Chapter Five · How Heavenly Authority Was Discovered

Only many years later, when you look back, do you realize that it had been there all along. That is how heavenly authority was discovered for me. My rhythm had diverged from that of many other people very early on, which is also why I have often said that I might not "live very long."

When I was in the second year of middle school, I skipped the third year. I felt that whole sequence was too slow, so I went straight into high school. Later, when I reached the second year of high school, I did not follow the third-year track either. I went directly to sit the university entrance exam. Then, when I was in my second year of university, I left altogether and went into business.

From the outside, everything looked smooth. Roads that took other people three years, I finished in one. Stages other people had to endure, I simply leapt across. At the time I thought this was ability, or intelligence. Later I thought it was "luck." Only much later did I slowly realize that there was something deeper inside it: I had been accelerating all along. But the reason I could accelerate that way was not only that I was bolder than other people, nor only that my luck was better.

The larger reason was that, very early on, I read many books that did not belong to my age. The I Ching, the Dao De Jing, the Zhuangzi, The Art of War, along with a great many Eastern and Western philosophies. These things were never meant to help a young man take shortcuts. They were meant to help a person see structure, see boundaries, see cost, and see rhythm.

But at that age, I really did use them in another way. I used them to judge, to choose, to move ahead early, to cross stages, and to accelerate my life.

In other words, I was not moving quickly by myself alone. I had borrowed the eyes left behind by the sages. I borrowed their understanding of the world, their insight into rhythm and structure. That is why I could see earlier, and cross over earlier as well. Of course, that let me gain many things. It let me earn money much earlier than many people my age and enter stages they had not yet entered.

But what is borrowed is still borrowed. Once you use it, traces are left somewhere else. It does not come free. The first time I truly felt this was not in books, but in business.

This was probably around 2008 to 2009, when I was selling tourmaline in Wuhan. At the start everything went smoothly. I kept selling, selling to merchants in the wholesale market. They came to take goods, and I kept pressing more goods into their hands. The faster I sold, the more excited I became. The faster the money came back, the more convinced I was that I was right.

On the surface, everything looked good. But the problem appeared very quickly. It was not that I could no longer sell. It was that the demand in their hands had already been satisfied ahead of time by me.

The tourmaline they had taken had not yet truly been sold onward, and yet I was already anxiously trying to push fresh stock toward them again. At first that anxiety looked like ability. Later it began to look like destruction. Because when the goods kept increasing while the market's power to absorb them did not keep up, they did not first think, "I may have taken too much." They first began to doubt whether the thing itself had any value, whether the market had a problem, whether the road itself was wrong.

At that moment I saw one thing very concretely for the first time: it was not that the business itself was bad. It was that I had taken a cycle that could have been walked through slowly, and burned it up ahead of time through a way of moving that was too anxious.

For the first time, I felt very concretely:

But at that time I still had not thought the matter through completely. The real deepening came later. In 2011, Wenjie graduated and came to Sihui to find me, preparing to struggle together with me. We had not seen each other for more than a year. I took him to my favorite hidden gathering place in Sihui, the Fairy Pool behind Liuzu Temple. It was a deserted place, almost like the Shennongjia of my sixteen-year-old memories, with water so clear you could see the bottom.

I remember that place vividly, not only because it was quiet, and not only because of the mountain and water, but because the stream where we sat that day had a dam running across its middle. Upstream, the water was stored in abundance, calm, thick, and heavy. Downstream, the water ran only in a thin flow. We sat there for a long time and began to discuss a question.

Why is it that when the desire for eating, sleeping, or sex is satisfied, it no longer wants more? Once you are full, even delicacies become tasteless. Once you have slept enough, more sleep turns into splitting pain. But money is different. Power is different. Resources are different. Security is different.

Why do these things seem to have no end?

