Tao Te Ching XXV

There is a thing confusedly formed, born before heaven and earth.

Silent and void, it stands alone and does not change, goes round and does not weary.

I don’t know its name, so I style it the way.

I give it the makeshift name of the great.

Being great, it is further described as receding;

receding, it is described as far away;

being far away, it is described as turning back.

Hence the way is great, heaven is great, earth is great, and the king is also great; within the realm, there are four things that are great and the king counts as one.  People model themselves on earth, earth on heaven, heaven on the way, and the way on that which is naturally so.

As the West’s mythologies have been found wanting and the East’s have crawled from their previously denigrated caves into desperate arms, is it surprising that we have found what is resting in the Tao long ago:  chaos is not something to be denied but is integral to the way.  Chaos is not something be conquered, to be overcome, to be struck down with light and order.  Nor is it something to give oneself over to utterly and always.  The Tao is formed, but it is confusedly formed.  So are we all, so are all acts, so all thoughts, powers, and words.

The traveler who sojourns through the world, tasting its bitter pleasures, its salty energies, gains a cloak of weariness from the inability to escape existence’s monotonous themes, its repetitive acts, conversations, and senses.  The Tao does the same—and is worn, like the traveler—yet, unlike the traveler, remains a babe:  receptive, vulnerable, open, questioning, doubtful, capricious, inappropriate, wondrous.

The Tao is far-near and so embraces mystical notions of God.

The king is great but dubiously great as he is almost apologized for in the counting … a curious emphasis in a book not given to such emphasis.  Even further, the king is part of the earth—not heaven or the way—even as we all are part of the earth; the distance between the king and heaven is far greater than the distance between you and the king.  Any competent king knows this and acts accordingly.  These days, though, with kings diminishing, read king as one with significant political authority, with vast hierarchies churning beneath him.  The king is great only because the people need a king, whereas the earth, heaven, and the way are great irrespective of the people.  The sage, however, does not need the king; she does not even need the way … the way just is and what we all live within.

We confront the offensive and disturbing assumption that that which is naturally so exists.  Hasn’t it been disproven that human nature exists? Hasn’t it been proven that nature imitates art, revealing nature as artifice?  Hasn’t the very volume of the vast vats of inks spilled extolling our freedom sufficiently convinced us that nature’s circumference is limitless, its essence dubious?

Yet.

Replace the oceans with desire, pile words to Andromeda, pave the earth with microchips, project art on the clouds … does this do anything but increase the distance we have to travel to acknowledge the foundational reality of nature, the limitations of physical and spiritual substances.  And we are travelers, aren’t we?  Thus we increase the distance between nature and ourselves just to give ourselves new paths to walk.  The sage is she who walks the present path to the end, sees the path turning back to nature, and returns.

Tao Te Ching XXIV

He who tiptoes cannot stand; he who strides cannot walk.

He who shows himself is not conspicuous.

He who considers himself right is not illustrious.

He who brags will not have merit.

He who boasts will not endure.

From the point of view of the way these are excessive food and useless excrescences.

As there are things that detest them, she who has the way does not abide in them.

Is the Tao binary, suddenly?  Is it like some Christian moralism?  A little morsel of self-abnegation, a thick steak of judgment?  After all this odd integration and seeming acceptance of the body, do we have a strange divorce?  The Way separate and apart, peering down at the inevitable fulminations of finite souls and proclaiming them Bad?  The Way splitting with its clear and shining axe the complex world into two spheres—one of light, one of shadow?

Yes.

The Tao is large enough to include this bifurcating mode, as this mode itself is part of the way.  The difference between the Christian and the Taoist is that this mode for the former is the way while this mode for the latter is a way within the way.  It is simply a color on the vast palette of the soul—necessary, yes, but not sufficient.  And for those who would find it sufficient, they have their rewards:  virtue, knowledge, separation, clarity, lines and measurements.  They have these things.  And that is what they have.

Tao Te Ching XXIII

To use words but rarely is to be natural.

Hence a gusty wind cannot last all morning and a sudden downpour cannot last all day.  Who is it that produces these?  Heaven and earth.  If even heaven and earth cannot go on for ever, much less can humanity. That is why one follows the way.

