Edward Slingerland

The ‘thinking without thinking’ strategy certainly has its limits, but it is becoming increasingly clear that any behavior we want to be reliable and fast in real-life situations needs to be turned into an embodied habit or tacit skill.

If we can manage to not push too hard when trying is bad, and not think too much when reflection is enemy, the flow of life is always there, eager to pull us along in its wake.

The idea here is that, if you are to successfully enter wu-wei, your focus should be on the world, not yourself. You have to forget everything—your ego, even your own body—so that you can be absorbed into the larger movement of Heaven’s Way.

The conscious mind has limited capacity, and often the best thing to do when you run into difficulty is shut it down for a while and let the body take over.

Complete relaxation and freedom from external concerns perfect your de and make you formidable, conveying a confidence and ease that makes others think twice before messing with you.

True de, true attractiveness, comes out of sincere absorption into a larger, valued good... not calculated clothing choices or pickup lines. What you choose to embrace doesn’t matter, as long as it’s something that you’re doing genuinely, not for strategic reasons.

For a person in wu-wei, the mind is embodied and the body is mindful; the two systems— hot and cold, fast and slow— are completely integrated. The result is an intelligent spontaneity that is perfectly calibrated to the environment.