It's better to listen than to seek

Bridge over a green waterfall
By Blake Verdoorn

It's better to listen than to seek |
Saturday – February 14, 2026

In most Oriental traditions, particularly in the Tao Te Ching (道德經), the emphasis is on the contemplative mode of being, that is to say the higher and substantive outlook, and this is why the East tend to produce less warriors—Kṣatriya's (क्षत्रिय) to borrow from the Hindu caste system—and more Brhamins (ब्राह्मण), persons of high intellectual aptitude, again to borrow from the Hindu caste system. One way to paraphrase this more contemplative and substantive outlook is to always listen to the creation, as opposed to seeking out what you want, for what you want may not always be meant for you, and this could just as well be summed up into the anti-Western act of simply giving up. But to give up is not to lose in the sense that most westerns would put it, because the fact of the matter is, that you do not have a free will that can be used reshape the world so that the world suits you better; the world does not care about your will, and this is very much an essential insight. The fact is, that certain people simply do not belong in this domain or the other, and such persons would be much better of realizing this, and this anti-Western and anti-egalitarian realization is very much misunderstood in the West, because again according to the humanist axiom there are essentially no boundaries, sacred boundaries as well as material, that can limit anyone individual, but this assertion is not only wrong, but it assumes that an individual's ineptitude is equivalent to some kind of limit or some kind of barrier that must be lifted in order to liberate the whole mass of humanity, something that can never be done without completely inverting the metaphysical order of things. Of course, as I've stated in most of my other posts, this is the ideological source or justification for the current state of confusion and social chaos, and again this is the main reason why this modern deviation can be said to be Western in character, not merely because of the geographical circumstances, but also because of the character of Western men, which is quite different from the character of the East, where again ideas such as democracy, free will, egalitarianism, etc, appear antithetical to the tradition. Of course, this is also due to the fact that even within the Western world, all of these modern disorders do stand in opposition to the traditional ways of the West.

    But with this post I wanted to provide just some advice from a Oriental point of view, or really from the point of view of tradition, but again I felt it necessary to provide some background in the introduction. Also, I need to clarify that I don't think that you should simply "give up" or give in to the hardships of life, but what deep contemplation truly mean is that you value the less obvious and hidden signs of the metaphysical order, as opposed to the immediate, but always short term, release from whatever material need and want you may suffer from, and again do notice that the entirety of the monstrosity that is the material order is constructed on the assumption that you and every other atomized individual—here the Greek word Atom really symbolizes the materialist push for further and further division of matter, and the word individual symbolizes this tendency within the human order, so essentially we may speak of a kind of cosmic order of the material and within that order humanity—should continue to want to seek out the temporal domain, and of course, without contemplation there is no beacon and no direction and consequently you find yourself lost on the high seas without any direction or hope of direction; this is why everything eventually turns into the cosmic flux, for such are the laws of the temporal domain and without sacred knowledge you are lost to this abyss of meaningless noise and scatter, the realm of nonsense creatures. Again, this confusion, this reign of quantity as scholars put it, can be noted in every domain and every aspect of the modern world, whether multiculturalism, warfare, or democracy, the assumption that expanding and multiplying quantities knows no limits is fundamentally inverse to anything approaching reality, and just as well for the power of the supposedly "free will". Of course, as I just stated, this is not true, and the result of this materialist inability to understand or accept the sacred and material limitations of the world, continually leads to enormous suffering, even though the humanist claim is that this somehow leads to less suffering, and, this assumption of the fundamentally "reasoned" and "good" quality of the human spirit leads to its own destruction, read transhumanism. Indeed, modern men are not merely delusional; modern men have embraced delusion.

    Is there any practical advice to be thought from this understanding of the disordered nature of our contemporaries? Indeed there is, but the first advice is to learn from the Eastern traditions, and this means that you should not seek out for instance a particular doctrine; instead you should contemplate and listen for the answers. See, the problem is not that you want something; the problem is that what you want may not be suited for you, and once you seek out what you want in the world, the profane will overtake the sacred. See, if you are to embrace the teachings and the doctrines of a revealed tradition, you must do so because this suits your character, not because this tradition suits your material intentions or aesthetic "preferences". Some people in the East would refer to this outlook as "becoming water", but I much prefer to simply call it the Pacific Route. Once you've been able to see past the supposedly paramount need to understand and "psychoanalyze" the individual and the compartmentalization of every aspect of life, you'll also be able to better understand the substance of the creation, those metaphysical aspects of the world that are not immediately available – really the quality within each particle and within each unity of each particle within the whole of the creation. This synthesis is surely not adequate, but it'll nonetheless have to do for today.

Reginald Drax – February 14, 2026.