This is all a far cry from the principle espoused by Lao Tze. Yet it remains true that much, perhaps most of our suffering comes from an unwillingness to let something go and walk away. Keeping our hand in the fire, we blame the fire, when all along we had the power to take our hand out of the flames. It does, after all, take two to keep conflict going. Often the way out opens as soon as one person disengages, whether through refraining from counterpoint or actually walking away. It seems to me at this point in my life that emotional and therefore physical well-being, and perhaps even in some sense our sanity, depend on our ability to say no, to recognize when we’ve become involved in a no-win situation, and to disengage.

At the end of the film, The Matrix, the protagonist, Neo, gets this lesson big time. The enemy “agents” have shot him dead, but love resurrects him, and having gone to the limits of his fear and survived, he comes back a new version of himself (“Neo,” of course, means “new.”) This new version of him has what appears to be near unlimited power, and neither the agents nor their bullets can touch him anymore. In the pivotal scene, he turns away from them—turns away, it is important—holds up his hand matter-of-factly, and says in a barely audible voice, “No.” That’s all. And he’s turned away so that he isn’t even looking at the agent who is now trying, to no avail, to kill him again. In Lao Tze’s terms, he has stopped contending, and so cannot be beaten.

The power to disengage is the power to refrain from, to say no, to walk away, to reject terms that, if accepted, will take one hostage. All of this depends, of course, on the willingness to lose whatever prize would seduce us into engaging, and it is no accident that Neo must lose everything, must lose his very life, before he can discover this great power within himself. In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, Victor Frankl said that he observed people every day exercising their ultimate right to refuse to continue participating in the horrendous conditions around them by walking over to the electrified fence and saying “No.” Most of us are not facing situations that dire, but we may gain much from the instruction. To refuse to be “gotten,” as my friend Dennis describes it,” inwardly or outwardly, is to tap a current of power, self-possession, and excellence that no one can take away from us. In the end, what works against us is our own hubris, attachment to outcomes, and willingness to work against our own best interests. If, however, we follow the example of the ancient Greeks, for whom “know thyself” was the ultimate dictum, we will come to understand the wisdom of self-solidarity, loosen our grip on the world, and come home to excellence.

In the most practical way, remembering to stay innocent means letting go our conclusions about what has to happen and when, and even unchecked assumptions about what would be good and what would not. So many factors are involved in even the seemingly simplest situation, and it is just such situations that pose the greatest risk that we will forget to wear our conclusions lightly, that we will forget to leave room for the gods. For there always are contexts beyond the one that has our attention, and both subtle and dramatic causal branchings of which we are all but certainly unaware. The wise man, knowing that he knows not of these things, knowing that they move on the side of things hidden from mortal eyes, has his conclusions, but lives at the edge of relinquishing them at any moment, should this be required by the revelation of a truth that extends beyond where he was looking a moment ago. There is a famous Zen parable illustrating this sort of wisdom: A Chinese farmer lived on a small bit of land with his son. They were poor to say the least, and struggled each day just to keep food on the table. One day, a wild horse came out of the mountains, jumped their fence, and began grazing on their land. By law, the horse now rightly belonged to them. Horses were considered possessions of great value; only the wealthy had even one of them, and the son was overjoyed. When the father saw this, he said to the boy, “Who knows what is good and what is bad?” On the second day, the horse broke through the fence and escaped back to the mountains, leaving the boy sorely disappointed and complaining, to which his father responded by saying, “Who knows what is good and what is bad?” On the third day, the horse returned to graze further on the sweet grass he had tasted the day before, but this time he brought half a dozen horses with him. As the father and son worked quickly to corral the animals with a stronger fence, the son was all but dancing with joy, while the father said only, “Who knows what is good and what is bad?” On the fourth day, the son climbed on one of the wild stallions and was thrown badly, breaking his leg. As the local doctor was tending to him, the boy looked up at his father and began complaining about his bad luck, to which the father replied, “Who knows what is good and what is bad?” And on the fifth day, the province went to war, and the army came through and conscripted all the young men in the town, except for the one with a broken leg.

