The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything

Product Information

In the Preface, what do the authors reveal as the central theme of the book? What do they say our vision of how to build a good life is rooted in? What is much of our current thinking a legacy of? The Chinese philosophical texts described in this book offer alternatives to this Age of Complacency. But they are not coherent ideologies that would, for example, replace democracy. Rather, they are counterintuitive notions about the self and its place in the world. And many of them were actually developed in opposition to the idea of living according to any overarching system of thought. We decided to coauthor the book because it just made sense to join forces: Michael had deep experience with the ideas that would form the basis for the book, and Christine was familiar with these philosophies and also had experience writing for a popular audience. It seemed an expedient way to get these important ideas out there. I would give it five stars if it didn’t occasionally (often) feel like a commercial for Peter Mallouk’s company. Still, it’s a very worthwhile read especially if you haven’t yet had any financial planning done, and if you have had some it’s a good refresher; helps open your eyes to any possible bad (or hopefully good) advice you may have been given.

The Path | Book by Michael Puett, Christine Gross-Loh

I highly recommend the audiobook; listening to Puett and Gross-Loh read their own words lends emphasis to some things that reading the book does not. in Chinese, the word for mind and heart is actually one and the same: xin. The heart-mind is the seat of our emotions as well as the center of our rationality. (Location 825) The Path is divided into nine chapters. Each chapter takes a key facet of Eastern philosophy and examines it briefly before looking at ways we can apply its teachings to our everyday lives. Puett is convinced that, if we adopt these philosophies, then we will be happier, more fulfilled, and more successful. He encourages us to read the book carefully, study it, and reflect on each chapter and lesson as we go along.The argument of the Laozi is that you can always defeat strength through weakness. If you’re in a position of strength, play weakness, and if you’re in a position of weakness, play weakness. Play weakness regardless of your starting position, and that is how you will shift situations in better directions. (Location 1332) The logical brain can get caught spinning its wheels. Constantly searching for more information and trying to figure out the absolute best way to do something. The solution is to figure out where you want to end up and just get started.

The Path of the Warrior-Mystic: Being a Man in an Age of Chaos The Path of the Warrior-Mystic: Being a Man in an Age of Chaos

But many of the Chinese thinkers would argue that you are not and should not think of yourself as a single, unified being. Let’s say that you think of yourself as someone with a temper; someone who gets angry easily. The thinkers we are about to encounter would argue that you should not say, “Well, that’s just the way I am,” and embrace yourself for who you are. As we will see, perhaps you aren’t inherently an angry person. Perhaps you simply slipped into ruts—patterns of behavior—that you allowed to define who you thought you were. The truth is that you have just as much potential to be, say, gentle or forgiving as you do to be angry. The final part of this analogy is the path, and this represents our environment. The environment that we find ourselves in impacts us both consciously and unconsciously. We typically follow the path of least resistance and are nudged in the direction of convenience. Although it could be challenging at times to coauthor a book, it was also helpful because we could run ideas by one another and discuss them before even committing them to words on paper. It was also helpful to have someone with whom to “divide and conquer” all the various tasks that go into the writing and publicizing of a book. It could easily be misconstrued that the rider is “good” and the elephant is “bad”. That we need to suppress emotions. But this isn’t true. But as you are about to learn, many of our stereotypes about these “traditional” societies are wrong. And there is much we can learn from the past.

The two final chapters round out this non-interventionist concept of change. The chapter on Zhuangzi is a variation on earlier reflections on epistemological flexibility and centres on our ability to adopt different worldviews in a world in perpetual transformation ("Am I a human being dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I am a human being?"). Xunzi's plea for a wise practice of 'artifice' and 'putting pattern on our world' weaves a lot of the book's themes together.