Chapter Four · Break Attachment, See the Momentum, Settle the Heart

This chapter does only three things. First, it tells you that the essence of confusion is phase. It is not your friend, and it is certainly not your enemy. It is more like winter in the cycle of seasons. Second, it lays out the six stages through which all things pass: beginning, development, confrontation, stability, decline, and collapse. Taken together, I call them the six stages of heavenly selection. Third, it asks how, within that pattern, one may wield the three swords of human choice: break attachment, see the momentum, and settle the heart, so as to rediscover one's position, one's road, and one's inward center.

I have always loved winter, and I love warming myself by a fire in winter even more. Without real cold, we never learn what warmth is. People are much the same. Many things cannot be seen while life is going smoothly. When you are moving with the current, relationships, emotions, and choices all feel light, natural, almost self-evident.

Many problems are things you would never study carefully in ordinary times. Only when everything slows down, cools down, and comes to a halt do shapeless things begin to grow a shape, and confusion is born precisely there. Confusion is therefore neither enemy nor companion. It is a phase. It is like winter in the cycle of seasons. Winter itself is not wrong. Cold is not wrong. What goes wrong is that people always want to skip it.

People want only spring, only summer, only growth, only results, only abundance. But the turning of the seasons is a law of nature, a manifestation of the Way. It cannot be selected; it can only be observed and lived through. That is why the line "When grasses and trees first emerge, they are still curled and not yet fully unfolded" matters so much. Its importance is not that it offers a quick method, but that it reminds you: when the seasons are turning as they should, winter is not the end, and spring is not a reward. They are both only phases.

I cannot solve your problems for you. I cannot do it, and neither can anyone else. I cannot choose on your behalf, endure on your behalf, or live out your life for you. What I can do is tell you why you keep producing these problems, and how the force that creates problems may be turned into the force that begins to resolve them.

That is the meaning of this chapter. It is not here to ensure that you will never feel confused again. It is here so that you can begin to recognize the moment: this is not the sky falling in. This is me repeating the manufacture of the same kind of problem once more. Human pain is often not the problem itself. It is the endless reproduction of the same problem without ever seeing how one has helped bring it into being.

For many people, the real suffering is not that winter has arrived. The suffering begins after winter arrives, when they refuse to let winter be winter. They insist on treating winter as a mistake, and then start producing more trouble on top of it. They grow frantic, become disordered, force their way forward, blame themselves, wonder whether they have become useless, hunt obsessively for answers, and demand that they return to normal at once. Winter is not the problem. The problem is insisting on living like summer while one is inside winter.

Everything in the human world moves through six stages, and I call them the six stages of heavenly selection: beginning, development, confrontation, stability, decline, and collapse. Every stage has its own typical errors, and every stage has something that most needs to be restrained.

One person's life, a company, a nation, a tree, a leaf, one fish devouring another, a building — all of them move through this process. Buddhism names it impermanence. Daoism names it the Way. The I Ching names it change. These are not decorative conclusions. They are names for a pattern. Before you can look for the momentum, you first have to know where you are standing within it.

Many people think problems come from outside. That is not entirely true. A great many problems are produced inside a phase that is itself normal, because the person refuses to accept the phase in its own proper form, and so manufactures extra complications.

Winter is supposed to be cold. But if you insist that you yourself must feel like summer, you grow impatient. Impatience turns to disorder. Disorder leads to forced decisions. Forced decisions lead to mistakes. Mistakes turn into self-reproach. Self-reproach makes the cold feel colder still. In that way, a phase becomes a problem because you yourself help remake it as one.

That is why I have gradually come to feel that human pain often comes less from the phase itself than from the refusal to accept the phase. A person cannot accept that he is in a beginning stage, yet wants the results of maturity immediately. He cannot accept that something has already entered confrontation, yet still expects the ease of development. He cannot accept that a relationship is already declining, and tries to force it back into stability. He cannot accept that he is confused now, and insists that clarity must come at once.

That is why the first step is never solution. The first step is always this: reduce the extra problems you are adding.

The first kind of confusion is not that there is no road. It is that you cannot see the road. You had a road that you were already walking, but then you lift a telescope and look ahead, only to find that the far end of that road does not look like what you had hoped for. At the same time, you hear that another road may be better, and you feel tempted to switch. Yet the new road is hidden by fog as well, and the telescope cannot see through it. So you grow disappointed with the old road while remaining uncertain about the new one.

What kind of extra problem is most easily created in such a moment? Greedy choosing, followed by fear after the choice, and then panic after the fear. A person begins forcing himself to have an answer immediately, to choose immediately, to prove immediately that he has not wasted his time. The problem is not really "having no direction." The problem is despising what can already be seen, while demanding to see clearly what is still hidden.

First, break attachment. Breaking attachment is not passive resignation, nor is it the act of lying to yourself and saying, "It is all fine." Its core is to shrink the self and enlarge the world. You must first ask: what exactly am I attached to? Am I attached to having an answer immediately? Attached to not being allowed to choose wrongly? Attached to not letting other people think I am useless? Many people do not fail to see a road. They are simply terrified of admitting, "The new road I chose may have been wrong," or, "The old road I abandoned was not so worthless after all."

