Part 8 | Calm-Abiding and Insight in Tandem: AI Helps You Expand Efficiency; Spiritual Practice Helps You Hold Your Direction

In this era many people are chasing speed: fast responses, fast decisions, fast output, fast launches, fast deals, fast expansion, getting a version out before others have even finished. From a business standpoint this is not wrong. Since AI arrived, speed has indeed become a new basic skill: what used to take a week must now run in a day; what used to take a team to slowly polish can now be prototyped by one person with a set of systems. Future competition will not wait for you to think things through before it begins; often it is already rolling forward before you have got organized. But I increasingly feel that what is truly frightening today is not that everyone has become faster, but that everyone has become faster without necessarily becoming clearer. That sentence is the core of this piece, because AI can help you expand efficiency but cannot guarantee that you are heading in the right direction. It can help you generate content but cannot judge for you which content is worth generating; it can help you organize data but cannot understand for you the structure behind that data; it can help you speed up execution but cannot answer whether this should be done at all. So at this stage what decides victory is often no longer speed itself but a sense of direction — and I increasingly believe that, in the end, a sense of direction is not a question of tools but of spiritual practice, not of technique but of the heart. This is why in the AI era I want to specifically bring up “calm-abiding and insight in tandem,” because the strongest people of the future are not only those who can use AI but those who, amid high-speed expansion, keep the heart undisturbed, the eyes deep, the hands unhurried and the direction unbent.


1. Today’s Biggest Risk Is Not Falling Behind but Moving Fast in the Wrong Direction

The biggest anxiety many people have now is falling behind: fear of learning tools too slowly, fear that others are already using them, fear of still using old methods, fear that if they don’t keep up they will be left behind by the market. I completely understand this anxiety, because AI has indeed pushed the pace of the whole world forward very fast, and if you don’t learn, don’t touch and don’t adjust at all, you will certainly have a harder and harder time. But if you see only this layer it is not enough, because compared with “being a bit slower,” today’s bigger risk is in fact that you are fast but fast in the wrong direction. This kind of error hurts more than slowness: slowness can sometimes be made up, but once the direction is wrong, the faster you go the farther away you get. You use AI to generate lots of content, but your brand positioning hasn’t been thought through at all; you automate your processes, but the process itself is amplifying errors; you build a more efficient sales system, but the customer segment you are chasing was wrong from the start; you mass-produce short videos, run media channels and build knowledge products, but your underlying value, the structure of your viewpoint and your place of existence are all still unsteady. At that point AI is not your bonus multiplier; it just amplifies your deviation more efficiently. So many people today are not unable to do things but are doing too many “things that shouldn’t be done first” too fast: optimizing errors too early, amplifying noise too early, using technology too early to speed up a direction that hasn’t been thought through. This is visible almost everywhere — in companies, in startups, in the content industry, in investing, in personal career transitions. So I often say one thing: what is truly dangerous in the AI era is not that you are slow but that you are fast without a center. And to solve this problem you need more than tools; you need a deeper ability: to steady yourself first within speed, to see things clearly first within information, and before wanting to do many things, to first be clear about why you are doing them. That is the modern value of calm-abiding and insight in tandem.



2. Calm-Abiding Is Settling, Steadying the Mind, Gathering In and Steadying the Nervous System

Let’s first talk about “calm-abiding” (zhi). Many people see this word and assume it means stopping, suppressing, doing nothing — but it doesn’t. The core of “calm-abiding” is not switching the world off but bringing the heart back. Bringing back what? Bringing back the attention pulled away by the outside, bringing back the rhythm pushed along by anxiety, bringing back the heart bent by comparison, bringing back that nervous reaction that makes ripples at the slightest stir. In the language of spiritual practice, calm-abiding is settling; in modern language, calm-abiding is the ability to “return to center.” This looks simple but is in fact very hard, because modern people’s hearts are almost scattered: answering messages while looking at the phone, worrying about the future while regretting the past, doing a task while endlessly writing scripts in the heart. Your body sits here and your heart may have run to five places. Such a state can hardly be called judgment; you can’t even truly see what is in front of you. So the first value of calm-abiding is not that you become very quiet but that you become less scattered: you begin to be able to slowly draw the heart back — to the breath, to the body, to the present, to one truly important thing. And from the standpoint of the nervous system, calm-abiding matters too, because a person long in a state of excessive sympathetic activity may look highly motivated but can hardly be truly stable: his focus is easily interrupted, his emotions easily triggered, his judgment easily distorted by stress. So in a way, calm-abiding is also helping a person slowly adjust his whole system from over-alertness back to a more usable state. In other words, calm-abiding is not withdrawal; it is the ability to take back control of one’s own internal system. In the AI era this ability will become more and more valuable, because external tools are all accelerating, and if you lack an axis inside that can hold steady, in the end you will not be stronger but more easily dragged down by speed.



