Learn how to govern your own mind, Chuang-tzu says, and the universe will govern itself.
- from The Second Book of the Tao, Stephen Mitchell
I love this notion. But I bet most people reading it will think of self-discipline as the route to governing one’s own mind.
But self-discipline isn’t such a great tool for governing ourselves most of the time, especially when it comes to mental behavour — what we think or what we feel. And it seems pretty hopeless to me to think that the world will “govern itself” if we just force self-disciplne on everyone. Really? Is that going to happen??
I’m going to ask you to let go of that notion.
In my nearly-finished book The Way of the Brain, I write about the importance of understanding the principles behind how the brain~body works (the Ways it works) and recognising that these are exactly the same Ways as the Way the rest of Nature works. One of those Ways is that the brain~body is a self-regulating, self-organising system. It governs itself.
So, looking at this quote from that #BrainDao perspective, I see the message being that if we can learn the Ways we work — the core principles underlying our brain~body as a complex system — and really respect those Ways, then we can also start to understand and apply those Ways to the larger world we all together make up as a yet-larger system.
If each of us lived by those Ways, then the world really would be more likely to be able to just Be and better self-regulate and self-organise — in a word, to better govern itself.