Today, I randomly flipped to verse 48 of the Tao Te Ching. It goes like this:
In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, ever day something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
The world is ruled by letting things take their course.
It cannot be ruled by interfering.
“The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.” – I’m starting with these two lines at the end of the verse, because they tell you how it is: if you want to rule – to guide and influence something – you must be willing and able to be guided and influenced by the nature of the thing. You cannot rule by going against the nature of the thing (see: raising a teenager). In nose work, if you want to enjoy searching with your dog, you must consider the nature of the search, the nature of your dog – and your own nature. I believe the nature of the search is conversational. It is about listening and speaking, about agreement and understanding. I believe the nature of the dog is social and collaborative. And, the nature of the human… same as the dog, but with an overactive frontal lobe that obfuscates our essence.
When a human partners with a dog to search, the human must consider how her interactions with the dog are both sensible and consistent from the dog’s point of view. If the human has only considered her actions from her own point of view, she may frequently go against the nature of the search, the nature of the dog – and her own nature; rejecting her dog’s communication, and rejecting the truth of the situation. While you can “rule” the search and the dog if enough variables come under your control (known hides, or obvious blind hide locations, familiar search locations, like home), this kind of “interference” cannot last. True partnership calls for harmony. As the verse says, “the world is ruled by letting things take their course.” The search is ruled the same way. When a human can get out of her own way, her course naturally leads her to intertwine with the dog’s course.
When someone asks me during a search, “should I let my dog search over there?”, what the person is really asking is, “should I interfere right now?”. Questions like this do not get asked when we are in touch with the nature of things. Imagine if there was no one around to ask. What would you do then? You would try to figure out what to do by partnering with your dog. Maybe, today, your search would take a long time and you would experience some frustration. Maybe tomorrow, you would come into a clear understanding of your dog’s course and your course, and the search would flow easily towards a satisfying conclusion. The difference between interfering and letting things take their course is called wisdom.
“In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.” – Let it not go overlooked that both learning and Tao can be pursued. “In pursuit of” refers to a quest, or the act of following something. In nose work, what does the pursuit of learning bring us? It brings us supposed knowledge and skills. We acquire procedural and propositional knowledge. We can “do” nose work, and we can explain “facts” about nose work to ourselves and others. What does the pursuit of Tao bring us in relation to nose work? The Tao brings us perspectival and participatory knowing. These two kinds of knowing are not about “learning” so much as they are about stripping away the noise and the clutter from our awareness so that we can experience what is really going on. The practice of Taoist nose work is about trusting the process of awareness and participation to bear the fruits of meaningful skill and knowledge.
In nose work, you might attend a class and spend your time raising your awareness of the dogs in class. Maybe the next week you raise your awareness of the humans in class. Maybe the week after that you raise your awareness of yourself. For these three weeks, you will still be in an environment where skills and facts are being taught, but you will be pursuing the moment to moment experience – taking perspectives and participating – rather than trying to acquire skills and facts. When I focus my awareness on what a dog is doing, and what a person is doing, I quite often find the answer to the question of “what needs to happen right now?” The other day, I followed what needed to happen between a border collie and his human during an indoor nose work session. The border collie wanted to have a satisfactory conversation about toys, the human wanted to do nose work – specifically, the human wanted the dog to behave like he was doing nose work. We dropped the focus on nose work and pursued awareness of the dog and ourselves. We participated in a wonderful and powerful exchange with the dog, playing with concepts of shared value and fairness as we showed the dog we could enjoy toys together and we could be trusted not to trick the dog into an unfair trade. We ended up doing one nose work search at the end of this session, and it was electric and satisfying for all. Without awareness as our pursuit, we could easily have gotten bogged down in an intense effort – going against the dog, and ourselves – to “figure out” how to improve the nose work searching that day.
“Less and less is done until non-action is achieved.” – So, the pursuit of Tao is a quest towards non-action? I think “non-action” is the important phrase here. Action can be thought of as ego-driven acquisition of skill and knowledge. If you are taking action to build skills and increase your knowledge in nose work, you may find yourself getting into fixed ways of thinking and doing, getting weighed down like a cart full of bags of wheat. You may find your increasingly heavy cart leads to your wheels sinking deeper and deeper in a rut along the road you’re traveling, until you’re stuck. If you are aware of cultivating “non-action”, prioritizing your perspectival and participatory ways of knowing, you are actively keeping the load on your cart light, your wheels are staying on flat ground, and you are free to change direction, to change roads. Notice that verse 48 starts with “pursuit”, then we “drop”, and now we do “less”, until we “achieve” non-action. One must keep returning to the idea that non-action is not inactivity, complacency, or inability. Following Tao is a pursuit, dropping things is a cultivated intention, doing less is directly related to being aware of more, and achieving non-action is the culmination of a very aware, very free mind and body. Your dog will almost always communicate his experience from his perspective, it’s all there for you to listen to, and the more completely you hear his message, the clearer the path the two of you should take.
“When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” – If you are pursuing “non-action”, you are moving ever closer towards the experience of “flow”, a state where action unfolds effortlessly and elegantly. A state where whatever needs to happen can happen as if it was inevitable. I love the simplicity of this line.
When “non-action” has been replaced with awareness, you can experience the final lines of this verse: “The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.” Now, we see how cultivating awareness and connecting with the nature of things allows you to enjoy harmonious partnership with your dog.
Many people cannot tap into the awareness needed to become wise and harmonious partners with their dogs. This is because other areas of their life present patterns of stuckness. For example, if you frequently break connection with yourself to check your phone, you will frequently break connection with your dog when you search. If you are controlling at your job or with your children, you will have a difficult time letting the search and your dog take their course. In this way, nose work can be a direct portal to the things in your life that need to change.
How amazing it is that we have the opportunity to practice awareness, reveal areas of stuckness, and change for the better, all through partnership with our dogs in the game of searching for a target odor. There are so many other activities you can do with your dog if you need to be more exclusively in the “teacher” role, and you want the dog firmly in the “learner” role. Searching is a rare opportunity for you and your dog to practice fluidly sharing in the roles of teacher and learner as you co-create a path to understanding.
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Happy Sniffing!
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