But you could make use of the shade it provides, rest under its sheltering branches, and stroll beneath it, admiring its character and appearance. 'You complain that your tree is not valuable as lumber. Therefore, no one pays attention to them.' Your teachings are the same - useless, without value. No builder would turn his head to look at it. Its branches and trunk are crooked and tough, covered with bumps and depressions. We will let a selection from the writings of Chuang-tse illustrate: Hui-tse said to Chuang-tse, 'I have a large tree which no carpenter can cut into lumber. “.you'd be surprised how many people violate this simple principle every day of their lives and try to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the clear reality that Things Are As They Are. It’s only strange when you don’t listen.” All it really is, though, is being Sensitive to Circumstances. When you do that sort of thing, people may say you have a Sixth Sense or something. Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…' Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing. Later on you can look back and say, 'Oh, now I understand. If you’re in tune with The Way Things Work, then they work the way they need to, no matter what you may think about it at the time. You don’t have to try very hard to make them work out you just let them. Things may get a little Odd at times, but they work out. When you work with Wu Wei, you have no real accidents. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything.

Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit into round holes, but not square holes. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the round hole. When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. Mistakes are made–or imagined–by man, the creature with the overloaded Brain who separates himself from the supporting network of natural laws by interfering and trying too hard. Since the natural world follows that principle, it does not make mistakes.

Then we work with the natural order of things and operate on the principle of minimal effort. “When we learn to work with our own Inner Nature, and with the natural laws operating around us, we reach the level of Wu Wei.

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