natural state – before someone comes along and ‘carves’ them into something they want.  There is no doubt that Michelangelo’s ‘David’ has changed that particular piece of marble into something which, to human eyes, is beautiful.  But so often mankind, in trying to modify something in its natural state, screws it up.

Pooh Bear, in Benjamin Hoff’s ‘The Tao of Pooh’, is the epitome of an ‘Uncarved Block’.  Hoff explains it in terms of things in their original simplicity contain their own natural power, power that is easily spoiled and lost when that simplicity is changed – when wisdom is clouded by knowledge, when the act of not doing (Wu Wei) is confused by the act of doing, when the growing of food needs genetic modification to produce more, and so on.  Hoff continues:

One more funny thing about Knowledge, that of the scholar, the scientist, or anyone else: it always wants to blame the mind of the Uncarved block – what it calls Ignorance – for problems that it causes itself, either directly or indirectly, through its own limitations, nearsightedness or neglect

So you are at College to amass knowledge with all the ‘doing’ necessary to achieve it; but don’t do that at the expense of ‘being’, of an awareness of the process that you’re going through, of gaining wisdom to go along with it.  Chapter 11 of the ‘Tao te Ching’ talks of the need to keep a sense of emptiness at the centre, citing a cartwheel where only the emptiness at the centre, to allow an axle to pass through, makes it useful.  Profit comes from the outside of the wheel (= Knowledge) whereas usefulness comes from the empty centre (= Wisdom).  So my advice is not to fill yourself up to the top with knowledge – leave a space for intuition, discernment and a sense of wonder.

But the biggest thing of all, is not to forget your loved ones/families/friends etc.  They are not on the same journey as you but you need them to support you as you travel along it.  Leave a space for them.

A practical aid to this is to write down a log of what you’re going through – I did so for the first 2 years of the course and was amazed, on reading back through it, the nature of the journey I’d undertaken.

Discernment

And while you are being bombarded with facts, concepts, assignments etc, try and stand back from it and take a critical view.  Krishnamurti considers that:

“A mind that is contented and satisfied will never acquire sympathy or affection or give understanding to others”. 

He goes on to develop the idea which you may find useful when sitting and listening to all those lectures:

“Each guide, each interpreter of the Truth translates that Truth according to his own limited vision.  If you depend on the interpreter for your understanding, you will only learn the Truth according to his limitations.  But if you establish the goal for yourself, if you strengthen your own desire for Truth and test the keenness of that desire by observation, by welcoming sorrow and experience, then you need have no mediators, then there need exist nothing between you and your goal, between you and the Truth.”

……………

So good luck with the start of this particular adventure.  Try to stay a little un-carved throughout it all and you’ll come out the other side a little wiser.  But hey, that’s just my version of the Truth.  As the Sage says “I know nothing”.

Metta