tao te ching lxiii

The sadoo returns to the Tao Te Ching after a hiatus--

Do that which consists in taking no action, pursue that which is not meddlesome, savor that which has no flavor.

Make the small big and the few many.  Do good to him who has done you an injury.

Lay plans for the accomplishment of the difficult before it becomes difficult.  Make something big by starting with it when small.

Difficult things in the world must have their beginnings in the easy.  Big things must have their beginnings in the small.

Therefore it is because the sage never attempts to be great that he succeeds in becoming great.

One who makes promises rashly rarely keeps good faith.  One who is in the habit of considering things easy meets with frequent difficulties.

Therefore even the sage treats some things as difficult.  That is why in the end no difficulties can get the better of him.

The Dao is a self-sustaining spiritual ecosystem, using the materials of destruction to destroy destruction, enabled to do this through its core use:  using use to achieve non-use.  For doing is usually active, pursuing meddlesome, savoring flavorful.  The small is usually just small, the few few, and greatness a result of effort.  What is this spiritual magic show, pulling big from small, many from few, good from injury, greatness from nothing, action from no-action, and flavor from no-flavor?  A linguistic game, an inane delusion, a mind so imbalanced it’s upside down, hanging from itself?

Perhaps.  But it could simply be a graceful imaginative act:  seeing the world in your beloved or without stirring abroad.

The Dao itself is a manual for this seeming sleight-of-hand:  using word to get beyond word, language to deconstruct language (long before deconstructionism).  But once language is deconstructed through the Dao, there is not nothingness but a way of nothing, not emptiness but an empty path.

Unlike the dominant forms of religious and secular moralities, the Dao never attempts to be good or to eradicate or condemn evil; instead it asks how great the distance is between the two and in asking, in not defining, dissolves the duality.  It pursues non-pursuit, creates by turning back to old ruts.

I wait at Yonge and Bloor for the scramble to open.  In waiting and in scrambling i immerse myself, naturally, with minimal cost, in the waiting and scrambling that comprises life.  This little waiting becomes the waiting the bureaucrat does for the president, the general for the enemy to finish a mistake, the universe to end or expand, the pain of unrequited love; this little scrambling becomes the way through, the cessation of unsustainable pollution, an order of chaos.

This smallness is not done from volition, from frivolity, self-effacement, inferiority or ressentiment, from spiritual principles or guidelines, some text, but from an almost unthinking unwilled unassuming efficiency of nature—this self-sustaining ecosystem called Dao which the world tries vainly to emulate visibly through green technologies and spiritual systems.

Yet here it is.