A person of the way conforms to the way; a person of virtue conforms to virtue; a person of loss conforms to loss.  She who conforms to the way is gladly accepted by the way; he who conforms to virtue is gladly accepted by virtue; he who conforms to loss is gladly accepted by loss.

When there is not enough faith, there is lack of good faith.

But!

In this age of words, to use words incessantly is to be natural.  To cast oneself into the production, dissemination, gobbling, digestion, excreting, transformation, and production of words is to be relevant and modern.  Words are the artifice that have become natural and he who would conform to the world, to evolution, to power, must conform to words’ productive circulative necessity.  The natural is not a fixed fate, a static fact, an existential incarceration … but our creation, an urgent freedom, a matter of definition—maybe the matter of definition. 

Is the sage then about to be extinct?  If not, should she be?  This is the same as asking whether trees should be extinct.  Or air.  Or garlic or horses or dandelions or children. 

The sage looks at words, definitions, change, and present mores as you might look at the weather in the North Sea—here, there, come, gone, wet, dry, bright, dark, cool, warm.  And in each state the people nailing words to the clouds and the clouds heaving off to rain the words in the ocean where they are diluted and disappear.  The sage is a way of looking at words such that words lose their weight and substance.

The sage does not speak for the trees the way an ecologist might; for the ecologist typically is interested in the trees because he is interested in humanity.  Any commonsensical person knows that the trees have a better chance of being on earth far longer than we do—no need to worry about them.  But the sage is no more interested in humanity than the trees, no more interested in the Internet than in stone, and no more interested in ethics than sleep.  This is why the sage is not committed to the modern enterprise of communication, why she does not privilege words over water or talk over death.

If the sage were committed to virtue, she would not be a sage; if committed to suffering, she would be some other thing also.  If she were committed to anything that could be named, she would be no sage but whatever the naming calls forth as the expert or devotee in that naming.  So the virtuous affirm each other in their virtuousness, dancers in their dancing, peach merchants in their peach merchandizing, gamers in their gaming, thieves in their thieving, lovers in their loving, and saints in their sanctifying.  But no sage affirms the sage if she is truly a sage; any words are only smirking doubts.  Her only affirmation is silence and a caprice that is often gentle, and for these she waits.

If she is committed to anything, the sage is committed to shadows and that which has no name; so words are nothing special and she uses them when she feels like it, which isn’t all that often.

Tao Te Ching XXII

Bowed down then preserved.

Bent then straight.

Hollow then full.

Worn then new.

A little then benefitted.

A lot then perplexed.

Therefore the sage embraces the One and is a model for the empire.

She does not show himself and so is conspicuous.

She does not consider himself right and so is illustrious.

She does not brag and so has merit.

She does not boast and so endures.

It is because she does not contend that no one in the empire is in a position to contend with her.

The way the ancients had it—bowed down then preserved—is no empty saying;

truly it enables one to be preserved to the end.

The One the sage loves is no middling balance, no average of the difficult extremes, no part of the whole, no thing expressed in words, no idea.  It is only the reality of fully lived experience.  It includes all the opposites and so, in inexperienced hands, is schizoid even as the empire, in inexperienced hands, is schizoid.  But the sage is so comfortable with the nature of reality—the nature of government, civilizations, cultures, societies, organizations, families, the human psyche, nature, reality, dreams, herself—that nothing phases her.  What is schizoid to others is one to her.

It is because of this familiarity that she does not act like the average person—overtly or covertly asserting herself, overtly or covertly competing, raising herself up, pushing others down, smiling as she is successful in doing this, frowning as she isn’t—but like a sage, doing none of these things—not from volition, instruction, force, actual or potential gain, but naturally.  The sage is conspicuous, illustrious, meritorious, enduring simply because she is rare.  The rare is beautiful and virtuous, not according to the vast preponderance of beauty and virtue—those common images and words which the masses fall sway to—but according to some other thing.

Tao Te Ching XXI

In his every movement, a person of great virtue follows the way and the way only.

As a thing the way is shadowy, indistinct.

Indistinct and shadowy, yet within it is an image.

Shadowy and indistinct, yet within it is a substance.

Dim and dark, yet within it is an essence.

This essence is quite genuine and within it is something that can be tested.

From the present back to antiquity its name never deserted it.

