人选天选论: Chapter 5
Not until many years later, when you look back, do you realize it had always been there.
This is how Tian Quan was discovered by me.
《人选天选论》 Chapter 5 · How Tian Quan Was Discovered
姜蓝 著
Very early on, my rhythm was different from most people’s. This is why I always say I might “not live too long.”
In eighth grade, I skipped ninth grade because the whole system felt too slow, and I went straight to high school. Then in my sophomore year, I bypassed the standard junior year process and went straight to college. Later, when I was a college sophomore, I dropped out to start my own business.
It all looked so smooth. What took others three years to walk, I sprinted through in one. The phases others had to endure, I simply leaped over. At the time, I thought it was competence and wisdom, then I thought it was “luck.” It was only much later that I slowly realized a deeper truth: I had constantly been accelerating. And the reason I could accelerate wasn’t just because I was bolder than others, nor was it just better luck.
The bigger truth was that I read many books at a young age that didn’t belong to my age. I Ching, Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, The Art of War, along with much Eastern and Western philosophy. These texts were never meant to be shortcuts for a young person. They were meant to help people:
- See the structure
- See the boundary
- See the cost
- See the rhythm
Yet, at that age, I used them differently. I used them to judge, to make trade-offs, to move early, to skip phases, and to accelerate my life.
In other words, I didn’t walk fast purely on my own; I borrowed the eyes left behind by ancient sages. I borrowed their understanding of the world, their insights into rhythm and structure, which allowed me to see everything sooner and cross hurdles earlier. Of course, this got me many things. It let me make money much earlier than my peers, and gave me access to levels others had yet to reach.
But what is borrowed is, ultimately, borrowed. Once you use it, it leaves marks elsewhere. It isn’t free. I first felt this not in the texts, but in business.
Prematurely Burning the Cycle
It was around 2008 to 2009. I was selling tourmaline in Wuhan. At first, things were incredibly smooth. I kept selling, pushing goods to vendors in the wholesale market. As they took the stock, I kept overloading their hands with more. The faster I sold, the more thrilled I became. The faster the money returned, the more I believed I was right. On the surface, everything was perfect.
But the problem surfaced soon enough. It wasn’t that I couldn’t sell anymore; it was that the demand in their hands had been prematurely fulfilled by me.
The tourmaline they bought hadn’t really been sold to the end-users yet, but I was already anxiously pushing fresh stock to them. That anxiety felt like “capability” at first, but later it started looking like destruction. When the stock piled up and the market’s consumption couldn’t keep pace, they didn’t think they had bought too much. Instead, they began to doubt: has this item lost its value? Is there something wrong with the market? Is this the wrong path?
At that moment, I saw something very specific for the first time. It wasn’t the business failing; it was that I took a cycle meant to be walked slowly and prematurely burned it out through my over-anxiety. For the first time, I felt something concrete:
It isn’t that some things cannot be fast. But when they surpass their native rhythm, they break.
But I hadn’t truly thought it through yet. The real deep dive happened much later.
The Dam by the Fairy Pool
In 2011, Wenjie graduated and came to Sihui to work with me. We hadn’t seen each other for over a year. I took him to my favorite hidden spot behind the Sixth Patriarch Temple: the Fairy Pool (Xiannu Tan). It was utterly desolate, much like Shennongjia when I was sixteen. The water was crystal clear to the bottom.
I remember that place vividly, not just for the silence or the mountains and water, but because of a dam in the stream we sat beside. Upstream, the pool was heavily reserved, calm, thick, and deep. Downstream, the water flowed in thin trickles. We sat there, staring at it for a long time, and then we began discussing a fundamental question.
Why is it that human desires for eating, sleeping, or sex — once fulfilled, disappear? Eat until you’re full, and even delicacies lose their taste. Sleep enough, and sleeping more gives you a headache. But money is different. Power is different. Resources are different. The sense of security is different.
Why do these things conceptually have no end?
That day, we sat by the stream, tearing the concept apart piece by piece. On the way down the mountain, riding behind Wenjie’s motorcycle, I wrote in my diary: Eating, sleeping, sex — these are short-term desires. They stem from the body, from hormones, from biology. When they come, you demand them. When they are met, they retreat. They will return, yes, but each time they do, it is a new occurrence, not a permanent suspension over your mind.
