Tao Te Ching LV

One who possesses virtue in abundance is comparable to a newborn babe.

Poisonous insects will not sting it.

Ferocious animals will not pounce on it.

Predatory birds will not swoop down on it.

Its bones are weak and its sinews supple yet its hold is firm.

It does not know of the union of male and female yet its male member will stir.

This is because its virility is at its height.

It howls all day yet does not become hoarse.

This is because its harmony is at its height.

To know harmony is called the constant.

To know the constant is called discernment.

To try to add to one’s vitality is called ill-omened.

For the mind to egg on the breath is called violent.

A creature in its prime doing harm to the old is known as going against the way.

That which goes against the way will come to an early end.

Virtue is not a mental concept, but a physical orientation; not a code but a state; not a judgment but a celebration; not an institution but a laugh; not morality but mysterious caprice; not stone but water.  To attempt otherwise is to stand existence on its head.  Yet such inversion is now the order of existence; ill omens and violence are the norm and while talk of harmony abounds what is meant by it is often adding and egging:  truth is something which can be obtained through communication and goodness isn’t goodness unless it’s named, photographed, copied, and broadly disseminated.

The virtuous are flexible—emotionally, intellectually, practically, structurally, ontologically, fiscally, geographically, culturally, aesthetically, erotically—not because they believe in flexibility as a goal or idea but because their bodies are rooted in the way.  The falsely virtuous know and thus prescribe, the virtuous do not know and thus exist.

The soul—that possibly threatened murky repository of the human:  contradictory, shifting, impossibly one, desirous and still—is not dissimilar to the Tao in its once and future proclivities.  Nor is it dissimilar to the historic Yahweh—calm, like a high wind that never ceases.  East and West poles staked early in the ground of time.

With the poles now magnetized and fibre optics strung between them, with Yahweh in a test tube and the Tao a freeway, the soul—like almost everything—has become subject to the clinicians’ incessant analysis:  the forced stuffing of that-which-cannot-be-stuffed into mind’s metallic ordering—an ordering that overturns existence’s dark vibrancy for those who don’t walk increasingly large and rocky detours around it.

This analysis and ordering include diagnoses like bipolar, manic-depressive, mentally unstable, schizophrenic.  If these false laboratory priests’ labeling, induced by fear, is listened to, those listening will view themselves as something to be fixed, take pills and therapies—and so seal themselves more thickly from the source of life.

The Tao is a turning back, a stripping away.  It does not add names, prosthetics, and theories, but subtracts them.  In subtracting it finds not mental illness, but murky life.  It does not damn the river or deny it, but becomes it.  So the sage is diseased according to those who would name the way.  So she is unconscious, fulminating, and silent in Yahweh’s masculine bush.  But in the Tao the river flows and every thought and feeling passes through her and they are not her but the world, so she is not disturbed.  As the world is not there to be healed but to exist.