On Living Clearly: A Walk

This essay is a first-person account of decades of inquiry across multiple traditions — Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity — tracing how the author arrived at the framework sketched in the companion essay On Living Clearly: A Map. Two foundational distinctions organize the entire walk: ignorance (not-knowing how things work) and ego-clinging (the distorting grip of a fictitious self-image) are separate illnesses with separate cures — learning and observation respectively — and neither can substitute for the other. The essay further identifies three triggers of ego-clinging (self, others, world) and argues that withdrawal from the world suppresses only two of them while feeding the third in silence, making engagement with the world not merely permissible but structurally necessary. Two paths for loosening ego-clinging are proposed: widening the field of view, and genuinely attending to others — the latter connecting ren, cíbēi, and analogous concepts across traditions. The essay also reflects on the role of AI as a tool for clearing ignorance and, unexpectedly, as a living illustration of a mind without ego-clinging. It closes with an account of a personal turning point and an invitation to walk without a fixed endpoint.