But long-term desires aren’t like that. A long-term desire isn’t truly an existing desire at all. It is more like a fear — a fear of whether your short-term desires can continue to be satisfied in the future.
- The fear of having nothing later. The fear of losing.
- It’s fine today, but what about tomorrow?
- I have the conditions today, will I still have them in the future?
It is this exact “what about later” sentiment that pushes people out of short-term satisfaction and traps them inside long-term desire. Therefore, what people ultimately pursue:
Is often not the money itself. It is not the power itself. It is an insurance measure.
An assurance that no matter what they want in the future, they will still have the capacity to satisfy it. That dam is the exact same concept. It dams the water not because people have nothing to drink now, but because humans fear the future drought.
And here lies the problem. The more you hoard, the greater the risk.
Once the dam bursts, the people downstream have zero buffer. Everything is ruined. Power and money work identically. When you stack countless dams, the more you have, the more miserable and thoroughly dead you become when the flood hits. If you have 1 million and lose it all, you can make it back. But if you have 10 billion and your dam bursts, you are like Xu Jiayin — you don’t merely lose the opportunity to live, you lose the opportunity to die.
Sitting by the Fairy Pool that day, I genuinely realized something for the first time:
A human’s true problem Is never whether or not they have desires But how they manage desires. More accurately: It is how they manage the relationship between short-term desires and long-term desires.
The Bridge Between Greed and Fear
It was from that point on that the embryo of “Tian Quan” slowly formed in my heart. At first, it wasn’t a word, nor a concept. Just a blurry feeling. I realized more and more that humans don’t lack the ability to choose; they lack balance.
- When they want, they don’t know how to pull back.
- When they fear, they don’t know how to let go.
- When they’re fast, they don’t know how to stop.
- When they’ve stopped, they don’t know when to move again.
Later, I pushed my thoughts deeper: what is the fundamental difference between humans and animals? Animals have desires; they seek food, reproduce, and evade danger. More complex animals engage in simple waiting and storing. But an animal rarely suffers for the “future.” It does not push its boundaries to infinity just because “it might be gone later.”
Humans are different. Once humans become aware of the future, long-term desire inflates. It is exactly this inflation that built human civilization. It taught us to store, to plan, to construct systems, to establish order.
But it is also exactly this inflation that causes anxiety, unrest, depression, and forces humans to preemptively consume their lives on events that haven’t occurred.
Meaning: The very thing that makes humanity human, is also the source of humanity’s suffering.
This structure is inseparable. You cannot claim the civilization and power it brings while utterly discarding its consequences. Realizing this, I forced the question down another layer: Can humans, entirely independent of their physical bodies, rely solely on their thoughts?
The answer I gave myself later was: No. At least not in the understanding I have at this age. I don’t believe it.
Thinking itself is not your creation. The capacity to think is bestowed by the body, granted by genetics. It was Heaven’s Selection (Tian Xuan) that first gave you such an organ and structure capable of functioning before you could ever execute those complex layers of logic and analysis. You can cultivate your mind, maintain restraint, and ensure your vision is crystal clear. But the moment an injection of anesthetic enters your bloodstream, Laozi drops, Confucius drops. Avoiding the needle is just physics; you either hide from it or redirect its timing. It is not an issue of ideology; it is a natural law.
- Hormones secrete
- Bodies react
- Desires generate
- Emotions fluctuate
These things do not vanish because you’ve figured out life. So the true predicament of a human is:
You possess thoughts, but you are not just your thoughts. You possess rationality, but you don’t reside in pure reasoning. You possess a body, but you can never completely control it.
By this point, my vision of Tian Quan got a bit sharper. In the past, I thought the problem was greed and fear themselves. I learned later: it’s not. The issue is never greed, nor is it fear. To be alive guarantees you will be greedy, and guarantees you will be afraid.
- Wishing to grasp, is Greed.
- Fearing to lose, is Fear.
- Stretching out the hand, is Greed.
- Retracting the hand, is Fear.
Both sides will permanently be present. The real issue is: Does a bridge still exist between the two?
Such a bridge is not designed to eradicate greed or to annihilate fear. It exists so that greed can walk across and look at fear. It exists so that fear can also walk across and look at greed. If this bridge remains, the person remains stable.
Greed will not endlessly escalate into spiraling chaos because it can still walk toward fear and acknowledge the consequences. Fear will not retreat into a shell of numbness because it can still walk toward greed and discover what it truly wants.