The fact of our ignorance in the face of the hidden and intricate unfoldings of chaos lead us ineluctably to a conclusion that some may find startling. In the most practical sense, we do not know what to want. As I look back, I see that some of my greatest moments of disappointment were directed by the divine hand, and those things that I regretted losing so bitterly at the time I later gave thanks for being spared. The realization that our desires may drive us to our undoing as well as to the expected fulfillment led Oscar Wilde to write, “In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

As this fact of life sinks in and its roots take hold in the soil of maturity, we still find ourselves wanting things, but we do not take our wanting as seriously as perhaps we once did. We still have conclusions, but we realize that they are at best only part of a story that the gods can rewrite at any moment. And so we offer innocence as a libation to the unseen, and uncertainty, once a foe, becomes a trusted and truthful companion. As William James writes in his famous essay, The Will to Believe, we can know, but we cannot know that we know. In other words, our knowing cannot be absolute, only relative, educated guesswork, like a bookmark in a book that shows where we are in the reading so far. Like the Chinese farmer, those who are aware of this, who practice innocence and so work in collaboration with chaos embody a beauty that forever eludes those who assume their knowing to be more than human knowing can be. In loosening our grip on even our most precious conclusions, even those that seem to us self-evident and beyond questioning, we make room for our greater good to come to us.

Let me give a few examples. Every day, millions of times, people place phone calls to companies and, while on hold, listen to recorded messages. It has become a common practice for companies to have these recorded messages tell us that someone will be with us in a moment. Now, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has wondered how a recorded message could know this. But the simple truth is that such messages are not concerned with conveying information, only with conveying the semblance of information. Empty reassurance is a lie, but it fills dead air time, and at leaves gives the impression that care is being given where it is not. Another example: Every day, commercials for department stores, car dealerships, and other retail companies tell us to “hurry” to take advantage of sale pricing. This “now” factor is ramped up with such snipes as “three days only,” “sale ends tomorrow,” and so on. It is truly a bafflement that anyone is prompted to act by this nonsense, since we all know well that a new sale will start within days after the current one ends. And yet, the hype continues, as though the world were going to end on the last day of the sale du jour. Here’s one more: Television programs that air movies have adopted the habit films released as much as 20 years ago and shown many times since on TV as making their “television premier” every time they return to the programming schedule. Last week, for example, one of the Jurassic Park movies made a television premier. Again. For the hundredth time. And yet, somehow, this time still counts as a “premier.” The claim is patently untrue, of course—but it sounds ore exciting than saying, “Jurassic Park is back for the hundredth time,” or even saying nothing at all. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is or is not a premier; it sounds good to say there is. A little lie. A victimless crime, perhaps. Or is it?

I have said that these lies are little, but I believe the point that makes all this worth discussing, and that carries the issue beyond nitpicking into something more serious, is the disregard for others implicit in every lie told out of self-interest—to make ourselves look good, to acquire or accumulate profit, to give a falsely favorable impression, and so on. Such lying amounts to a kind of theft, and theft, in flouting the truth and seeking to get away with something wrong, gives hubris a foothold and places us on the wrong side of chaos. Untruthfulness, however trivial the context may seem, and even in those cases where the motive is altruistic, is a slippery slope.

There are times when it is prudent, compassionate, or skillful to refrain from telling an untimely truth. Such restraint should not be confused with a lie of omission, of course, which can be just as much a lie as an outright and deliberate misrepresentation. What makes silence prudent, compassionate, and skillful—what makes it an expression of character and excellence—is the underlying concern and consideration for another. The thief will say anything to achieve his ends, and it is of little concern to him who has to pay for it. And if one looks around these days, one sees little acts of theft taking place on all sides, assumptively, without a second thought. Alcoholics Anonymous, describing how addiction takes on a life and force of its own, tell us: “Man takes the drink, drink takes the drink, drink takes the man.” Lying, given quarter, can do the same. We can fool ourselves into thinking that the truth doesn’t matter—and it is the little lies that will seem the most acceptable. But we cannot fool the gods. Chaos moves through us and our lies, sweeping away all before it like a great wave. Truthfulness alone provides a refuge. Recorded messages that tell us that “someone will be with us in a minute” tell us less about how long we’ll be on hold than they do about the company that uses them. Sales do not end for long, and movies that are being broadcast for the nth time are not “premiers.” As someone wrote, “Is is, isn’t isn’t.” Which side of that line we live on, is up to us.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi survived a NATO airstrike on Saturday night that killed his youngest son Saif al-Arab and three of his grandchildren, a Libyan government spokesman said.

