The basic assumption of Taoist philosophy which lies behind this attitude of wu wei—roughly, “hands-off;” it means literally “non-interference”—the attitude of this is that nature, and your own nature, has to be trusted. Because if you can’t trust your own nature, can you trust your not trusting it? And obviously you can’t.
Look for your mind. If you think you are the separate agent—the separate being who is not nature, but stands apart from it and observes it—find me that.
The human brain is part of its own environment, and this whole attempt to control everything by standing outside it is a vicious circle.
A Taoist attitude, say, could encourage scientific investigation, provided it’s the instrument of spontaneity and stays in that subordinate position. So that the scientist would be the person skilled in knowing when to stop—like a cook is: a cook knows when to stop cooking a soufflé. And a scientist also has to know when to stop controlling things. And indeed, there is some possibility that our scientists will be the first of our culture to find this out, because they know themselves you cannot control research personnel and make them punch time clocks. The men in the white coats in the labs have got to be allowed to be whimsical and wayward, and to play with things. Randomness is necessary for creation. Randomness is spontaneity, is ziran, is the Chinese idea of nature. But this is not randomness in the sense of chaos. It’s randomness in the sense of an order which we cannot, however, describe in our clumsy, logical, and linguistical categories.
There is a fascinating Chinese word for the order of nature. It is pronounced lǐ. And this word, lǐ, means originally “the markings in jade,” “the fiber in muscle,” or “the grain in wood.” In other words: an order, something we perceive as incredibly fascinating—just as, you see, when you take a cross-section, say, of a plant stem and look at it through a microscope: what a thing! But it eludes description. Because language and thought takes things in one at a time, in a linear series, whereas the order of nature is everything going on everywhere at once altogether, and figure that out in words you never will.