In Taoist philosophy, the essence of practice is wu wei, usually translated as “effortless effort” and represented by the movement of natural phenomena: the tumbling water of a river, clouds scudding through the sky, falling rain, the turning of the planets and the seasons. In human nature, this has to do with the art of allowing things to happen rather than trying to force, manage, or control them through the imposition of our will.

We adults seem to have a hard time with the “effortless” part of effort. We try our best, try harder, try and try again—but in none of this do we see the ease and efficiency of an allowing that moves things, not by some exerting, but by its very nature. The difference can be grasped readily in the image of a leaf floating on a river. The leaf can rest in the natural motion of the water, or it can try to propel itself. From a bird’s-eye view, these two scenarios might look much the same, but we can see that the leaf’s effort to propel itself would be redundant, wasteful, pointless, since it’s flowing along anyway. By simply resting in the natural movement of the river, its effort becomes effortless.

We may be concerned that if we abandon effort, nothing will happen in our lives. We’ll end up sitting on our hands, waiting. This, perhaps more than any other belief, reveals the hubris of Particle willfulness. Look around! Does the hand of Nature seem idle? Everywhere we turn, we see a brilliantly creative, organizing intelligence that must humble us again and again. Each electron, each galaxy, is spinning with clockwork precision and with no exerting anywhere! And are we not part of Nature? Do we not belong to this prolific creativity as much as the trees and stars? Asleep in willfulness, we have fallen to believing that if we don’t make something happen, nothing will happen, but this is belied by all Creation.

I recall watching my grandson when he was a few months old. One of the most striking things about infants is their natural receptivity to effortlessness, their ease in belonging to the Mystery that moves them as it does all of us and all things. The little hand “knows” to go to the mouth, as though Nature Herself had taught the infant the essential gestures long before he could understand what makes them essential. My grandson was born “knowing” how to hold his head up, how to nurse, how to cry when he needed something. At three months, this knowing expanded to include smiling at familiar faces, and soon after, he began laughing out loud. Imagine—laughing! Astounding. He always responded with delight when I held a picture book in front of him and read to him; something in him recognized and, in this sense, already “knew” language. This something later turned him over, got his arms to start pushing the ground away, and lifted his bottom while bringing his knees up under. Before we knew it, the whole house had to be baby-proofed to make way for this unstoppable effortlessness!

In all of this, we see that easy state of allowing native to every infant—a state of grace and gracefulness—a natural cooperation with deep life, which conceives, delivers, nurtures, and brings up all babies by becoming them. For all their natural knowing, they are ignorant, in the original meaning of the word, “not knowing,” and in this knowing-through-not-knowing, they embody a profound and easy trust in the living moment at hand. Their efforts to gain control of their body and their world are effortless, like the leaf moving with the river; at this point, they have no choice but to grant their instinctive impulses right of way as they move along the arc of becoming more and more fully who they are. Later, of course, they will have a choice. We have this choice now. Babies have a great deal to teach us, simply because they have not learned to interfere, to judge, to resist, to try to manage what must be allowed. They have no agenda; their agenda is life-becoming-greater-life before our eyes. And arguably, there is no other time of life that rivals these first months and years in sheer development, creativity, and accomplishment—all through the great efficacy of allowing.

Babies teach us to not so much lead our lives as follow them. There is something of the Taoist master in each of them, fulfilling the precept set forth by Lao Tze in the Tao Teh Ching, and echoed by many great spiritual teachers, “Do nothing, and everything will be done.”

If I had to name the most important event in my life, the one that most fulfilled my identity in a defining before-and-after, I would say it was the birth of my daughter, Samara. I remember as though reliving it, the nervous morning-into-afternoon hours of counting minutes between contractions, Christina’s weariness as the spasms washed over her, the trip to the hospital, the doctor eventually administering the spinal anesthesia, my donning a green gown and mask and helping wheel the gurney into the delivery room, and finally, finally!—the crowning, the emergence of tiny shoulders, the miracle of watching one person exit another, that first cry, soft as tearing paper, and the solitary walk I took on campus afterward, looking up through Loblolly pines at a full moon that seemed to me newly born.

