Great knowledge is wide and comprehensive;
   small knowledge is partial and restricted.
Great speech is exact and complete;
   small speech is (merely) so much talk.

When we sleep,
the soul communicates with (what is external to us);
when we awake, the body is set free.
Our intercourse with others then leads to various activity,
and daily there is the striving of mind with mind.

There are hesitancies; deep difficulties;
reservations; small apprehensions causing restless distress,
and great apprehensions producing endless fears.

Where their utterances are like arrows from a bow,
we have those who feel it their charge
to pronounce what is right and what is wrong;
where they are given out like the conditions of a covenant,
we have those who maintain their views, determined to overcome.

(The weakness of their arguments), like the decay (of things)
in autumn and winter,
shows the failing (of the minds of some)
from day to day; or it is like their water which, once voided,
cannot be gathered up again.

Then their ideas seem as if fast bound with cords,
showing that the mind is become like an old and dry moat,
and that it is nigh to death,
and cannot be restored to vigour and brightness.
Joy and anger, sadness and pleasure, anticipation and regret, fickleness and fixedness, vehemence and indolence, eagerness and tardiness;?? (all these moods),
like music from an empty tube, or mushrooms from the warm moisture, day and night succeed to one another and come before us,
and we do not know whence they sprout.

Let us stop! Let us stop!

Can we expect to find out suddenly how they are produced?

Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou, trans. by James Legge

This story is contemporary even if it comes to us from around 400 BCE. Each of us is defined by the conversations that pass between us and others. Exchanges range from the trivial, conventional small talk, to the measured focus of a group of adults gathered for continuing education. Dreams are also mentioned, a communication while immobilized in sleep. When awake though communication and action are linked. Physical freedom is entailed with our struggle to understand and to be understood. Mind strives with mind signaling the action that is in store. Zhuang Zhou describes nothing less than discord of interests.

Lines highlighted orange describe a type of communication that is like an arrow dispatched toward a target. One and only one meaning is demanded, as prescribed by the speaker/archer. Meaning is reduced, nailed down, limited to what the speaker has in mind. Like it or not – that is what you get!

The Master observes such use of language is indication of morbidity, a failing mind. Ironic reference: like taking a piss – the water is beyond recovery. A mind “like an old and dry moat.”

Zhuang Zhou writes that our minds (ideas) arise from states of our body, from the flexible response to external reality which we sometimes call “moods”. Like anything which is vital, alive, there is no fixing, no final certainty of understanding how feelings arise, or why.

Ergo (therefore) simply stop it, be done with pretending to know with finality.

No one’s word, no one’s understanding is as if the word of a god, the “last” word.