Know the male but keep to the role of the female and be a ravine to the empire.
If you are a ravine to the empire then the constant virtue will not desert you
and you’ll again return to being a babe.
Know honor but keep to the role of the disgraced and be a model to the empire.
If you are a model to the empire then the constant virtue will not be wanting
and you’ll return to the infinite.
Know the white but keep to the role of the sullied and be a valley to the empire.
If you are a valley to the empire then the constant virtue will be sufficient
and you’ll return to being the uncarved block.
When the uncarved block shatters it becomes vessels.
The sage makes use of these and becomes the lord over the officials.
Hence the greatest cutting does not sever.
The great quest for unity—as articulated here in the triad of infant, infinite, and monolith—refuses to fit into the compartmentalized unities of the teeming religions, spiritualities, ideologies, philosophies, systems, and desires. Here, forced male unity becomes masked, contradictory female unity; honor, convention, and respectability pay their respects to disgrace, subversion, and disreputability; white becomes sullied. Unity exists in the Tao, but beyond words, time, thought, and laws; it may exist in the body, it may in water or the wordless soul; it may exist in calm doubt, spontaneous action that loves other creatures as much as oneself; it may exist on the elusive scales that balance the heavy weight of desire and the weightless freedom of none. It may exist in these things or it may not. It may exist if the mass of human civilization and power could speak and said upon seeing you in your totality of actions—this one is larger than us, this one that does not speak and lacks a name; this one that is confused about its own name—this one provides empty spaces upon which we build ourselves.
Nature—as the empire, as the soul, as the sage—is a complex and irreducible unity. Humans—being nature but other than nature; being given to nature but antagonistic toward it—are the one entity that specializes in reducing the unity of nature to component parts that it abstracts from nature, externalizes and internalizes, and identifies with. This process of reduction, abstraction, externalization and internalization, and identification is the process of vesselification. The vessel thinks it makes use of nature—that in specialization it becomes lord, though all it becomes lord of is its little bundle of tangible abstractions, those who reify those abstractions—but … no … it is made use of. By nature and the things that are close to nature—infants and timelessness and old old stone.
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