Nothing after this was the same. It took Christina and me no time at all to fall utterly in love with Samara, and we are both just as much under the spell of this today, many years later, as we were then. From the moment she arrived, we made no decision that did not consider her. In restaurants, we corrected playful maitre d’s who asked if we needed seating for “two and a half,” and insisted that skeptical servers give Sam a menu, too (which she immediately put in her mouth). It was the early 70s in a college town, and I’m sure we were diligently protecting feelings she was busy not even having, as she sat innocently teething on her menus, and so on. But that is not the point. The point is the empathy, the oneness.

How quickly the years swept away those pristine days of togetherness spent tickling and kissing Baby! Many of us have felt, looking around at our parents and siblings, that we were tossed into the wrong bin at birth. Certainly, I have felt this way about my tribe and its loopy ways that have nothing to do with me, no way. Yet, there is also the oneness. For all the differences, all the arguments we will make against the folks to whom we’re related, for all the ways we will swear we are nothing like them, there is an ineffable but undeniable indivisibility called “family” that holds sway long after all our complaints have gone to bed. When we put down the weapons of critical judgment of our parents, when we see them as they were, perhaps, before they became parents, we find that, despite everything, the oneness is there—they are of us, and we, them. I do not claim that this is true or at least conspicuous in all families. But where it is absent, the absence itself becomes defining, and something has gone terribly awry in any family that has no feeling for its oneness in each other.

Lovers, too, often report this experience of being “one soul in two bodies.” Part of the power of this sense of oneness that we realize with our lovers and our children is that it draws us into a recollection of an expanded identity, one that is not defined or bounded by the physical body and its stance of separateness. This sense of expanded identity has a mystical undertow. Ultimately, it signals our oneness with spiritus mundi, with all Being, with the Absolute, however we may conceive (or not conceive) that ultimate reference. Family is the first call out of the ubiquitous self-centeredness of the child into the centeredness in that Self that knows it is not the body, not even in the body; rather the body is in It, as are all things. Here is Consciousness Itself, at first involving Itself in the separate I-sense, then evolving into the greater social self of family and friends, and ultimately finding Itself to be nothing less than the unconditioned I that is the whole of Creation, ringing with identity at last. “What I had taken to be myself, was not myself; what I had taken to be not myself, was myself all along. Finally, there is nothing that is not my Self.” Yet this is a Self that the separate, resistant, willful self scarcely could begin to imagine—were it not for family.

This mystical experience has at its base the love that calls us into expanded identity. But this is not love as we usually think of it, not a love based on special interests and favors and loyalties returned. Rather, it is love in the sense of oneness, from which vantage I see that I must “Love my neighbor as myself” because my neighbor is myself, the same “I am” that I am. This love is in a way impersonal, and there is a great deal to be said for the ability to love impersonally, since what we call personal love so often makes a mess of love in any sense. To truly love someone may well mean nothing more than entering into one’s expanded identity where that other is concerned. Where one can open to this, one becomes empathetic, kind, considerate, interested, available—all the things we try to contrive when love is still personal, and we make our accommodations, or so it feels, at our expense. Impersonal love, on the other hand, is simply resident in oneness. The other’s concerns become one’s own; there is no conflict. There is no accommodation. There is only this wonderful, impersonal gesture to grant, to care for, to fulfill, to recognize, to acknowledge, a gesture as natural and effortless as snow falling.

The word family originally meant “a servant.” If we regard this strictly from within the consciousness of separateness, it will seem like a bad thing, demeaning, and implying a relinquishing of one’s rights and autonomy and such. But when we realize that we all serve something, we may consider that to be a servant of family is, mystically speaking, to be a servant of oneness, to open oneself in willingness to become the next more expansive version of oneself, to cultivate compassion and lovingkindness, and to see, as the incomparable Göethe put it, “God’s presence in all things.”

On this path, our earthly family members remind us that we are not here just for our little self, which is the barest seed of who we are. They call us to be more! The greater the differences that seem to separate us from our parents, siblings, children, the greater the opportunity to see through them to the underlying greater reality. And if, despite the very real differences, we are living in the light of that acknowledgement of oneness, we have to that extent already begun our homecoming.