Then, see the momentum. Once the road has changed, you must ask at which point on that road you are actually standing. If you are still in the beginning stage, then not seeing clearly is normal. The beginning stage is supposed to be unclear. It is supposed to be blurred. It has not yet unfolded. When grasses and trees first emerge, they are still curled and not yet fully opened. Many people are not roadless. They are merely demanding of a beginning-stage self the visibility that belongs only to maturity.

Finally, settle the heart. When the road cannot yet be seen, what must be restrained is haste. Do not rush yourself. Do not drive yourself. Do not run wildly through fog. The best movement is not random movement. It is to avoid creating yet another wrong road, to probe slowly, to move in relative safety, and to let the next bend in the road arrive. You are not solving confusion all at once. You are simply refusing to add more chaos while you still cannot see.

The second kind of confusion is not that there is no road. It is that there are too many. A good family background, a good education, some respectable savings, invitations coming from many directions — a life that once had no room to choose now starts to feel as though every road might lead to Rome.

Every road seems possible. Every outcome seems difficult to relinquish. So a person stops moving. What kind of problem is easiest to manufacture in this moment? Excess wanting. Not ordinary desire, but the desire to have everything. You are unwilling to give up any possibility, and so you end up unable to walk even one road fully.

First, break attachment. Ask plainly what you are attached to. Are you trying to preserve every possibility? Are you unwilling to release any road? Do you want a little of every outcome? Are you hoping to avoid every cost and every risk? Only once this is admitted can the roads begin to clear.

Then, see the momentum. Look again at the stage. Among all these roads before you, what stage is each one actually in for you? If something has already entered confrontation while you are still treating it with the optimism of development, or if it has already entered decline while you continue to behave as though it has just begun, then of course the more you choose, the more disorder you create.

Finally, settle the heart. What must be restrained here is drift and excess. When there are too many roads, the crucial thing is not to choose beautifully. It is to relinquish some of them first. Not because they are impossible forever, but because they are not roads you should all be walking at once.

The third kind of confusion runs deeper than the others. You want life to become better, yet at the same time you want certain things never to change. You want opportunity, long for transformation, and yet do not want to accept the scenes that transformation may bring with it. You want to grow stronger with time, want your career to prosper, and yet do not want time to carry you toward age, wrinkles, and loss.

What kind of problem does this create? Delusion. The delusion that the world should change only in ways that benefit you. The delusion that time should bring gain but take nothing away. The delusion that you can keep moving forward forever without paying a cost.

First, break attachment. Admit that what you are attached to is not change itself. You are attached to a version of change that contains only benefits. You do not really want to accept the cycle of seasons. You want to remain forever inside the season you happen to prefer.

Then, see the momentum. Look again at the structure. Any relationship, any undertaking, any state of life moves through beginning, development, confrontation, stability, decline, and collapse. Wanting to freeze it forever at one stage is already a movement against the turning itself.

Finally, settle the heart. Here what must be restrained is delusion, reluctance, and that part of the heart that wants change but refuses what change costs. This step does not solve the contradiction immediately. It acknowledges that the contradiction is there. Once it is acknowledged, half the problem has already fallen away, because you have stopped demanding that the world move according to your taste alone.

So what is this chapter really saying? It is not teaching you how to eliminate confusion. It is telling you that confusion itself is not the problem, that phase itself is not the problem, that winter itself is not the problem. The real problem is that, inside a phase that is entirely normal, you keep manufacturing unnecessary problems: panic when the road cannot yet be seen, excess when there are too many roads, delusion when you want change without its cost.

What I can do is point out the ways in which these problems are made. If, the next time you enter winter, you create a little less of them, that will already be enough. This is also the distilled statement of Human Choice, Heavenly Choice in this chapter:

Finally, many people feel something oppressive, even piercing, when they read Human Choice, Heavenly Choice. That is normal. Let me use an image to make the point clearer.

If, in winter, you thrust your hand into snow, the first thing you feel is a piercing cold, a pain of freezing. But after a while, it starts to seem as though the cold has eased, as though the hand has become warm. Many people mistake that for adaptation. It is not warmth. It is cold-induced vasodilation. If you keep going, numbness arrives very quickly. The most dangerous state for a human being is not pain. It is the disappearance of pain.

By contrast, if in winter you find a place to sit, light a fire, and move toward it slowly, what you feel at first is not warmth but a sting. Only after that sting does the warmth begin to emerge little by little. On the surface, both experiences look like a movement from "hard to bear" toward "not quite so hard to bear." But inwardly they are opposite things.

The "warmth" in the snow is the loss of feeling. The warmth by the fire is the recovery of feeling. One is closing down. The other is opening up. One makes you duller and duller. The other makes you clearer and clearer.

That is why I have come to care more and more about one question: not whether I feel bad right now, but whether this thing I call "getting better" is making me more able to feel, or less able to feel. Real recovery is almost never comfortable at the start. At the beginning it is usually sharp, slow, and full of sensation. It lets you know, distinctly, that you are returning little by little to yourself.

Now we are ready to walk toward the most important bridge on the road of choice inside Human Choice, Heavenly Choice — the birth of "heavenly authority."