Wu Wei is a term derived from the Daoist tradition of China, and basically translates as “non-doing”.  It is championed by the adherents of this tradition as an ideal way of conducting our behavior, of evaluating our intentions, and of directing our lives.  In our modern culture so focused on material accumulation, “advancement”, and ambition, the notion of “non-doing” as a positive ideal can seem bizarre, or even dangerous.  How can one even survive if you are focused on “non-doing”? 

When we contemplate the traditional explanations of this term we can easily understand that this notion of wu-wei doesn’t mean to literally abstain from doing any activity at all – lying around in bed all day would hardly be a satisfying way to live for very long, even for the few who had the leisure time to try it.  The term is sometimes expanded to wei-wu-wei – “doing not doing” – which makes clearer the intention that this idea is not about a lack of activity per se, and also to emphasize that what is pointed to here is indeed paradoxical to the conventional mind.

So what does it mean?  Daoist literature is replete with warnings about the dangers of human ambition and arrogance.  Destruction and suffering is depicted as the inevitable result of our obsession with control – our endless scheming to manipulate and dominate our environment according to our personal desires (whether that environment is the physical or the social).  We can understand wu wei, in that light, as a stepping back from the habits of personal, ambitious or achievement-oriented “doing” – releasing the addiction to constantly trying to remake our world according to our very limited perspective.  Instead we are encouraged to slow down – to pause in our relentless pursuit of goals, and see if we haven’t been missing something in what is already in front of us.  It is suggested that what we are really after in all our efforts, beyond our calculating intellect, can only truly be found in turning our attention back to the simple observation of the present moment, and to the deep appreciation and realization of what is inherent in the basic experience of being alive.

This is very similar to what the Buddha is said to have taught: that desire for something beyond what we already have is at the root of all discontent (the second and most pivotal of the “Four Noble Truths”).  Also in line with this is the Buddhist advocacy of leading a materially simple life, and the promotion of the practice of meditation.  Seated meditation, in fact, could be seen as the ultimate bodily expression of wu wei – chasing after goals has ceased (at least physically chasing them), and the attention has turned to what it feels like to simply breathe and be aware of the body in the moment, free of tasks and obligations.  Standing and walking meditation as well, even as they enter the realm of physical activity, help release the practitioner from the habits of pursuing desires, and instead cultivate this appreciation for the present moment.  

In the pre-Buddhist contemplative movements of India that first gave birth to the yogic tradition of meditational practices (such as the culture recorded in the Upanishads) we discover yet another version of this same general orientation.   Here we find one of the earliest expositions of how all willfully directed activity – our pursuit of desires emanating from our personal, limited self-perception or ego – leads to the creation of “karma” (cause and effect waves) that either directly cause suffering, or, even when causing temporary seemingly positive outcomes, eventually deteriorate into dissatisfaction.  The wise are depicted as avoiding the creation of karma by turning their attention away from personal pursuits and desires and instead towards the contemplation of present awareness itself.

It is not only in ancient Asian spiritual cultures that we find this call to abandon personal ambition and the striving for achievement – despite the quite subversive nature of this perspective to the usual norms of our own society, it is found in some form throughout world religious traditions.  In primary cultures we find the ubiquitous practice of periodic abstaining from usual daily pursuits, sometimes even from eating and social interaction, in order to cultivate deeper spiritual inspiration and guidance.  This typically happens at important life transitions, but also can occur any time guidance or renewal is sought.  In Hebrew culture going back to its origins, we have the practice of Sabbath, in which the holiest day of the week, associated most directly with the divine, is a time to let go of usual productive activity, and devote oneself to simplicity, contemplation, and appreciation.  In the teachings of Jesus we can see a furthering of this orientation to a whole way of life: as an itinerant, homeless preacher and healer he encouraged his followers to give up possessions and professions, and urged them to discover how all beings, such as the flowers and birds, are taken care of naturally, without toil, effort or worry – and how humans need to return to such a state if they are to realize the “Kingdom of God”.

Today the human family, together with all other creatures, are faced with the global emergency of climate chaos and widespread ecological breakdown.  When we observe the unfolding deterioration of our natural systems and the increasing calamities that result, is it reasonable to conclude, as we often do with so many other problems, that it is fundamentally caused by a lack of activity – we’ve been too lazy?  Or perhaps not the right ambitions and schemes, or not efficient enough execution?  Or has the time finally come where we might admit that the problem is actually that we have been doing way too much.  Too much cutting down forests for centuries, too much breeding of cattle, too much mining, and too much fossil fuel extraction.  Too much throw away consumption (for those of us in wealthier countries anyway) that drives it all.  At the root of it is the unquestioned following after our personal desires that we inherit from our cultural conditioning – clinging to the illusion that with the next possession, the next vacation, the next level of luxury or entertainment, that core sense of lack, of incompleteness, and of loneliness that is almost constantly with most of us to some degree, might finally be relieved.  But missing out on the fundamental joy and completeness of being alive and aware in this moment can only be remedied by one thing – beginning to notice it again.

