Nature is chaotic and disorderly; its entropy is extreme. In the vast world, its details are too many to lay out, and no human creation can contain them. It is so chaotic that no function or physical law can easily summarize it, like a disk filled with random numbers—you can only painstakingly engrave it character by character. Then, like a natural watch brought in by a wave, like a ripple on a deathly still water surface, like the patterned rustle in a jungle, like a mural in a cave of piled stones, like a line of footprints in an endless desert. Your evolved ability to detect salience can keenly distinguish low entropy, just as in a chaotic jungle you pay more attention to a lion—the beast that can kill you—rather than an ordinary tree. Discovery alone is often insufficient; it slowly evolves into the brain's ability to create salience, to build roads, to raise walls of bricks, to erect skyscrapers. Those unordered things gradually fade in your mind; forget the useless stuff! You only need to remember everything of low entropy, to transform the high-entropy world into low entropy. Humans are nature's exception.

But nature is also wondrously simple and ordered; statistically it behaves like a clock, so punctual, steadfastly keeping its iron laws at every moment. If you flip a coin ten thousand times, the number of heads will be close to five thousand. Just as when you retreat from convoluted human relationships, from the complex logic of survival, from endless classes, from ceaseless learning, from unreadable stacks of books, from unsolvable problems, and return to the calm lakeshore, to the uninhabited mountain foothills, to an echoing cave, to a simple—perhaps a little monotonous—quasi-primitive life, to the philosophical sequence of Dao producing One, One producing Two, Two producing Three, Three producing the ten thousand things. Nature is that simple. The human body is composed overwhelmingly of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen; the environment in which humans live does not escape any physical law; human societies, after cohesion, fragment—survival of the fittest. Humans are not an exception to nature.

If there were no sorrow, joy would be meaningless.

If there were no death, survival would be meaningless.

If you throw your life entirely into the human world, that is when sorrow and joy are farthest apart, when death and survival are farthest apart; if you return your life to nature, that is when sorrow and joy are closest, and when death and survival are closest. People fear nature and want to transform it to desperately maintain their low-entropy state, to avoid negative experiences; people approach nature and want to be assimilated by it to drift with the wind and waves and return to their origin. Those who transform nature pursue the present, craving sensory stimulation and life's experiential feel; those who seek closeness to nature pursue ultimate ideals, longing for the root of the spirit. Both, it turns out, follow human nature: moving from disorder toward order. Even this truth is finally both opposed and unified.

All things are opposed; opposition is meaning. All things are one; oneness is also meaning.