It serves as a means for inspecting the parents of the multitude.

How do I know that the parents of the multitude are like that?

By means of this.

The Tao is nested into itself and all things, even as all things are nested into themselves and the Tao.  To be a thing is to not be shadowy, yet the Tao is a shadowy thing.  Though it is a shadowy thing, it hides within itself reflections, substances, and concentrations—each of these having at least a semblance of tangibility.  Yet within these reflections, substances, and concentrations, there is yet something else—something else unnamed—and this unnamed thing is somehow verifiable.  What sort of experiment might you construct to verify the presence of this thing within the image within the shadowy thing within the sage?  And how might one follow such a thing within a thing within a thing within a thing?  And how could one tell such was being incessantly followed?  And where in any text on psychology, healing, or religion might one find such an elusive definition of virtue?  Nowhere, for though words do not desert it, it eludes words; though the multitude ignores it, it inspects the multitude through its origins.

Imagine the council of original begetters, lined against the wall dressed in their most dubious selves.  Something not quite there pacing back and forth in front, its name tucked inside its pants, performing strange inspections.  Would you stand against that wall?  How do you know?

The Tao is nested through the liminality of itself in everything, of the twilight that infests all certainty and the doubt that thrives at noon.  The Tao does not live in the mirror; it is the mirror—its frame, casing, glass, source, void, and contents.  It is a method that precedes, infuses, and succeeds science ontologically and historically.

The Christian, the Jain and Hindu, the Moslem and Jew, the Buddhist, the Confucian and humanist … all must deviate from their ways, for their ways are ways and all walk but one way—the way of ways, the way of the body, life’s murky sensate path; the one who follows the Tao, though, follows the broadest possible way—without narrowness, without eradication, without rules, without scriptures, without priests or gods, without idols and ceremonies and structures, unreliant on the false gods of art and technology, unconcerned with money and reputation, giving time only a passing glance,   The way is not narrow but broad, for life is broad; most walk the narrow ways from fear and indolence, but the sage sees life and does not stray from its breadths, heights, or depths.  So she follows the virtue that is not named virtue and walks the way that is not named a way.

Not surprising, then, for such indistinction to avoid the clarity that grammarians demand with their crisp call for neon antecedents.  The Tao shrugs at such demands.  You ask, Like what? How?  It may respond, Like this.  By means of that.  If you follow the Tao, you know the that and this; you’ve seen and touched them, used them as tools and measures, been measured by them, followed them.  They are as genuine as pi and berries, as real as LSATs and wombats.

Tao Te Ching XX

Between yes and no, how much difference is there?

Between good and evil, how great is the distance?

What others fear, one must also fear.

The multitude are joyous,

as if partaking in a feast or going on an outing in spring.

I alone am inactive and reveal no signs and wax without having reach the limit,

like a baby that has not yet learned to smile.

Listless, as though with no home to go back to.

The multitude all have more than enough,

I alone seem to be in want.

My mind is that of a fool—how blank;

vulgar people are clear.

I alone am drowsy,

vulgar people are alert.

I alone am muddled—

calm like the sea; like a high wind that never ceases.

The multitude all have a purpose,

I alone am foolish and uncouth

and value being fed by the mother.

Here the ambiguity of morality is accepted, long before good and evil were surpassed and ambiguity proclaimed as some revelation.  It is not as if the way refuses morality, but that it quietly acknowledges the relative insignificance of all things—oneself as much as anything—and the complex intertwinement of all things—effect, cause, shadow, light—and in these quiet acknowledgements knows that a wrong turn, a misplaced book, or unrequited love can lead to ecstasy, even as fulfilled ambition, a glorious finish, or a benign prognosis can lead to misery.  Those who take credit for their fortune and talents—even as those who blame others for their misfortune and lack—fear the vast architecture of unseen causes and the elastic randomness of time.  For sometimes there are thousands of leagues between good and evil, sometimes a nanometer.  How great is the distance?  The question is unanswered because there are an infinite number of answers.  If you know why you say yes or no, you play at god … and the way smirks at such unacknowledged play and returns to the play of the wind.

