External Things

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless.”

Zhuangzi said, “It is only when you know uselessness that you can know anything about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and wide, but a man at any time uses only as much of it as his two feet can cover. But if you were to dig away all the earth around his feet, down to the Yellow Springs, would that little patch he stands on be of any use to him?”

Huizi said, “It would be useless.”

Zhuangzi said, “Then the usefulness of the useless should be quite obvious.” (Zhuangzi 222)

It is difficult to resist the temptation toward external things. I, for one, am severely unenlightened in this regard. I have dreams and ambitions, consuming desires that rage like wildfires creating my personal Hell. Ironic, is it not, that I’ve dedicated so much time and focus to studying philosophies that forewarn against the worship of externals? Perhaps it isn’t. In fact, I believe it is because I am so drawn toward my dream—toward a set of circumstances ultimately outside of my influence—that my higher self longs for wisdom to balance me, to help me reevaluate my self-worth: in other words, to change the way I conceive of “useful” and “useless.”

In this modern age of rapid, shallow information and communication, being “useful” appears paramount. Status is everything, status being the utmost marker of the capacity to generate power and wealth. Thus, are we all measured. Thus do we measure ourselves—if we are foolish—and fools we are.

Deep spirituality has been abandoned, cast into the dust bin of history, and derided as nonsense. Post-enlightenment rationalist materialism reigns. It has become our king and Christ-figure, and under its rule, morality has “progressed” so far and so fast from its origins that the ontology has become buried beneath mountains of unconscious presupposition. We have become self-worshipping gods, blind and without wisdom. Arrogant. We take as axiomatic our power to shape the world in our own image. We believe that we have become masters of consequence.

The truth is otherwise.

All it takes to see the mistake is to consider what lies beyond our horizons. Compared to the infinite vastness of the universe, our knowledge is infinitesimally small—and wrong. The great hypocrisy of the scientifically minded lies here, in the lack of philosophy to which they apply to their own preconceptions. Science does not produce knowledge; any honest scientist will happily admit this. Science produces models, partially erroneous maps by which we can better navigate the world toward our desires. These maps are by necessity false. They are not the things in themselves, but shadows on the wall, approximations and even arbitrary categories relative to us. That is to say what we call knowledge is actually an emergent property of our subjective consciousness and the objective reality.

But what does any of this have to do with “usefulness” and “uselessness?”

Simple, friends. It reveals to us that “usefulness” and “uselessness” are themselves desire and aversion. They are judgements relative to the beings conceiving of them. They are constructs of the subjective mind and do not exist as such in the objective universe. The Great Course does not discriminate between “useful” and “useless,” only that which-is and that which-is-not.

So what does that mean for us?

Like Huizi, we assume that our preconceptions of utility are real. We assume that they are a part of our intrinsic being. They are not. There is no real line between usefulness and uselessness, and even if we draw one arbitrarily, the fact remains that it is necessary for relative uselessness to exist for there to be a usefulness to be valued. To claim one as good necessitates claiming the other, for to admonish one is to will the destruction of both.

So if you, like I often do, find yourself stricken by fears of being useless, remember that there is no such thing. There is only the affirmation or denial of life—only the walking or straying from the Course.

Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi; The Complete Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn, Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2020