Tautologies are curious things. Operating a bit the way oracles do, they can give you either no information or vital information, point to the simplistic or the essential, and seem banal or profound—all depending on one’s willingness to look beyond the surface, beyond the appearance to the underlying truth, which is what philosophy at its best does. By definition, a tautology is a statement of logically necessary truth in the form of a redundancy. In other words, the truth of a tautological declaration lies in the fact that the predicate asserts what was stipulated in the antecedent. Most of the time, tautologies are regarded as rhetorical manipulations or fallacies of reasoning, or at least as failings of style in the same way that redundancy in writing is viewed as a failing. Here are some examples, which should help make this logical parlance clear:

Nothing changes if nothing changes.
We are who we are.
Is is, isn’t isn’t.

These statements and other tautologies are true “by definition,” meaning by virtue of what the words mean, rather than as a result of inductive investigation or polling or anything else to be found in worldly experience. If we say that “All bachelors are unmarried males,” we haven’t claimed something that one has to go out and prove or disprove by interviewing unmarried males to see if they are indeed bachelors. The statement is true by virtue of what the word bachelor means, such that the statement cannot be false, and any attempt to falsify it will result in a contradiction from the get-go.

One can respond to the sort of truths that tautologies assert in either of two ways. The first is with a “So what?” and a yawn, and perhaps a glance at one’s watch. “We are who we are.” So what? Who else could we be? The second way, however, is illuminating, and tremendously useful in the sort of work that applied philosophy allows and encourages us to do, which at the end of the day is the work of improving ourselves, using our tools, talents, resolve for the truth, and experience to live better lives. Considered in this light, tautologies can help make us wise, or at least wiser. But to get to this, we have to be willing to consider that the wisdom of tautologies lies not in their linguistic form or in their assertion of what’s true by definition, but in what these assertions imply for everyday living.

To illustrate this, let’s look at each of the tautological examples, above:

Nothing changes if nothing changes.
The statement throws us back on ourselves, on the responsibility we have to make good choices. It even implies that our life is the result of these choices, and that to expect our life to improve by itself, magically, through divine intervention, and so on is the height of folly. Our life improves in step with our willingness to work on ourselves, become more aware, and make better choices. There’s a joke about a young man who took a position with a company as bookkeeper. After a month, he found a note in his paycheck envelope that said, “We’ve decided to give you an increase. It will become effective as soon as you do.” Many of us want change, even need change, but are unwilling to make the changes within ourselves that the desired change requires. This tautology puts us on notice that the conditions of our life depend on something other than those conditions, something interior. Change the cause, and the effect must follow.

We are who we are.
“Who else could we be?” as it turns out, is a good question, for as human beings, we have the ability to deny who we are, to suppress or trivialize or translate the truth of our nature. Such stances, however, set us against ourselves and never work out well. In this tautology, there is a tacit call to self-acceptance, to begin where we are here and now, and above all, to cease all inner hostilities. In this simple, “We are who we are,” there is the intimation that each of us has a story, a through line, and a destiny, following which we find we can move with a certain ease and poise through the inevitable times of adversity, simply because we are on our own side. It is not such a common thing to find someone established in this state of self-friendship. In philosophical counseling sessions, I often work with people who are masters of self-rejection, self-criticism, self-disparagement—driving through life, as it were, with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake, and wondering why things aren’t going well. I’ve even wondered if, in the subtle regions where mind, spirit, and body intersect, this might not be a factor if autoimmune disorders. This tautology invites us to trade self-rejection in any and all of its pernicious forms for self-acceptance in the willingness to begin where we are—a profound invitation with potentially life-changing consequences.

Is is, isn’t isn’t.
I have more than once wished I had come up with this one. “Is is” certainly might win the Shortest Tautology of All Time award, with “Isn’t isn’t” taking second place. We know, of course, that what is, is; also that what is not, is not—so what does this tautology offer us, beyond an obvious statement of the most basic ontic truths? Well, the buried treasure here will be well known to anyone who has ever tried to make something happen that life refused to support, or tried to stop something from happening that life required. “Is is, isn’t isn’t” reminds us that life is a collaboration, that there is a time to stop trying, to bow before the inevitable, both in those things that we want with all our heart and those that we would do anything to avoid. Equanimity, release of the will, the importance of timing and of moving with things rather than against them—there is so much in this little, four-word statement that one might be able to follow its star straight down the path of self-work to a real and abiding happiness.