So the one who follows the way is no more alone than others but knows her solitude—not as something to be overcome but as something that is.  She sees the blistered demarcations the people build between ideas, the sacred walls between words, the firm objectives, moral certainties, hardened judgments.  She sees them not as the people see them—as blisters, monuments, guiding stars, pedestals, and tribal cement—but as bubbles in a storm.

Inactive, impoverished, drowsy, confused, foolish, coarse, strange—look for these attributes in some obscure human resources database in some obscurer job description.

When the way is disused, alertness and clarity, purpose and knowledge, activity, opinions, sophistication and signs, acquisitiveness and independence are valued.  But the one who still seeks the way in such times doubts the superiority of such things—doubts the superiority of so many things—and in this doubt may even find the way.  Yet, in seeking and maybe finding, she also even doubts the way.

The sage is profane even as the mother is profane.  She does not know and her only knowing is this.  A slight upturn of the lips, a gaze that sees but doesn’t grasp, a soul that cannot be found for it hides in the entire universe. 

Tao Te Ching XIX

Exterminate learning and there will no longer be worries.

Exterminate the sage, discard the wise, and the people will benefit a hundredfold.

Exterminate benevolence, discard rectitude, and the people will again be filial.

Exterminate ingenuity, discard profit, and there will be no more thieves and bandits.

These four, being false adornments, are not enough …

and the people must have something to which they can attach themselves.

Exhibit the unadorned and embrace the uncarved block,

have little thought of self and as few desires as possible.

Here the sage, so extolled, so much the embodied mirror of the Tao—the Tao, the great way, the mother of the named and nameless—recommends her extermination for the betterment of the straw dogs.  Education, wisdom, goodness, creativity, capitalism—the pillars of progress, health, and truth—are obliterated for the sake of some hypothetical Edenic state.  Who would be sufficiently naïve to practice such annihilation?  Who would promote the eradication of what has been built up over so much time, with so much blood?  Who would sacrifice that rarest of noble specimens—the sage—for those most prosaic, vulgar, and common citizens—the people?  Does this all not sound too much like the way of the cross?

But there is no cross!  The sage eats and drinks and makes love and laughs and governs or bangs pots without discrimination and lives to a ripe old age or dies young—whatever.  She looks at firm breasts and buttocks, bulging sacs and colorful quesadillas, thinking, Ah, how lovely and ripe is the world.  Though she may just as easily run off and sit on a bench, thinking of nothing.  When she becomes a sage, the sage is exterminated; there is no more sage … this is why she is the sage.  Extermination occurs not through some masochistic denial, some suicidal pact, but through the dissolution of opposites (learning and ignorance, sagacity and foolishness, goodness and avarice, creativity and routine, profit and loss) by means of immersion in the opposites.  You can tell the sage because she does not believe in the sage even as you can tell the true believer by the one who doesn’t believe.

There is a thing in a shadow in a thing in a shadow at the center of things; this thing is stretched in time and the stretching we call learning, wisdom, goodness, creativity, business.  Would the sage cut the stretching of time and civilization with the Tao’s dubious scissors to see the circle of progress burst and the saggy center exposed?  The sage is not out to cut and burst!  The sage is the sage simply because she sees the circumference, she sees the center, and she sees no difference.  Thus she lives in the center for that is where she lives.  The people live on the line stretching from the center to the outer boundaries of the present—what is commonly called progress—for that is where they live; if they did not, they would not be the people and there would be no line.

The people, however, must attach themselves to things; this is why they are the people and know who the sages are, where there is profit, why learning and creativity are necessary, and how goodness is expressed.  They might themselves be better if they did not know who or where or why or how; they might be less anxious, more filial, less greedy.  So the sage laughs at such knowledge and in the laughter there is absolute death.

For the wisdom that is not wisdom, go to the one who has lost its definition and listen to what she doesn’t say.

Tao Te Ching XVIII

When the great way falls into disuse, there are benevolence and rectitude.

When cleverness emerges, there is great hypocrisy.

When the six relations are at variance, there are filial children.

When the state is benighted, there are loyal ministers.

When immorality increases, there are pious leaders.

When education becomes readily available, there is vast stupidity.

When corruption is rampant, the people are efficient.

When corporations are insane, teamwork abounds.

When free speech is entrenched in the Charter, when there are rights and freedoms,

there are clichés and tyrannies.

