Tao Te Ching LIV

What is firmly rooted cannot be pulled out,

what is tightly held in the arms will not slip loose.

Through this the offering of sacrifice by descendants will never come to an end.

Cultivate it in your person and its virtue will be genuine.

Cultivate it in the family and its virtue will be more than sufficient.

Cultivate it in the hamlet and its virtue will endure.

Cultivate it in the state and its virtue will abound.

Cultivate it in the empire and its virtue will be pervasive.

Hence look at the person through the person, look at the family through the family, look at the hamlet through the hamlet, look at the state through the state, look at the empire through the empire.

How do I know that the empire is like that? By means of this.

The incessant alteration of fashion, the subtle perpetual morphing of language, the orgy of novelty, the sags and slings of our outrageous bodies—these lead the common mind to the conclusions that life is in constant flux, that the only constant is change, and that the wise or at least pragmatic person (and these too, to such a one, seem as one) thus accepts change as good.  And these conclusions are not wrong.

But the sage passes on the embodied elusive knowledge of that which is deeply rooted—not by negating flux but by seeing it as the other face of that which does not change.  For despite our attempts to control, despite our narratives of freedom, despite our fear that we may have already articulated the essential and be largely unable to incarnate it, we remain humans and the soul remains the soul.  It is this knowledge—held silently and deep within the sage, even as it is within rocks and words—that makes the sage the sage.  So everything reveals itself as itself and it is this revealing that will never come to an end.