Philosophy’s “lovers of wisdom” know that for the true student, the teacher is everywhere, even in the obvious statements of truth that tautologies express. Our interests lie not so much in the logical as the ontological, in the quality of our being-here and the self-work that allow us to be here skillfully and well. That direction calls us to be mindful, watchful, attentive to details, to be slow to dismiss, to look beyond the obvious to something implied. Every statement, like every person and every situation, has its truth. The truth we reject out of hand often proves to be the truth we most needed to hear.

Those who come to PhilosophyCenter for counseling, despite the differences of personality and circumstances, often have at least this much in common: Something deep in their psyche has begun rattling around and demanding attention, like a squeaky screen door or loose shutter that the wind keeps banging against the house. Sometimes they’ve lived with it a long time, and got so used to it that they didn’t hear it anymore. But lately, it’s been growing more insistent. And now it’s time to put the house in order. Something triggers this. They may be feeling anxious or out of sorts, caught in a loop of anger and resentment, or pervasively sad with no apparent reason. Each of these states has left them with the intrusive sense of something essential suspended, unresolved, incomplete in some way that no longer can be ignored. In essence, who they are has become a question that needs answering.

Usually all of this brings a certain urgency. They not only want the answer, they want it now, or at least soon. Our whole culture has gone to lengths to inculcate in us this demand for speed. Computers, ATMs, next-day delivery, jet travel, instant Internet socializing even in the midnight hour, tweets and texts and telecommuting—at every turn we see technology pressed into the service of instant gratification, the compression of time, and real social contact, community, and conversation being usurped by their digital counterparts—and all of this leaves one weighing what we’ve gained in the ability to go faster and faster against what we’ve lost.

For all of that, it is a truth borne out again and again that self-work cannot be done quickly. In order to examine the assumptions we carry in the shadows of our being, we have to slow down, notice the unasked question there, and be willing to ask it. In this process, we discover that living well, being happy, and coming into possession of what Plato called the “well ordered soul” are not advances that happen overnight, and so we learn to be patient with those days in which, aware of the better path, we yet fail to take it. Instead of answers, philosophical counseling gives clarifications, directions, and new ways to look at old things. Answers have their place, serving essentially as bookmarks in the story of our life, and over time, if we slow down enough to pay attention, we may come to appreciate how much they change, and that having answers is far less important than how beautifully we live the questions.

Anyone who’s worked one of the numerous Twelve-Step programs knows that the work begins with an admission of powerlessness. Alcoholics Anonymous, the mother of these programs, in its main reference text, describes addiction as a condition of “self-will run riot.” The insight here is that addiction is a state in which one’s will is out of control, by which is meant self-control. Thus: “Man takes a drink, drink takes a drink, drink takes the man.” In light of this, it isn’t surprising that recovery depends on acknowledging one’s powerlessness over behavior so willful that one no longer experiences having anything to say about it, whether the addiction is to alcohol (A.A.), narcotics (N.A.) overeating (O.A.) or even the behavior of others (Al Anon). This crucial admission of powerlessness is the moment of truth that can set one free, and as is often the case with admitting a difficult truth, it has a deeply humbling effect that can be life-changing, even life-saving.

Despite the Twelve-Step program’s insight into addiction as a condition of excessive willfulness, the language of its practice loses an important distinction, for Step One of the steps is stated thus: “Admitted we were powerless over alcohol [for example] and that our lives had become unmanageable.” The distinction lost here is between admitting that one is powerless and admitting that one’s will is powerless, and it is by no means a trivial oversight, for it confesses identification with the will. In other words, if I equate “my will is powerless” with “I am powerless,” then I have expressed that I am will-identified, and in a world where our will is all but entirely limited, such an identification cannot serve us well for long. If we keep the distinction, however, important changes of the most useful sort follow, for while our will may be powerless not just in many situations but in every situation past a certain point, it does not at all follow that we are powerless. Where the power of our will ends, we may find the power to accept, to meet our experience without resistance, to stay open to creative solutions, to be curious, to be patient, to refrain from reacting, to remember that things change, and so on—all of which tends to open doors where a moment earlier there were no doors, or so it seemed to the willful gaze. If, however, one is identified with one’s will, then in the face of the powerlessness of the will, one must experience oneself as powerless, and this sort of powerlessness quickly becomes hopelessness and despair. A moment’s reflections make clear that just because we can’t make something happen, it doesn’t follow that that thing, or something better, can’t happen. It only means that it can’t happen through the will. But this in itself is no occasion for hopelessness or despair. On the contrary, it is illumination, clarity, direction, and so, instruction of the most important kind.