3. Insight Is Penetrating Perception: Seeing Things as They Are and Discerning Cause and Effect and Attachment

If “calm-abiding” is letting the heart settle, then “insight” (guan) is truly seeing clearly after settling. The “seeing” here is not seeing on the surface, not reading more information, nor doing more beautiful analysis; it is a deeper penetration — seeing the essence of things, seeing the mechanism behind emotions, seeing why you are especially pulled by certain people, certain words and certain situations, seeing the causal context of a matter rather than just the surface stimulus, seeing what you are attached to, what you fear and what you want to prove. This ability is very scarce, because most people most of the time are not seeing but reacting: someone says a word and they first feel uncomfortable; a market signal appears and they first get excited; a partnership changes and they first get anxious; a piece of news comes out and they first take a side. Many people think they are thinking, but they are only being pulled at high frequency by inner and outer stimuli. “Insight” is not like that. Insight is that you begin to have space: you see yourself reacting, you see that habit of yours, that attachment of yours, that place in you that moves whenever it is touched. And once you begin to see, many things change: you find that much anxiety is not the matter itself but your projection onto it; much attachment is not that things must be a certain way but that you are too used to living with some old identity; much discomfort is not that the outside has truly hurt you but that some place inside you has not been seen. This kind of “insight” is not merely self-awareness; it slowly grows into real judgment, because what judgment fears most is not being not smart enough but mistaking your own attachments for the truth. If you can’t see your attachments, it is hard to truly see things; if you can’t see your habits, it is hard to jump out of old patterns; if you can’t see your inner script, it is hard to know whether you are making choices or being pushed by the script. So the essence of insight is not only understanding the world but understanding how you understand the world — and once this level opens, your life is different.



4. Without Calm-Abiding, Insight Scatters; Without Insight, Calm-Abiding Dulls

This is why the ancients did not speak only of calm-abiding, nor only of insight, but of “calm-abiding and insight in tandem.” These two cannot be separated. What happens with only calm-abiding and no insight? You may become somewhat calmer, somewhat quieter, less likely to explode; but if you don’t truly look at the attachments, habits and causal structures within you, that quiet may well be only superficial, and over time it can even turn into dullness — looking unmoved but in fact simply not having gone deep, looking calm but in fact only having pressed many things down without dealing with them. Conversely, only insight with no calm-abiding is not good either, because if the heart isn’t steady, insight easily scatters: you seem to be self-aware but are really just continuing to analyze while stuck in thoughts; you think you are understanding yourself but are only finding another way to keep the brain running, and in the end you are not clearer but more complicated. Many modern people fall into this easily, especially smart people, people with lots of information and people with strong analytical ability: they easily live “insight” as overthinking, breaking things into ten layers before they are clear, analyzing a hundred possibilities before they have loosened up — in the end it is not contemplation but internal friction. So what is truly formidable about calm-abiding and insight in tandem is this: calm-abiding lets you steady yourself, insight lets you see through; calm-abiding keeps you from being dragged away by the outside, insight keeps you from being deceived by yourself; calm-abiding gives you space, insight gives you direction; calm-abiding makes you less chaotic, insight makes you less blind. Only when the two work together does a person truly mature. Otherwise you are only calmer, or only better at thinking, and still not truly clear.



