Tao Te Ching XXXIII

He who knows others is clever,

she who knows herself has discernment,

he who overcomes others has force,

she who overcomes herself is strong,

he who knows contentment is rich,

she who perseveres is a person of purpose,

he who does not lose his station will endure,

she who lives out her days has had a long life.

The vessels, the mandarins and bureaucrats, the splinters of the uncarved block, the specialists and proponents, the advocates and the good—each one aligns himself with a tribe that promotes a particular set of ideals and behaviors from within life’s morass of ideals and behaviors.  Each set is a realm and each realm is separate, peering at the others from its own peaks, plains, and chasms.  Sometimes there is activity to join realms, but all that is done is the creation of a new realm with its own set and peering.  A new interdisciplinary sphere becomes a discipline.

So the psychologist speaks from the tribe of psyche—and often a very particular sub-tribe; the businessperson from the tribe of business; the virtuous from the tribe of virtue; the citizen from the tribe of citizenry; the healthy from the tribe of health.  Each is right, each is insufficient.

The way is a strange circle embracing all realms.  Players in the realm of spirit—like all specialists—attempt to warp the geometry of the circle into the line (the female into the male, disgrace into honor, sullied into white, dubious virtue into virtue)—and the myriad creatures are anxious for this warping—devoted to placing names, ideas, and artifacts in piles, with themselves inevitably at the top.  But the one of the way refuses this devotion, this piling, this geometry; refuses not from any effort, desire, force, intelligence, intent, power, or perspicacity, but because this is the way she is.

So all unities are not false, but limited, except the way.  But the way achieves the true unity only by refusing to advocate, refusing to join any realm of names, by not aligning itself with anything but everything.  So all is fulfilled and all is cancelled; it is because this cannot be put into words that the sage uses words sparingly and is shadowy, incapable of being given any particular attribution.