Tao Te Ching XLVI

When the way prevails in the empire, fleet-footed horses are relegated to ploughing the fields; when the way does not prevail in the empire, war-horses breed on the border.

There is no crime greater than having too many desires.

There is no disaster greater than not being content.

There is no misfortune greater than being covetous.

Hence in being content, one will always have enough.

Who is greater—the one who stretches his ambition to human limits or the one who lies content on the spherical meadow of time?  Who is greater—Caesar or Lao Tse?  We cannot say Caesar or Christ, for they are simply differently ambitious, reflecting the West’s schizophrenia regarding politics and spirit.  Caesar tries to encircle the earth, Christ tries to reach God, Lao Tse tries to do nothing.  Or rather, places himself in whatever current sweeps him along and so feels as if he is trying to do nothing.

Caesar reflects the common political ambition—Nietzsche’s lion.  Christ reflects the common spiritual ambition—the camel.  Lao Tse reflects the child.  They are popular in that order:  the majority want more money, comfort, security, pleasure and power and are envious of the few, like Caesar, who are hanged on history’s vast meat hooks; a significant minority—whether through common disgruntlement or much rarer inclination—seek self-abnegation.  The rarest of these is the mystic—Simone Weil is a classic modern case—who so successfully achieves it (physically, anyway) that she starves herself to death in her 30s.  But rarer than all these is the non-seeker, the contented one, who doesn’t particularly object to the rich and powerful any more than she objects to the anchorite, who ebbs and flows, enlarges and shrinks, not through any particular volition but through the natural ebbs and flows, enlargements and shrinkings, which are life’s.

By placing herself in life as opposed to her individual will, feelings, and thoughts, the sage conforms to the only possibly real notions of god.  Notions that are grounded, earthly, and realistic, yet also include certain traditional Western notions of god.  This grounded god is not something separate from life or earth; not something specific, nameable, or definable; not something subtractable but the sum of all things existing, possible, and imaginary; not something in itself graspable but the sum of all things graspable and ungraspable; not something benevolent or malicious though sometimes benevolent or malicious and frequently neither; not something ever static unless its constant is flux; not something abstract and beyond us by virtue of being beyond the senses but abstract and beyond us by virtue of including all senses, all memories, all things that have been and might have been and might be; not something of specific attributes and words but all attributes and words; something that feels as if it is boundless because we cannot see its bounds but something that could quite easily be bounded if something existed to bind it; not something which discounts the individual and specific but affirms all individuals and specificities; not something of particular hierarchy, ambition, scope, telos, or linear trajectory, but all hierarchies, ambitions, scopes, teloi, and linear trajectories; not something clear, though sometimes clear, but murky.

So she does not dissolve on the water, but is carried by it, and dissolves in it upon death.