Tao Te Ching L

When going one way means life and going the other means death, three in ten will be comrades of life, three in ten will be comrades of death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death and these also number three in ten.  Why is this so?  Because they set too much store by life.

I have heard it said that one who excels in safeguarding his own life does not meet with rhinoceros or tiger when travelling on land nor is he touched by weapons when charging into an army.  There is nowhere for the rhinoceros to pitch its horn; there is nowhere for the tiger to place its claws; there is nowhere for the weapon to lodge its blade.  Why is this so?  Because for him there is no realm of death.

Life is just life and not something more than life.  While human life includes fantasies about how life might be—and occasionally a few of these fantasies are partially enacted—fantasy is ultimately subject to life’s necessities, thus ensuring it is always actualized according to life’s proclivities, not fantasy’s.  As life both feeds and devours, those who cling to it will not live; they will die in any of the realms in which it is possible to die.

Modernity is a culture given to setting too much store by life; modernity devours and prolongs; hence our apocalyptic obsessions which arise from our collective intuitive sense that while talking life, we’re living death.  That, too desperate for life, we try too hard to shove death aside, fatally ignoring the inescapable reality that death is eternally the wind and we eternally leaves.

He has heard it said but never observed it as there is no one who solely excels in safeguarding her life.  Life is always stronger than any safeguard, than any individual excelling.  The one who is above accident, chance, harm, fate, the wiles of freedom, is a fantastical creation, not a product of life.  Nevertheless, one who gives herself over to life and not the way she wishes life to be—a process we might call love—can be said to live apart from death … for there is only one death that can and will affect her and this will not affect her until it does; until then, it plays no more role in her life than a flower.  So she is never harmed.