Most of us are so caught up in the assumptions of a society based on the worship of “achievement” – uncritically embracing the siren songs of “progress”, “development”, and technological “advancement” – that when we are faced with responding to the ecological crisis, we automatically think of getting busier, of more activity, more technology, more of what got us here in the first place.  We can save the earth by creating jobs!  (Why, exactly, do we want to create more work when most of us already feel overworked, over-busy, and exhausted, and we already produce so much excess that, in the US, half the food we produce ends up being thrown out, not to mention all the useless junk that fills the landfills each day?) The solutions we hear about in the media are all about building new electric cars, new kinds of power generating stations, new transportation infrastructure. It’s not that these ideas don’t have a role to play, but they don’t address the massive downsizing of energy consumption and resource extraction that is desperately needed to confront the enormity of the situation.  And they come at a cost – more fossil fuel use to create them (when we are perilously close to “tipping points”) and more ecologically devastating mining for battery metals and solar panel materials, among other things.  Where is the discussion about scaling back our massively over-consuming, high resource use, ways of life?  What about doing less?

For most of us, scaling back our destructive impact means, first of all, spending less money.  In the current global socio-economic system most of the physical impacts on the environment – the cleared forests, the open-pit mines, the polluted rivers and wetlands, the dying animals – are apparent only in little populated areas (or areas populated by the very poor), while they are paid for by people consuming products in cities and other highly populated areas, and often very far away.  We are insulated from witnessing the most serious consequences of our purchases – not by accident – and we often remain oblivious to them.  But it takes only a little research to realize that there is a serious environmental toll (and often a serious human rights toll as well) in almost anything we buy.  The solution is simple – to rouse ourselves from the addictive habit of shopping, and just buy much less.  This certainly applies to such things as new clothes, electronics, animal-derived foods, and other excessive material possessions with huge ecological impacts, but perhaps even more so to the fossil fuels for our oversized commutes, or for our extravagant (to the vast majority of humans) airline travels across the country and around the world.  If we learn to spend less money, this means, of course, that we don’t need as much of it – we can afford to work less, and instead use our time to discover neglected realms of our human potential.

When we allow ourselves the time to carefully reflect on our living experience, we can begin to discover those deeper lessons waiting to be revealed in the teaching of wu wei that I’ve suggested above.  To practice non-doing, as we have seen, is to relinquish our obsessions with goals, plans and projects – all the fantasies about shaping the future that we keep thinking will bring us lasting happiness, even though they continually fail to do so.  Our obsession with these future hopes is intimately bound to perceptions of our self-character that we hold from the past – stored memories colored by a sense of inadequacy inherent to the isolated, limited individuals we take ourselves to be.  We keep hoping to fix that sense of lack with the next future plan.  But all these imaginings of the future and clinging to the past continually pull our attention away from appreciating what is actually going on right now – what it really feels like to simply be fully alive in the present.  At our core, we all want to rediscover that.  When we begin to suspect that self-images – either in the past or future, where they always reside – do not encompass who we really are, but instead obscure our fuller experience, we can finally start to let go of them.  We then find ourselves in unknown territory – without the personal identities made up of past and future stories, we don’t know who we are, or what we should do. This is the real opening of the practice of non-doing.  Having a doer, and things to get done, only happens in the mindscape of past and future imaginings.  Non-doing means that in the empty, uncontrived reality of the continually unfolding present, outside the mind’s trajectories of time, there is no one to do anything, and nothing to get done.  Wu wei comes alive and does itself.  It can be somewhat disorienting and scary, but if we find the inspiration and courage to inhabit this new space of the present, we find the revolutionary: without an imagined self in the way, what is left is a wholeness of a vibrant, colorful, mysterious and ever-changing world around us, not bound, limited or defined by any conceptual idea – a vast field of beauty and possibility that is complete in itself.  It includes everything in our experience, and makes up the reality of who we actually are.  This understanding is the liberation pointed to in so many spiritual traditions, and reveals itself as the only true fulfillment for that longing we all have to feel fully alive, and to fully belong.  Our estrangement from such simple awareness has perpetuated the craving and seeking that characterize the materialism at the root of our dangerous world situation today.  To step off the treadmill of our personal stories – endlessly wandering in the made-up world of the past and future – and embracing instead the fresh immediacy of present non-doing, we discover the reality of what we are, and both self and world are, at once, set free.

The ecological crisis we face, then, is perhaps also a great opportunity.  No longer can we believe the arguments for continuing the failed experiment of infinite material growth, endless accumulation, and insatiable consumption.  It is clear that the natural world on which we depend can no longer tolerate it, and still support life.  Instead, we are all called to question our assumptions about who we are that underlie our destructive behavior, and ask how we might become free of that story.  We are called to start  listening to the urgings of our spiritual forbears to stop, look deeply, and discover that this world we take to be separate and outside ourselves – an object to manipulate through time – is actually who we are in the timeless present.  When self and our environment are revealed as one, compassion and love become unbounded, and healing inevitable.