Tao Te Ching XLVII

Without stirring broad

one can know the whole world;

without looking out of the window

one can see the way of heaven;

the further one goes

the less one knows.

Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,

identifies without having to see,

accomplishes without having to act.

There are those who are middle-aged and older who joke, The older I get the less I know.  While the commonplace can produce smirks and nods, the speaker rarely believes it and the rare one who demonstrates it—that is, believes it in her body—would not likely say it.  The common trajectory is for the mind and soul to narrow—to become more brittle, less nimble—as they age in the body’s aging.  The individual’s words and opinions tend to peak at a certain point, plateau, and gradually decline.  We retreat against the onslaught of life’s cumulative randomness and pain, carving a niche of security for ourselves—an apparent solid certainty against existence’s terrifying indifferent gaseous swirl.

When one is young, one’s experience is the world; if one typically ages, this doesn’t substantially change, although one can accumulate new expressions, many of them simply required by one’s phase of life and the culture and society one moves in—such as The older I get the less I know.  But the world gives us the opportunity to make the world one’s experience.  If this reversal occurs—through the active polishing of one’s mirror—one’s particular experience does not disappear but is subject to the world in its entirety:  including all the experiences one has not had and never will have.  As even the most worldly person’s experience is only an infinitesimal part of the world’s experience, one gradually realizes that ego-knowledge is nothing compared to soul-knowledge:  that is, a trans-cognitive, trans-emotional experience and intuition of the vast reaches of life.  This does not mean that the sage knows nothing but that she knows differently.  And this different knowledge—which is nothing esoteric but passionately embodied and deeply earthy—feels like so little knowledge from the perspective of ego and mind that one can say very little from those spaces.

So with travel—modernity’s prosthetic eye and cheap cosmopolitan badge.  But as with aging, while there is opportunity, there is no necessary correlation between the amount one moves and sees, the amount one climbs and accumulates, and any knowledge.

Thus we have the human moving in time and space—from birth to death and across the globe—and we have various trajectories.  At one extreme the person who lives a long life and has travelled extensively who is small and trite; at the other, the sage who lives long enough and barely moves from her hometown but is as large and silent as the world.  Naturally, degrees exist in between and while the spectrum may be a bell curve, the pressures of ego and soul are such that few if any can give adequate attention to both.

Is the Tao advocating the one who subjects her ego to the world—not primarily through abnegation but in caprice and wonder—or to some severely rare or imaginary figure who develops both in tandem?  Is this knowledge that can be gained?