Knowing is acting

Wang Yangming was a Chinese official and general in the early 1500s who, in exile in a remote province, had a realization that reorganized Confucian thought for the next five hundred years. He said: you do not truly know a thing until you act on it. Knowledge and action are one. The person who claims to know that honesty matters, and lies, doesn't know it. They have an opinion about it. Knowing means doing.

The idea sounds obvious until you apply it to yourself. Think of everything you know you should do and don't. Wang says you don't know those things. You've heard them. If you knew them, in his sense, you'd already be doing them, the way you don't have to decide to pull your hand from a flame. Real knowing moves the body.

His practice followed from it. He thought the mind already contains the knowledge of good, which he called innate knowing, following Mencius, and that the work of a life is to clear away the selfish desires that block it from reaching the hands. Not to learn more. To act on what's already known.

This is the key for the end of a chamber about attention, because it closes a gap. Ninety-eight days of awareness practice could leave you knowing a great deal about yourself and changing nothing. Wang says that would mean you'd learned nothing. The test of every key in this chamber is whether it reached the hands.

Here's the encouraging version. You don't need to understand a thing completely before you act. You act, and the understanding arrives through the action. The log you've kept is Wang's whole philosophy in practice: write what you did, not what you believe.