6 ideas
Fixation works by pairs: whoever grasps desire is blinded to aversion, beginnings to endings, the distant to the near, the broad to the shallow, the ancient to the present. Because things differ, each one you attend to hides the others, so the error is not a false belief but a true part mistaken for the whole.
Mozi was fixated on utility and missed the value of culture and ritual. Shenzi was fixated on law and missed the role of worthy people, Huizi on words and missed realities, and Zhuangzi on Heaven and missed the human. Each school starts from a genuine insight and fails by making it the whole Way.
Emptiness means not letting what you already store block what you are about to receive. Unity means not letting knowledge of one thing interfere with knowledge of another, so you can hold several truths at once. Stillness means not letting dreams, fantasies and agitation disorder your judgment. Together these three let the mind take in the Way whole without having to forget what it knows.
Water left still in a basin settles its mud and becomes clear enough to reflect a face and even an eyebrow. Stir it slightly and the reflection distorts.
Walking under the moon, Juanshuliang saw his own shadow and took it for a ghost, then looked up at his hair and took it for a demon, and he ran home and died of fright. Xunzi sets this beside the drunk who leaps a wide ditch as if it were a gutter and the traveler who sees a crouching stone as a tiger at night. A disturbed inner state projects meaning onto evidence, and people then settle their conclusions at their most confused moment.
The cure for fixation is not to reject one corner for another but to lay out all the considerations together, desire and aversion, near and far, old and new, and weigh them on a balance. That balance is the Way. Without a stable standard of weighing, a person picks up bad things as good and discards good things as bad.