Tao Te Ching XXIX

Whoever takes the empire and wishes to do anything to it I see will have no respite.

The empire is a sacred vessel and nothing should be done to it.

Whoever does anything to it will ruin it,

whoever lays hold of it will lose it.

Hence some things lead and some follow;

some breathe gently and some breathe hard;

some are strong and some are weak;

Some destroy and some are destroyed.

Therefore the sage avoids excess, extravagance, and arrogance.

The external empire—the one politicized, institutionalized, departmentalized, democratized, commercialized, and industrialized—no longer exists as something that should not be tampered with.  Instead, it has become that which must be tampered with—that which has as its very function, being tampered with.  The externalized empire has evolved to a point at which it cannot survive without incessant, rabid, and comprehensive tampering; in short, it has become the property of the vessels, whose very nature is tampering with what-must-be-tampered-with.  The vessel and the external empire exist in symbiotic relationship and cannot tear themselves away from each other without fundamental destruction of both.

What then has replaced the external empire as that about which nothing should be done?  Something has surely replaced it, for the vast scales that balance the vagaries of the universe demand an equal weight of passivity to counter activity, an equal weight of destruction to creation, strength to weakness, gentleness to hardness, leading to following.

Life is now being lived on the other side of the mirror:  we live in technology not nature, art not God.  So the empire has crawled from the visible elements of land and monarchy to the invisible elements of soul and psyche.  No one other than the bureaucraticized mad believes in the sacredness of the external empire; its profanity is well established.

Now, whoever attempts to tamper with the empire of the soul will have no respite.  Whoever does anything to it—whether by technical, medical, or spiritual means—will ruin it.  Whoever attempts to grasp it will lose it.  The soul’s boundaryless kingdom is elusive, ungraspable, contradictory, changing in detail and relation but not in its entirety of energy and composition, sacred.  Whatever singular entity thinks it possesses the intelligence, perspicacity, knowledge, and power to tamper with something so vast and unknowable has no intelligence, perspicacity, knowledge, or power.  The sign of intelligence, perspicacity, knowledge, and power is yielding to the empire and accepting its greatness.  This is the closest a human can get to the center of the universe and, with the external world mapped and profaned, the journey is now within.

The empire—whether external or internal—is no reducible beast.  Despite the constant global attempts to reduce the empire to these words, these signs, these ideas, these passions, these tendencies—and the masses’ predilection to believe these reductions to maintain and increase their comforts—the empire is never anything but the sum of all words, signs, ideas, passions, and tendencies about, toward, and for it.  So some preach peace and some war, some preach proactivity and some quietude, some wildness and some restraint, some usurpation and some generosity.  But the sage preaches nothing, leaving preaching to the empire.  The empire speaks, but with a trillion tongues and a trillion eyes and many of these are silent and many of these are closed.