Parsing the will and the self, sundering that ancient linkage and waking up from the dream of identification with the will opens up life and the world in wonderful ways. Indeed, it is only when we begin living beyond our will, as it were, that we can truly be said to be living at all. Human will exerts a formidable gravitational pull on us, all but demanding identification and an authority that it may hardly occur to us to question. It is this unexamined infatuation with our will that leads to down blind alleys of self-defeat and misplaced effort until finally we “hit bottom,” as the Twelve-Step programs put it, stop blaming the world, and begin looking for the answers in the only place they can be found—in the mirror.

Perhaps it is immediately helpful to consider that our power lies more in acceptance than in resistance, more in cooperation than in the imposition of our will, more in the willingness to question our conclusions than in attempting to impose them. It may seem to us sometimes that a situation cannot be redeemed, cannot come right, unless and until this or that happens, but life has many more ways of working things out than our will typically considers. It may be waiting to bless us and all that concerns us in surprising ways the moment we take a step back and grant it right of way.

The wee hours are good ones for doing philosophy. In the stillness, in the darkness, there is little to distract from that spring of clarity and inspiration that bubbles up as though from nowhere and solves some problem or illuminates some previously shadowy direction. During the day, I had run into a snag with a bit of code on one of the pages of my web site, a snag that was preventing a script from executing properly. I had spent over an hour perusing the hundreds of lines of HTML and CSS that the page comprises, but nothing presented itself as out of the ordinary or out of place. I tried some things, but the problem wouldn’t budge.

By the time I lay down for the night, I had put the problem out of my mind, figuring that tomorrow would be here soon enough to tackle the screen of intractable code again, and I soon fell asleep. Halfway through the night, I woke up and instantly knew where the errant code had managed to hide, escaping detection. Somehow, a deeper part of my consciousness had continued working on the problem, perhaps going over code that it had without my knowledge memorized for deep, subterranean consideration, when it would not be hindered by conscious effort. As it turned out, a single HTML instruction needed to be moved up above another, simply that. It was hiding in plain sight, as the saying has it, which is where the truth of a situation often hides.

There was something else latent in the night, in the dark stillness of that hypnogogic passage from sleep to wakefulness. As the spring of nonlocal understanding continued to percolate, I found my thoughts drifting to the issue of forgiveness. Lying there, poised between worlds, I remembered a line of verse written by Max Freedom Long, the fellow who brought Huna to the West:

And if some hurt has struck me deep,
And no amends are made,
I ask the light to balance all,
I count the debt as paid.

I had heard this years before, and now it came back to me unbidden, like the solution to the errant code, like a distant narration I could almost here. Something about it was off—an implication, a cadence, something. It was, I thought, the last line. What was it really saying? (This is how philosophical questions, which at their best always turn out to be self-questions, can mess with you when you should be sleeping.) Well, “I count the debt as paid” seemed to be either some New Age attempt to manipulate reality—as though forgiving the debt might actually set into motion a mysterious process leading to the paying of the debt—or, if not that, then at least a declaration meant to free the one who had been hurt from the burden of holding a grudge. Both of these, however, seemed to me disingenuous. On the one hand, counting debts as paid rarely gets them paid on the other hand, it is not so easy to announce the debt paid when one has been “struck deep,” especially when no amends were made. There is in such situations, not only the matter of having been hurt, but also the matter of justice, or fairness, according to which something in us knows that injuries need to be addressed, if not redressed. A response is called for. No one should be allowed to commit violations and simply walk away from them.

