"Don’t ever force a lock; you’ll bend the key or break the lock. You jiggle until it revolves. So, Wúwéi is to act in accordance with the pattern of things as they exist, not to impose on any situation a kind of interference that is not in accordance with the situation.
For example, we have a slum, and the people are in difficulty, and they need better housing. Now, if you go in with a bulldozer and knock the slum down, and you put in its place by some architect’s imaginative notions of what is a super-efficient highrise apartment building to store people, you create a total mess. Utter chaos. A slum has what we would call an ecology. It has a very complex system of relationships going in it by which the thing is already a going concern, even though it isn’t going very well. Anybody who wants to alter that situation must first of all become sensitive to all the conditions and relationships going on there.
It’s terribly important, then, to have this feeling of the interdependence of every form of life upon every other form of life."
~ Alan Watts
(Rare photo of Alan Watts & Jiddu Krishnamurti)
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