Tao Te Ching XVII

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to her subjects.

Next comes the ruler they love and praise.

Next comes one they fear.

Next comes one with whom they take liberties.

When there is not enough faith, there is lack of good faith.

Hesitant, she does not utter words lightly.

When her task is accomplished and her work done,

the people all say, “It happened to us naturally.”

Progress has often been the extension of volition to a greater proportion of people.  With great masses of individuals now empowered, with democracy crawling across the earth, entitling billions to live like kings, with names and spiritual prosthetics now comprising the bulk of human imagination, with copyrights and rights the definition of justice, who would there be who chooses to meander down another path, dim and dubiously named, not craving extensions, who views her will as neither more nor less than that of any other object, who does not strut but lurks in shadow, who has removed herself from the elastic of affirmation and rejection, who cannot be taken advantage of for there is nothing to grasp, who aligns herself with the river of bodies, emptying into the sea?

Philosophy has replaced thinking with volition, wisdom with will.  Education has replaced knowledge with certification, thinking with industry.

If no sages remain, it is because we have moved so far from nature that we easily deceive ourselves as to our significance.  We perhaps have moved so far in order to deceive ourselves.  When I can instantly publish every little act I do, every little thought I think, the results of every little survey I take, to a great cloud of babble, how can I not be someone with whom to reckon?  The sage, in an age of eliminated external nature—or, at least, nature reduced to two dimensions—must seek nature within.  The commoner says, Because I seek it within, I can make it whatever I wish it to be.  But just because it cannot be seen does not mean it is subject to our wills.  The sage is intimate with shadowy things, with the elusive and the hidden; she peers into darkness and sees shapeless shapes, imageless images.  She sees the way.

Intimacy’s tyranny is difficult to avoid when humans exist in massive proximities.  When there are millions living and bumping within kilometers of one’s home, who would not divide these millions into those we love, those we fear, those we exploit?  The one whose primary reality is not those millions, but a nature that swirls in distant eddies.

To recreate nature, then, is the sage’s task.  Not to recreate it according to the fancies of her imagination, to the whimsies of desire, but according to the patterns she sees around her—patterns which emulate the ancient routes, still traced with our lives.

The body knows three dimensions.  The mind knows a fourth.  Technology strives for a fifth and in striving achieves two.  So the sage returns to the body and so is less and more than modern man.  The sage follows the body but does not care for time.  In stopping at the limits of the body, she is able to act naturally.

But in a world of artifice, the natural seems artificial and the sage is a fool.  In a world of artifice, nature must be dissected, analyzed, comfortably visited, explained, proceduralized, romanticized, and therapized so that the people can appear to be connected with it.  But once it has been dissected, it is no longer nature and the people are tethered to a corpse.  The sage turns away from manuals and texts, theses and therapists; she turns to the nature she sees and what she sees is the body.

The gods lived in nature and the gods were shadowy.  Now, the gods have receded and nature is shadowy.  Once nature recedes, what will be shadowy?  Perhaps us.

The sage has a task and when it is done, she does not care if no other comes along.  She sits and bangs pots, she makes pies or beds, she walks on silent sidewalks.  She does not stretch her life or power to unnatural limits but stops when stopping makes sense and dies when things are done.