That day we sat by that stream and took the question apart little by little. On the road down the mountain, with Wenjie driving the motorcycle, I wrote in my diary. Eating, sleeping, and sex are short-term desires. They come from the body, from hormones, from instinct. When they arise, they demand satisfaction. Once satisfied, they recede. It is not that they never return, but every return is a new return, not the same old thing hanging over the heart forever.

Long-term desire is different. Long-term desire is not really a desire in its own right. It is more like a fear, a fear about whether short-term desires will still be able to keep being satisfied later on.

It is exactly this feeling of "what will happen later?" that pushes a person out of short-term desire and into long-term desire.

A guarantee that no matter when they want something in the future, they will still retain the ability to satisfy it.

That dam was the same. It held back water not because there was no water to drink now, but because people feared that in a dry season later there would be no water. But the problem is here as well: the more you hold back, the greater the risk becomes.

Once it bursts, the people below have no buffer at all, and everything is destroyed. Power and money are the same. The more dams you pile up, the more miserable you become when the flood comes, and the more complete your destruction becomes. If you have one million and lose it, you can earn it again. But if you have ten billion and your dam collapses, you may end up like Xu Jiayin: not merely losing the chance to live, but losing even the chance to die.

That day, sitting by the Fairy Pool, I truly realized one thing for the first time:

To put it more precisely, it is how one handles the relationship between short-term desire and long-term desire.

It was also from that time onward that this thing called heavenly authority slowly took shape in my heart. At first it was not a term, and not yet a concept, only a vague feeling. I became more and more aware that people are not incapable of choosing. They are incapable of balancing.

Later I kept thinking further: what exactly is the difference between human beings and animals? Animals also have desires. They look for food, reproduce, and avoid danger. The more complex the animal, the more it can also manage simple forms of waiting and storing. But animals rarely suffer because of "the future." They do not push infinitely forward because of "maybe there will be nothing later."

Human beings are different. Once a person becomes aware of the future, long-term desire begins to swell. It is this very thing that allowed humanity to build civilization. It lets us store, plan, construct systems, and establish order. But it is also this thing that makes people anxious, unsettled, depressed, and willing to exhaust themselves in advance over what has not yet happened.

In other words:

That structure cannot be cut apart. You cannot demand the civilization and capacity it brings while asking to be spared the cost it brings.

When I reached this point, I pressed the question down one layer further. Can a human being rely on thought and completely detach from the body? The answer I later gave myself was no. At least from the understanding I have at my present age, I do not believe so.

Thought itself is not something you created. The capacity for thought is given by the body, given by genes. Heavenly choice first gave you an organ and a structure capable of thought, and only then did all those complex forms of reason and analysis become possible. You may cultivate yourself, restrain yourself, and make your seeing very clear, but if one needle of anesthesia is driven in, Laozi will fall, and Confucius will fall as well. What a person can do is only avoid being stabbed by the needle, or guide when the needle comes. This is not a problem of thought. It is a law of nature.

These things do not disappear just because you have understood them. So the real human condition is this:

You have thought, but you are not thought itself.

You have reason, but you do not live inside pure reason.

You have a body, but you can never control all of the body.

Only at this point did I begin to see heavenly authority a little more clearly. I used to think the problem lay in greed and fear themselves. Later I understood that it did not. The problem has never been greed, and never been fear. If you are alive, you will crave. If you are alive, you will fear.

Both sides will always be there. The real problem is whether there is still a bridge between them.

A bridge does not erase greed, and it does not erase fear. It lets greed walk across and see fear. It also lets fear walk across and see greed. If that bridge still stands, the person can remain steady.

Greed will not keep raising the stakes until everything runs out of control, because it can still walk to the side of fear and see cost. Fear will not keep retreating until numbness, because it can still walk to the side of greed and see what it actually wants. But if that bridge breaks, everything begins moving toward extremes.

Those on the side of greed throw themselves forward, exhausting themselves, raising the stakes again and again. Those on the side of fear keep retreating, keep explaining, keep shrinking themselves until at last they no longer even dare to move.

