Tao Te Ching XX

Between yes and no, how much difference is there?

Between good and evil, how great is the distance?

What others fear, one must also fear.

The multitude are joyous,

as if partaking in a feast or going on an outing in spring.

I alone am inactive and reveal no signs and wax without having reach the limit,

like a baby that has not yet learned to smile.

Listless, as though with no home to go back to.

The multitude all have more than enough,

I alone seem to be in want.

My mind is that of a fool—how blank;

vulgar people are clear.

I alone am drowsy,

vulgar people are alert.

I alone am muddled—

calm like the sea; like a high wind that never ceases.

The multitude all have a purpose,

I alone am foolish and uncouth

and value being fed by the mother.

Here the ambiguity of morality is accepted, long before good and evil were surpassed and ambiguity proclaimed as some revelation.  It is not as if the way refuses morality, but that it quietly acknowledges the relative insignificance of all things—oneself as much as anything—and the complex intertwinement of all things—effect, cause, shadow, light—and in these quiet acknowledgements knows that a wrong turn, a misplaced book, or unrequited love can lead to ecstasy, even as fulfilled ambition, a glorious finish, or a benign prognosis can lead to misery.  Those who take credit for their fortune and talents—even as those who blame others for their misfortune and lack—fear the vast architecture of unseen causes and the elastic randomness of time.  For sometimes there are thousands of leagues between good and evil, sometimes a nanometer.  How great is the distance?  The question is unanswered because there are an infinite number of answers.  If you know why you say yes or no, you play at god … and the way smirks at such unacknowledged play and returns to the play of the wind.

So the one who follows the way is no more alone than others but knows her solitude—not as something to be overcome but as something that is.  She sees the blistered demarcations the people build between ideas, the sacred walls between words, the firm objectives, moral certainties, hardened judgments.  She sees them not as the people see them—as blisters, monuments, guiding stars, pedestals, and tribal cement—but as bubbles in a storm.

Inactive, impoverished, drowsy, confused, foolish, coarse, strange—look for these attributes in some obscure human resources database in some obscurer job description.

When the way is disused, alertness and clarity, purpose and knowledge, activity, opinions, sophistication and signs, acquisitiveness and independence are valued.  But the one who still seeks the way in such times doubts the superiority of such things—doubts the superiority of so many things—and in this doubt may even find the way.  Yet, in seeking and maybe finding, she also even doubts the way.

The sage is profane even as the mother is profane.  She does not know and her only knowing is this.  A slight upturn of the lips, a gaze that sees but doesn’t grasp, a soul that cannot be found for it hides in the entire universe.