When the arts are funded, there is pervasive mediocrity.

When opportunity is unequal, there is contentment.

When history is forgotten, there are dancing and reverie.

Morality is not a system; it’s an orientation, the way one naturally faces.  For me to tell you that your face should be my face is to attempt to turn an orientation to a system, air to solid, nature to technology.  The more faces are displayed, normalized, reproduced, and idolized, the more the people lose their souls.  This is true whether faces are proclivities or names.  The more causation is hardened, the more minds are hardened.  The way is nimble, it does not nail down ideas or relations; it does not use nails, but bubbles.  Those far from the way depend on faces projected on the heavens to tell them how to face.  They see a way as the way.  But those close to the way seek the face without a face and face that way.  Systems, moralities, ideologies, ideas, orientations, faces:  these are simply signs that systems, moralities, ideologies, ideas, orientations, and faces exist … nothing more.  Those who wish to make them something more are tyrants and vary only in the degree to which they actualize their wish.

Life is no system; life is a shadowy sign of the way.

Tao Te Ching XVII

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to her subjects.

Next comes the ruler they love and praise.

Next comes one they fear.

Next comes one with whom they take liberties.

When there is not enough faith, there is lack of good faith.

Hesitant, she does not utter words lightly.

When her task is accomplished and her work done,

the people all say, “It happened to us naturally.”

Progress has often been the extension of volition to a greater proportion of people.  With great masses of individuals now empowered, with democracy crawling across the earth, entitling billions to live like kings, with names and spiritual prosthetics now comprising the bulk of human imagination, with copyrights and rights the definition of justice, who would there be who chooses to meander down another path, dim and dubiously named, not craving extensions, who views her will as neither more nor less than that of any other object, who does not strut but lurks in shadow, who has removed herself from the elastic of affirmation and rejection, who cannot be taken advantage of for there is nothing to grasp, who aligns herself with the river of bodies, emptying into the sea?

Philosophy has replaced thinking with volition, wisdom with will.  Education has replaced knowledge with certification, thinking with industry.

If no sages remain, it is because we have moved so far from nature that we easily deceive ourselves as to our significance.  We perhaps have moved so far in order to deceive ourselves.  When I can instantly publish every little act I do, every little thought I think, the results of every little survey I take, to a great cloud of babble, how can I not be someone with whom to reckon?  The sage, in an age of eliminated external nature—or, at least, nature reduced to two dimensions—must seek nature within.  The commoner says, Because I seek it within, I can make it whatever I wish it to be.  But just because it cannot be seen does not mean it is subject to our wills.  The sage is intimate with shadowy things, with the elusive and the hidden; she peers into darkness and sees shapeless shapes, imageless images.  She sees the way.

Intimacy’s tyranny is difficult to avoid when humans exist in massive proximities.  When there are millions living and bumping within kilometers of one’s home, who would not divide these millions into those we love, those we fear, those we exploit?  The one whose primary reality is not those millions, but a nature that swirls in distant eddies.

To recreate nature, then, is the sage’s task.  Not to recreate it according to the fancies of her imagination, to the whimsies of desire, but according to the patterns she sees around her—patterns which emulate the ancient routes, still traced with our lives.

The body knows three dimensions.  The mind knows a fourth.  Technology strives for a fifth and in striving achieves two.  So the sage returns to the body and so is less and more than modern man.  The sage follows the body but does not care for time.  In stopping at the limits of the body, she is able to act naturally.

But in a world of artifice, the natural seems artificial and the sage is a fool.  In a world of artifice, nature must be dissected, analyzed, comfortably visited, explained, proceduralized, romanticized, and therapized so that the people can appear to be connected with it.  But once it has been dissected, it is no longer nature and the people are tethered to a corpse.  The sage turns away from manuals and texts, theses and therapists; she turns to the nature she sees and what she sees is the body.

The gods lived in nature and the gods were shadowy.  Now, the gods have receded and nature is shadowy.  Once nature recedes, what will be shadowy?  Perhaps us.

The sage has a task and when it is done, she does not care if no other comes along.  She sits and bangs pots, she makes pies or beds, she walks on silent sidewalks.  She does not stretch her life or power to unnatural limits but stops when stopping makes sense and dies when things are done.