Only then did I truly understand that heavenly authority is not power, not control, and not transcendence.

Heavenly authority is the still-unbroken bridge between greed and fear.

That bridge does not make you desireless, nor does it make you fearless. It only allows you, when both sides are present at once, to go across, come back, go across again, come back again, and keep adjusting between the two.

When greedy, you can walk across and see what you fear.

When afraid, you can walk back and see what you still want.

That is the bridge. That is also the authority.

Heaven refers to heavenly choice. Authority refers to the right to walk across. Without that bridge, it is not that you cannot think, and not that you have no mind. It is simply that you can no longer choose, because one side has already carried you away completely.

Later, when I looked back again over my own road through the years, I finally understood where the problem was.

I always knew how to gather force, how to move forward, how to accelerate, but I did not know how to gather back in. I had spring, summer, and autumn, but very little winter. Once the seasons fall out of balance, the constitution of life tilts with them. That is why in 2019 I sold the company. It was not because I could no longer continue, and not because there were no opportunities. The deeper reason was this:

My life was unbalanced.

Guangdong has no winter, so I went to Japan, to Xinjiang, to Kanas, to Tibet. Not to travel, but to make up for winter. I knew that if winter remained absent, then my four seasons would remain incomplete.

And the reason I can see this today is not that I have suddenly become wiser than before. It is still because of those earlier sages, still because of the I Ching, the Dao De Jing, the Zhuangzi, and The Art of War. They saw these things earlier. I only borrowed them early. I borrowed their perspective, their judgment, their understanding of structure, and that is why I could see earlier and come this far earlier.

But because of that, I feel ever more clearly that I am in debt. Not indebted to some single person, and not indebted to one sentence, but indebted to an entire road that I borrowed in advance and walked before it was mine.

That is why later I gradually understood why I needed to write this book. Not to prove anything, and not to win recognition from other people. Simply because I used too much from those who came before. Now it is my turn to place back, as straight as I can, the stretch of road I myself have walked.

As for how it will be understood, I knew from the beginning. Some people will fail to understand it completely. Some will dislike it. Some will reject it outright. Some will curse it. All of that is normal, and all of it lay within my expectations. Of course, expecting it does not mean I can bear it perfectly.

I also have emotions.

I also fluctuate.

At certain moments I also feel that those voices are noisy.

But even so, I still want to write these things down at this stage of my life, because I know one thing: after some more years, I may not want to speak anymore, and may no longer feel any necessity to speak. So while there is still warmth, while there is still the desire to express, I say it now.

By the time I write to this point, I also know one thing very clearly: once this book is written, it too will enter its own rhythm.

It will not stop walking that road because I want it to. At first, some people will completely fail to understand it. They will resist it and mock it. Some people will understand a little, discuss it, try to explain it, and take it apart in their own language. There is another kind of person, one who truly understands. Those people often will not come to ask questions, nor join much discussion. They look once, and then they pass on. There is a final kind of person: one who understands and feels that he bears a debt like mine, and so joins in and repays it together.

These things are already happening now, and almost all of them lie within my expectations. Not because I can control them, but because this is how they naturally move.

So I am not writing this book in order for it to be understood immediately, nor for everyone to accept it. I am only writing it and letting it enter its own rhythm.

One day I will leave this platform, and I will slowly disappear from the field of view of many people. That is not failure. It is only a phase. The rest can be left to time. What I can do is only return, as well as I can, the things I borrowed, and then let them go on by themselves.

So the place where heavenly authority was truly discovered for me was not inside one book, and not inside one line of scripture.

It was only after I had accelerated my own life again and again, and finally began to see imbalance, to see the absence of winter, to see the danger in that dam between short-term and long-term desire, to see that there must be a bridge between greed and fear, and to see that I had borrowed too many of the sages' eyes along the way and would eventually have to return my own little share, that it slowly grew into view.