Tao Te Ching LX

Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish.

When the empire is ruled in accordance with the way, the spirits lose their potencies.

Or rather, it is not that they lose their potencies but that, though they have their potencies, they do not harm the people.

It is not only they who, having their potencies, do not harm the people.  The sage also does not harm the people.

As neither does any harm, each attributes the merit to the other.

The soul is a many-headed many-faced many-tongued beast.  Each head is a god, each face a spirit, each tongue a demon.  The processes of education and enculturation typically are processes of numbing—of building internal and external barriers between individuals and their souls, between selves and the divine; this numbing is for good reason:  the soul easily devours the faint-hearted, the serious, the glib, the naïve, and the coddled.  The primary function of society—its processes and structures—is to offer this protection.

Yet those who do not wish to be numbed, to be protected, against the soul’s vastness, its dark empty spaces, its potencies and surprises, must themselves develop strategies to avoid destruction, for the soul is always larger than anything that inhabits it.  We have a sufficient number of great explorers of the soul—from Baudelaire to Nietzsche, from Kierkegaard to Simone Weil—to know how it treats those who neither numb themselves nor appeal to the method as large as the soul—the way that accepts and walks but does itself become any aspect it sees.  Thus the soul’s potent spirits—whether they’re named Apollo or lust, Yahweh or pride, Aphrodite or despair—are not ossified, succumbed to, worshipped, or ignored … but simply acknowledged.  The sage knows the words and methods of each spirit, each god, each demon; she knows them but does not feel inclined to identify with them.  She walks, and in walking she passes from voice to voice, spirit to spirit, potency to potency … and in passing does not harm.