In an Op-Ed piece published on 05 May entitled, Thinking Through Assassination, which calls into question this practice of government-sponsored killing, writer by Jim Rasenberger states:

Osama bin Laden clearly presents a special case both morally and practically. There is no conceivable argument against assassination that could stand up to the overwhelming desire in this country to see the man die. But the apparent attack on Colonel Qaddafi two days previously is more troubling.

It seems to me that “there is no conceivable argument against assassination” is so overstated as to be wrong. There is. This would be the argument that we have a moral responsibility to live up to higher standards than murderers and terrorists. Certainly the argument is conceivable, and for many, the enormity of Bin Laden’s crimes against humanity notwithstanding, convincing. Ransenberger goes on:

There is no arguing with assassination as a short-term expedient. But ultimately, the wars we are fighting will depend on defeating a violent ideology, not on killing individuals. Osama bin Laden got what he had coming, so let us make an exception in his case. But if we want the rest of the world to believe that the way to justice is law and not cold-blooded killing, then we need to be very careful that the killing we undertake in the name of justice remains the very rare exception, and not the rule.

Accepting assassination as a “short-term” expedient opens Pandora’s box, and demonstrates that we are willing to agree that premeditated murder, under at least some circumstances, trumps the rule of law. The mentality that presumes the right to carry out these secret missions of murder to achieve political or ideological ends has become the order of the day. Yet in accepting this sort of thing, we may fail to notice that we have become the very thing we seek to kill off.

We cannot be sure what sequence of events transpired in that compound in Abbottabad. Even as soon as 24 hours after the news broke, conflicting stories were on the wires. Those of us who were not there cannot presume to judge the tNavy Seals team that moved in and carried out the assassination. It is not clear whether taking Bin Laden into custody was an option or not. What does seem clear, however, is that this mission, the NATO strike against Gaddafi, and other similar operations attempted by the CIA since the 1950s demonstrate a dangerous departure from our highest ideals and values. “Special cases” and “short-term expedients” place us on a slipper slope, and draw us into the risk of emulating humanity’s worst in the name of justice and revenge. And if there was truly no other way to stop Bin Laden—for clearly, he had to be stopped—than to kill him, at least let us recognize that something sobering and tragic has happened, and that the murder of any human being, even when it is deemed necessary, is a sad thing.

When we’re humble, we bow before things as they are, accepting the world as the handiwork of something far greater than ourselves. And yet what made the world as it is also made us as we are, and so to be humble must include bowing before the truth of our own nature. As it turns out, our nature is powerful, infused with creativity and passion, intent on purpose, and inclined toward enthusiasm (a word that means “to be filled with god”). Deferring to the truth of ourselves fortifies us with that power which brought us forth and sustains us each moment. The result is anything but passive.

Self-denial of any sort, even while it present itself as retiring and meek, is willfulness turned against itself. In denying our truth, we deny the gods and invite tragic repercussions. The path of humility is a path of vitality, adventure, self-respect, and life deeply lived. These are the hallmarks of excellence in relation to the self, the world, and that mystery out of which self and world arise, and without which we must remain, for the time being, in exile.

This week, we lost a dear friend and advisor to the Fate Project, James Millikan. Jimi passed away on 29 March at his home in Forestville, California. If there was ever a modern man who personified the Greek ideal of arete (excellence) in all he did, it was he. I met Jimi in 1968 at the University of Florida in Gainesville when I signed up for his introductory course in metaphysics. At 27, Jimi had been one of the youngest philosophy professors at Yale, his alma mater. I was so struck by his intelligence, his talent for listening, his passion for philosophy, and love for his students that from that first fall term on, I enrolled in whatever class he was teaching just so that I could continue studying with him. Once I even told a friend that I was “majoring in Jimi,” for this was the sort of thing he inspired, not only in me, but in many of us who had chosen the path of formal training in philosophy.