5. Modern Corporate Decision-Making Also Needs Calm-Abiding and Insight in Tandem

Many people, when they talk about spiritual practice, assume it is about a person’s inner life, but I want to say it more directly: truly high-level corporate decision-making itself needs calm-abiding and insight in tandem; people just don’t call it that. Look at a mature leader: why does he not easily lose his head when things happen? Because he has “calm-abiding.” When things come, he is not carried off by emotion with every wave;
when the market moves, he does not immediately change direction wildly; when the team has problems, he does not first press people with anxiety. That is calm-abiding. Then why can he see deeper than others? Why can he see the real structure behind a surface problem? Why can he tell noise from signal? Why can he know the real underlying intention of a partner? Why can he know that a trend is hot in the short term yet not necessarily worth betting heavily on? That is insight. Corporate decision-making, in the end, was never about more information being better; it is about whether you can, in a sufficiently stable state, see what is truly critical. This is even more obvious in the AI era, because AI makes the volume of information larger, faster and more immediate: whatever data, analysis, comparison or framework you want can be generated almost instantly. This looks like a good thing but also means that in the future what is lacking is not information but composure and insight. Without composure, more information means more chaos; without insight, more analysis means more bias; without calm-abiding and insight, AI will only help you get lost more efficiently. So I have always felt that the truly senior operators, investors and leaders of the future must not only learn tools; they must also retrain their inner order. Otherwise on the surface you are doing corporate governance but in reality you are just amplifying your inner chaos at higher efficiency.



6. AI Helps You Analyze; Spiritual Practice Helps You Not Get Lost

This sentence can be called the central line of this whole piece, because it separates tools and the heart very clearly. AI is powerful: it can help you analyze, consolidate, generate and compare, and compress what once took a very long time into a very short time. But AI will not decide for you which road your life should truly take. It will not answer: is this direction what you truly want? Is this game worth entering? Is this partnership compatible with your underlying values? Will this expansion merely amplify your lack? Will this success make you freer or more bound? AI can’t answer these questions because they are not data problems but life problems; you must know for yourself what you are chasing, and you must have the ability, amid high speed, to keep coming back to recalibrate. This is the most practical value of spiritual practice in the AI era: it does not make you leave technology but keeps you from losing direction while using it; it does not make you empty but, amid information explosion, lets you still know what your main line is. What spiritual practice does for you is not calculating answers; it trains you not to be hurried away by the first stimulus, not to be hooked easily by short-term interest, not to make the biggest decision when emotion is fullest, and not to stake your whole life before you have seen through your own attachments. So I say: AI helps you accelerate, spiritual practice helps you calibrate; the former lets you do things faster, the latter lets you walk more rightly. Without the former you may not keep up with the times; without the latter you may keep up with the times but lose yourself.



7. Truly Advanced Leadership Is Not Just Quick Reaction but a Heart That Is Undisturbed and Eyes That Are Deep

In the end we return to the person. Because whether you talk about AI, business, international matters, capital or trends, what finally decides how deep, how far and how steadily a thing goes is still the person making the decision. I have seen many people react very fast, but fast reaction is not the same as advanced. Some are fast because their nervous system is always on high alert; some are fast because they are too afraid of missing out; some are fast because they can’t bear emptiness and so must do something immediately. This kind of fast is dangerous because it doesn’t come from clarity but from unease. Truly advanced leadership is not like this: when things come, he steadies himself first, looks first, discerns first, knows what is emotion and what is fact, what is short-term fluctuation and what is the major direction, what is the attachment in his own heart and what is the real need on the scene. Such a person is not necessarily the fastest to react but usually the most accurate in judgment; not necessarily the one who talks the most but usually the one who can settle a situation; not necessarily the one with the biggest posture but usually the one with the most weight. Because he has calm-abiding, his heart is undisturbed; because he has insight, his eyes are deep. At this level you will discover that calm-abiding and insight in tandem is not a matter for the Buddhist hall; it is a matter for the boardroom, for the startup floor, for cross-border negotiations, for senior decision-making — a matter every person who wants to do great things in the AI era without being swallowed by speed must learn.

So for Part 8, I want to leave one sentence here: AI helps you expand efficiency, spiritual practice helps you hold your direction. Truly advanced leadership is not just quick reaction but a heart that is undisturbed and eyes that are deep. The future world will get faster and faster, but those who go far will not be merely the fastest; they will be those who still have a center within speed, restraint within expansion and clarity within complexity. Only such people truly deserve the next era.