The central importance of this sense of justice or fairness is explored in Plato’s Republic and within a more limited scope in the Gorgias, as well. where Socrates distinguishes pleasure from goodness. He goes on to make the case that it is better to suffer an unjust act than to commit one, and furthermore that if one does commit an unjust act (in Long’s terms, an act that “struck deep” with no amends offered), that it is better to suffer a just punishment than to get off scot-free. Polus, one of Socrates’s foils in the dialogue, demurs, in defense of his teacher, the rhetorician Gorgias. What are you saying, Socrates? he protests, in essence. Isn’t it self-evidently better to get away with an unjust act and avoid the painful consequences that one surely would suffer if caught and held to accounts? How can you say it would be better to be punished than to escape punishment?

Polus, who is young, misses the point. It is a matter of the debts we carry, soul-wise, as a result of our actions. Call it conscience or karma or whatever you wish. Criminals, for example, in committing crimes, incur a “debt to society.” Revenge may be, as King Arthur says, “the most worthless of causes,” but its roots run deep in that part of our psyche that demands that the ledger be balanced. We may disagree about what should count as payment of the debt—it hardly sits well with most of us that a man should have his hand cut off for stealing a loaf of bread. And yet, the idea that people should go about stealing bread freelance and without consequences goes against something basic in our nature, as well.

Back to the Gorgias: Socrates argues that it is better for us to pay the debt incurred by an unjust act than to have to carry the soul-burden of having gotten away with the crime. A just punishment, in this light, is a penance. It absolves us of the wrongdoing as much as the situation allows. Punishment is not pleasurable, certainly, but in losing our soul, as it were, by getting away with an unjust act, we lose goodness, and the loss of goodness is a far worse kind of suffering than the loss of pleasure. The most important thing, above all, for Plato, is that we act in accordance with the requirements of a well-ordered soul. Goodness is its own reward; evil, its own punishment. Accepting responsibility for our actions is part of it. It helps to keep the soul well-ordered, which allows us to stay on good terms with ourselves.

I was talking about Max Freedom Long’s little verse, and something about it that didn’t sit right with me, in the middle of the night when stillness has settled over the world so thickly that any incongruity demands attention—the New Age wrinkle, or the tacit and in my view quixotic suggestion that we can simply declare the debt of a deep hurt “paid.” What clarified this for me—the bit that seemed off—became apparent as the darkness outside the window began to bloom with the silver light of morning. It was about the light: “I ask the light to balance all…”—what is this? Does it mean that, in response to our asking, the light will balance all, or that somehow, in the asking, the balance already is achieved? And what is “the light,” anyway, that can do this?

The light, it seemed to me at that moment, must be the truth. Isn’t the truth that thing that comes to light? Socrates tells us this in the Gorgias: “The truth cannot be refuted.” Sooner or later, denial fails like darkness before the ineluctable advance of day. “The truth will out.” It is only a matter of time. So: “I ask the truth to balance all…”—this I could understand. Whatever the truth of a situation may be, such as the truth of the situation that hurt one deeply, with no amends made—that truth will come to light and “balance all.” It is not that it will happen. By virtue of the very nature of the truth, it is as good as done.

This was what came to me as I shook off the last, straggling invitations of sleep and returned fully into the waking world, the world of effort that misses things, the world that sometimes seems designed to send the truth into exile: When I am unforgiving, it is because I lack conviction. My grasp of the truth is halfhearted, foggy, once removed, obfuscated by weariness or hurt or the prejudice of special interests, blind, driven by reaction. Because I lack the conviction that a forthright acknowledgment of the truth would bring, and by this I mean the human truth, the truth that has been forsaken or twisted or denied by the one who hurts another, I become submerged in feeling wronged, and the offender must pay the penalty, and so instead of resting in the truth and the consolation of remembering that that the denied truth is already on its way into the light, I abandon philosophy and turn to prosecution. Follow out the equation, and you come to this: If one keeps one’s eye on the truth that has been deformed in the hurtful act, one can be generous, one can forgive. The one who hurts another and does not offer to restore the ruined balance, even if only for the sake of his or her own soul, is hurt more than the one who is hurt. The act is written in the ledger of the offender’s disordered soul. As the truth will out, we do not need to become prosecutors. Our conviction that the truth comes to light, restoring balance perhaps in ways we cannot anticipate or even imagine, settles these burdensome accounts and gets us through the long night.