Tao Te Ching XLIX

The sage has no mind of her own; she takes as her own the mind of the people.

Those who are good I treat as good; those who are not good I also treat as good; in so doing I gain in goodness.  Those who are of good faith I have faith in; those who are lacking in good faith I also have faith in; in so doing I gain in good faith.

The sage, in her attempt to distract the mind of the empire, seeks urgently to muddle it.  The people all have something to occupy their eyes and ears and the sage treats them all like children.

The sage sees her own mind as a forest, if it could see, might see a leaf on one of its trees.  The human mind is a particular limited floral configuration—perhaps beautiful, perhaps foul, perhaps rare, perhaps mundane; the only difference between the sage’s mind and other minds is that the former allows the forest to overcome it and does not presume its leaf to be greater than the forest.  Human minds are dusty reflections of nature—increasingly dusty as nature recedes as a living environment, replaced by technology—and in their totality is the Tao, though dirty now, almost unrecognizable, warped.  But the sage sees the Tao in the vast collection of minds in the city and hides in what she sees and gives herself over to becoming her sight.

While creativity is the rage in business, academia, and the arts, the sage dives into the center of transformation and creates what few entrepreneurs or artists do ... goodness from evil, faith from mistrust.  How?  Through the hot nimble furnace of the Tao.  When the people encounter evil, they respond with evil; when they encounter bad faith, they respond with bad faith; but this only increases strife.  They do not create, but recreate; they do not seek returns and origins but the endless turmoil of time; they talk but do not do; they assume the attributes of their enemies and so become their enemies; they take on the form of the content they despise and so mock any claimed virtue in their content and any purported seriousness in the dispute as a whole.  Instead, the sage transforms something into nothing then nothing into something by virtue of stuffing that which requires transformation into the Tao and pulling it out the Tao’s opposite side.  For the Tao contains and connects all and the one who resides in it uses it to do what she cannot alone, what only the power of all polished minds together can accomplish—the rustling of a billion leaves, in which all individual sounds are given to the forest’s full and desolate symphony.  So the sage devotes herself to polishing all mirrors and this is what she does.

The people, inhabited with desire and noise, are balanced on existence’s strange seesaw by the sage.  The people talk of clarity but are muddled; the sage attempts to muddle, not particularly caring for or believing in clarity.  Why does the sage seek to muddle the empire’s mind, particularly when that mind might be the very one she takes as her own?  Who would muddle her own mind?  The sage would and would even make this self-muddling her primary task, for she knows her mind alone assumes too much, usurps what is not its own, devours as much as presents itself simply to show itself to itself as paramount and true, deceives itself and others to no good effect, and thereby must be muddled to slip past truth’s golden ruse by means of the vast rustling of the endless ancient minds.