My undergraduate work led to the master’s degree program, with Jimi agreeing to be the chairman of my graduate committee. Meanwhile, over the years, we had become friends. When he was denied tenure by an ultra-conservative majority of the UF philosophy faculty, he left the university as Socrates had taught by his example—with head high, unsullied by rancor or blame, and with a readiness to take on the next adventure. Packing a shoulder bag and following his daimon, he hitchhiked out to California to start over. That was in 1973, the year I received my master’s degree. Over the decades since, Jimi studied theater, returned to his lifelong love for painting and drawing, became an administrator for Sonoma County, married a wonderful woman named Carroll, had grandchildren and great grandchildren, and always stayed in touch. We exchanged hundreds of emails, visited each other here and there, exchanged writings, and spent hours on the phone resuming the conversation that we had begun so many years ago in Gainesville.

Jimi’s passing from this world is a great loss for those of us who knew and loved him. He brought such quietly brilliant attention to everything he did, that his life itself became a work of art—an embodiment of what the Greeks called phronesis. Excellence may seem an intangible thing, until one encounters someone who has learned to embody it, someone who exemplifies what Plato called the “well ordered soul.” Such a one is like a fountain of all that makes being human good—kindness and compassion, generosity of spirit, curiosity and the willingness to learn, creativity and artistic expression, a real and abiding interest in life and in others, and of course, humility.

I spoke with Jimi on the phone a couple of weeks before he died, and told him that I do not know what my life would have been without him, so profoundly did he influence me. Carroll called me on 30 March to tell me the news, adding that Jimi had died as he had lived, “sweetly and without resistance.” As we do our best to accept the truth of his passing, and find ways to navigate around the hole it has torn in the fabric of our lives, we thank the gods for the time we had, for the chance to have known such a man, and for his example, true to Socrates to the end, a most excellent teacher, human being, and friend.

To peruse some of Jimi’s philosophical writings, view his online gallery, or read his blog posts, click through to his web site at jamesmillikan.com

Then, there’s the hubris of building nuclear reactors in high-risk regions without adequate safety precautions, and in this case, it appears that the experts were simply ignored—experts who had warned of the possibility of the very scenario that Japan is now facing. Again and again, we underestimate the powers of natural forces and exaggerate our own—and so open Pandora’s box again and again. When one takes a moment to consider the relentlessness of the gods, and the helter-skelter unpredictability of chaotic cascades, it becomes obvious that we simply can’t know what the long-lasting effects of our cavalier handling of nuclear energy will be, or how the earth will react to deep and repeated violations of its integrity.

Around the time of the Greeks, in ancient China, Lao Tze was penning the Tao Te Ching, a remarkable work that lays out the philosophy of Taoism. In that text, he writes: “Do you think you can improve the earth? You cannot. The earth is a sacred vessel.” This seems to be a point that Native Americans also understood. They recognized their fundamental oneness with the natural order, and knew that the harm they did to the earth, they also did to themselves. In other words, they were guided by a humility for which Western thinking seems to have little use. Yet, as the saying goes, the world is round. What has happened in Japan should prompt us all to take stock of our presumptuousness in the face of powers greater than ourselves. While we rarely can follow out the connections between causes and effects, especially those that span great geographic, geologic, or temporal distances, we will do well to remember that “what goes around, comes around,” surely it seems prudent and reasonable to assume that violence to the earth and the ecosystem we all share eventually will return to us in kind. The earth is a sacred vessel, but also capable of even far greater destructive release than we are witnessing in Japan. We have been given a priceless gift in the earth and its resources. Perhaps its time we wake up to what the Taoists and Native Americans, among others, knew—and start receiving the gift graciously.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent,  directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
- Aldous Huxley

Lately I’ve taken to watching episodes of Frasier, one of the best, wittiest, and certainly most urbane sitcoms (it really defies that classification, given what the term has come to mean) ever produced in the U.S. The series, which ran for a remarkable eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, focuses on the character of Frasier Crane, a talk radio psychiatrist for whom the show is named. Kelsey Grammar, who plays the good doctor, brings together hilarious and often poignant elements in his midlife quest for love; his frustrated but tireless attempts to find common ground with his beer drinking, live-in dad; and his futile efforts to work out tolerable compromises between his elitist, cultured sensibilities and a world that often runs roughshod over them. One of the most beautiful things about the character is his good nature, which sees him through one failed romantic liaison after another but never allows him to descend to bitterness. At the end of the day, no matter how disappointingly things have gone, Frasier somehow gathers his forces and resolves that tomorrow could be better.