If this bridge shatters, everything goes to extremes.
People stranded on the shores of greed will blindly lunge forward, perpetually overdrawing, constantly escalating the stakes. People stranded on the shores of fear will relentlessly retreat, offering constant excuses, shrinking back until they don’t even dare budge.
So then I finally understood. Tian Quan is not authority. It is not control. It is not transcendence.
Tian Quan is simply the unbroken bridge between greed and fear.
That bridge doesn’t rid you of desire. It doesn’t clear your mind of terror. It only allows you to transition back and forth when both states exist.
When you are greedy, you walk across and see what you fear. When you are afraid, you walk back across and see what you still desire.
This is the bridge, and this is the Right (Quan). Tian refers to Heaven’s Selection. Quan refers to the right to cross over. Without this bridge, it’s not that you can’t think or lack a brain. It’s just that you can no longer select, because you’ve been hijacked completely by one side.
Debt and Balance
Looking back at my trajectory over these years, I finally knew where the root of the problem lay.
I have always known how to build momentum, how to push forward, how to accelerate. But I didn’t know how to retract. I possessed spring, summer, and autumn, yet winter was extremely rare. But once the four seasons lose balance, an organism’s constitution skews. So by 2019, I sold my company. Not because I couldn’t run it anymore, and not because I lacked opportunities. The deeper cause was:
My life was imbalanced.
Winter has no presence in Guangdong, so I went to Japan, Xinjiang, Kanas, and Tibet. I wasn’t traveling. I was patching up my winter. Because I knew that if winter remained absent, my seasons would forever remain fractured.
The fact that I can acknowledge this today isn’t because I’ve suddenly become wiser. Again, it is because of those sages — the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, and The Art of War.
They saw these things earlier, and I merely borrowed their insights a long time ago. I borrowed their perspective, their judgment, their understanding of structural laws, which allowed me to see everything sooner and walk to where I am today much earlier.
But precisely because of this, I’ve increasingly felt it—I am in debt.
I don’t owe to one single person or one single sentence. I owe a debt to an entire road I borrowed ahead of its time.
This is why I finally grasped the reason behind writing this book. I am not proving anything. I am not seeking validation. It is simply because I’ve used too many tools from predecessors, and now it is my turn to gently and carefully place the path I’ve walked back where it belongs without distorting it too much.
As for how it will be perceived, I knew the answer from the start.
There will be people who absolutely cannot read it. Some will be annoyed. Some will deny it. Some will curse it. It’s entirely normal, and well within my anticipation. Of course, anticipation doesn’t equal full immunity:
I will still get emotional. I will still experience fluctuations. I will still occasionally find these clamorous voices irritating.
But even so, I still want to write these things out at this particular stage in my life. I know that as years pass, I might no longer want to speak of them, and I might no longer see the utility in expressing them. So while the text is still warm, and while my urge to transmit remains, I will voice them out.
As I write this down, I understand something profoundly. Once published, this book will establish its own rhythm:
Initiation - Development - Confrontation - Stability - Decline - Collapse
It won’t stall just because I will it to. At the start, people will completely fail to grasp it; they’ll reject it, they’ll flame it. Some will grasp a little; they’ll discuss it, attempt to extrapolate it, tear it apart with their own vocabulary. A third category, those who truly understand, won’t ask questions or participate heavily in debates; they’ll take a glance and walk past it.
The final category will recognize it, feel they share the same debt as me, and step in to help repay it together.
These things are already happening, exactly as expected. Not because I control it, but because it is bound to walk this path.
I’m writing this book not for instantaneous comprehension, or universal acceptance. I am writing it so it enters its own rhythm. One day, I will leave this platform, fading slowly from people’s view. It’s not a defeat; it’s a phase. The rest is handed to time. All I can do is strive to put what I borrowed back in its place, and let it walk independently.
Conclusion
So the place where Tian Quan was truly discovered by me wasn’t within any single book, or any specific line of scripture.
It slowly emerged right after I constantly accelerated my life and finally recognized the profound imbalance. I acknowledged the perilous danger posed by the dam between short-term and long-term desires. I saw the absolute necessity for a bridge spanning greed and fear.
And only after borrowing the vision of ancient sages for so very long, and finally acknowledging that I had to put this little bit of mine back where it belonged — did Tian Quan truly sprout.
—— 姜蓝《人选天选论》・Chapter 5 · Tian Quan ——
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