TAO TE CHING IV

The way is empty, yet use will not drain it.

Deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures.

Blunt the sharpness;

Untangle the knots;

Soften the glare;

Let your wheels move only along old ruts.

Darkly visible, it only seems as if it were there.

I know not whose son it is.

It images the forefather of God.

Does the Tao exist or does it not?  Is it the deluded creation of someone detached from the brute exigencies of reality or the elusive center and circumference of existence?  These are the questions of someone not walking the Tao.  In this sense, the Tao is like any way.  For those who walk the way of money, the way of money is real; for those of Christ, Christ is real; of family values, the same holds true.  And the list of ways is manifold, though the list of ways many claim is not long.  These ways, in theory or practice, explicitly or subtly—sometimes both, sometimes all—war against each other, each proclaiming the supremacy of its way.  But the Tao does not proclaim; it neither negates nor affirms each proclaiming way, though it can negate and affirm each way.  The Tao includes all ways, all myriad creatures, ideas, institutions, values, dreams; this is why it does not need to proclaim:  each specific way, each specific creature, each specific institution does the proclaiming and negating for it.  The sum of all proclamations and negations is the Tao.

We say the Tao is like … it seems … it’s the image of … for we can never see the whole, we can only intuit it.  Just as we can never see our entire body at the same time, so we can never think all thoughts, believe all values, and walk all ways simultaneously.  But we know the world—in all its teeming contradictoriness—is the one true thing.  So we walk the way of the world, which is the way of all ways, which is the Tao.

To reach the Tao, one walks the way of dismantling the ways that proclaim.  The light shines too clearly; all is not clear.  The truth pokes too incessantly, tradition stridently tangles, novelty creams its sticky honey.  The one who aligns herself with the Tao acknowledges the shining, the poking, the tangling, the creaming, but one is not blinded, stabbed, entrapped, or stuck.  For such a one walks in the empty darkness that, without speaking, says yes to all.

The Tao exists prior to the myriad specific ways, which are our great projections, veils on our fear, mutes on our trumpeting desires.  The one who follows the Tao neither veils her fear nor mutes her desires but by becoming the original fear and desire allows the Tao to enact fear and desire for her.  This does not mean she neither flees nor acts; it does not mean she does nothing … but she feels she does nothing for she does nothing but follow the Tao.  And the Tao is the force that gives birth to the gods and goes wherever it goes to whatever end.

It’s been said that life’s a dream; likewise it’s been said that unfortunately or not, it’s not—it’s the only reality.  Yet both these feelings are true:  life seems real, life seems a dream; life is real, life is a dream.  So with the Tao, for the Tao and life are like cousins in some obscure mythology.

The more life is categorized, technicized, visualized, analyzed, and verbalized, the more these methods of knowledge are trusted—that which is sensually objective—and the less the oneiric functions are, instead being viewed as the ignorant pastime of dilettantes and flakes—as they indeed often are.  But those categorizing, technicizing, visualizing, analyzing, and verbalizing are no less ignorant; it is simply that their ignorance is the accepted ignorance, the ignorance that masquerades as knowledge.  The Tao mysteriously unites the two modes and the one who follows the Tao walks the tightrope of strange unity, avoiding the silliness of excessive cognition and excessive fantasy.

So the Tao sometimes is glimpsed on a hazy night down a long corridor in a mirror, as the clouds wisp across the moon and a cool specter drifts though some window, effortlessly reaching for the glass, filling it with dim memories.