There’s one episode in particular that you can find on YouTube called “Sliding Frasiers,” which tells two parallel stories involving different versions of reality, each following from a single, crucial alteration in the succession of chaotic events: whether Frasier chooses to wear a jacket or a sweater to a speed-dating session. Both the title and the split-story line are a take-off on the film, “Sliding Doors,” which also aims to show how our fate is worked out in incidental choices that set us moving along pathways toward consequences we cannot imagine or anticipate—consequences that certainly can be life changing.

The most satisfying thing about the episode is also the most satisfying thing about the series and the lead character. At the end of the story, Frasier has again fulfilled his fate as one of “love’s big losers,” a term he uses describe himself in at least two other episodes. In the version of reality that he chose, his hubris and exaggerated efforts to win the affections of the beautiful woman that fate sent his way end in disappointment. Overwhelmed by his well meaning excesses, she breaks it off with him and leaves. It is a case of classic tragedy, worthy of the Greeks, for no one has undone Frasier but himself. Even so, when everything has fallen from his hands—again—in the last moments of the program, he has the humility to continue believing that love still can work out, and one gets the sense that, in that imaginary place where television stories play on after the credits have rolled, Frasier was not unteachable. Surely it isn’t such a terrible thing to make mistakes if we’re willing to learn from them, to lose our heart’s desire but come home to ourselves, to be full of ourselves if it shows us the wisdom of a little emptiness.

Innocence refers to the willingness to remember how little we know; ultimately, that we know nothing in the sense that our knowing is imperfect and approximate, and therefore must remain subject to revision. The truth is that our assumptions about a troubling situation may be far more troubling than the situation itself. We may be assuming, for example, that the distressing facts are unlikely to change anytime soon. By being willing to require such assumptions to show their credentials, we quickly learn that they have none, for on the “schedule of the gods,” anything is possible, and even intractable and chronic
problems can turn around and resolve in surprising ways, provided that we meet them with humility and do not impose upon them the adverse influence of our worst speculations, imaginings, and projections.

There seems to be a mysterious correlation between staying innocent—even “under fire,” as it were—and divine favor, though on the path of humility, there are no guarantees. It is as though situations let us go commensurately with our willingness to let them go, to move through them lightly, without conclusions. The winds may be howling, but we are safely sheltered in the sanctuary of nonresistance. This leads us to suspect that events themselves are as subject to revision as our conclusions about them.

When angry or critical conclusions are trying to bang down the door, and hubris has us all but convinced that our position is absolutely right, it helps to remember a few principles that have the power to defuse even highly toxic reactions: “All things considered, we all do the best we can, even if not the best we know,” “Everything changes; this, too, will change,” “We’re all in this together,” and “I can accept this situation as it is for now without agreeing with it.” These and similar sentiments have the power to return us to the native generosity of innocence, which introduces an element of spaciousness to otherwise constricted conditions, giving them room to come right.

Diligence, however, has nothing to do with asserting our will or setting out to make things happen. There is no question that, on the path of humility, we follow our life rather that trying to lead it—but this leads us to anything but a passive, uneventful existence. Far from it. Following our life—and by this we mean the inner promptings of the daimon, those directions made obvious by the flow of events and by the claims laid on us by dialogue, and the timings made efficient by nonresistance—these things energize us and imbue our experience with an efficiency, a clarity of purpose, and a state of graceful cooperation that no amount of will can approach. We should remember, too, that diligence comprises both doing what’s ours to do and refraining from doing what is not ours. There is a discernment in it, and an acquiescence—neither of which trouble those assertions of the will characteristic of hubris. The defense of willfulness qua diligence, then, proves to be groundless, as does the fear that our life will stop if it is isn’t driven by our will. There are far better forces to engage than our will if the aim is a hearty and productive forward motion, and even the slightest consideration of what the gods bring forth all around and within us each moment without the need to consult our will should be enough to banish the fear that nothing will happen if we do not make it happen through our will.

The question, then, isn’t whether or not there is life after we release our will, but rather if we truly can be said to be living prior to such release. Where we put down our cause, the divine takes it up, So do we follow our lives, trusting the gods to lead us along the paths of our ever greater good, and our life, dyed in the colors of humility, becomes a living work of art.