MEDITATIONS: TAO TE CHING CHAPTER Four

the tao source of life is an empty vessel
vast within
vast without
possessed of transcendental space

it seems able to hold anything and everything

yet it is also a force

file down the sharpest edge with it

untie any know and unknot any tangle

soften the harshest glare and settle unwanted dust

it is easy to secret away until needed
because it is already hidden away

but even in subtle storage
it seems to have a life all its own

nativity unknown
it was here before the parents of humanity
traversed the sky

—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching; An authentic Taoist translation. translated by John Bright-Fey

Potential—what is it? That which is not a thing in any singular time or space but is something that could be, or better said, could become. This is perhaps confounding to the purely materialist mindset which imagines nothing abstract to be real in any real sense. However, if one is willing to temporarily doubt his own understanding, apply skepticism to himself, to entertain the notion that something true and useful exists outside his current knowledge, then Chapter Four offers to the openminded insight into the nature of potential.

In one sense, potential is the set of limitations imposed on each being by the objective circumstances surrounding that being’s existence. This is what makes the Tao source of life a vessel. A vessel is a container, and a container is a border, division, separation, exclusion, the emergence of order from chaos, and the separation of one thing from another. This separation is what constitutes the vastness outside and in. For something to become one thing, it must sacrifice being any other thing—this is the vastness without. In the same vein, a thing which has yet to become what it could become is not one thing, but many different possibilities—this is the vastness within.

So potential is limitation, limitation by which a nothing can gain multitudinous possibilities of becoming one thing; but where are the boundaries? Where do the upper and lower limits lie? This is a mystery, hence the vastness inside and outside the transcendental vessel, hence the seemingly infinite range of great and horrible potential manifestations—these are what make potential an archetypal force of nature.

What is currently impossible for the inadequate, immature iteration of the self may well be possible, perhaps even trivial, for a higher version of who one might become—this speaks to Jung’s archetype of the child-hero as well as to Nietzsche’s übermensch—And remember! No one knows how high the upper limits of potential ascend, only that it is always beyond our vision, our ability to know. So no matter how dangerous a razor’s edge might seem to the current, vulnerable version of oneself who is trapped within his moment, it will prove blunt against the immortal, higher, more integrated self. Who one could be is stronger than who-he-is could ever imagine. No matter how complex the knot, no matter how painful the light by which the truth is revealed, who-one-could-be possesses the power to set things right. Problems kicked up into clouds of choking, obscuring dust he can settle—despite the current self’s inability to see the light at the end of the tunnel. His incredulity has no bearing on the transcendental reality. His belief is less true, less real than abstract potential.

So how does one access his potential self? Where is it exactly? Can it even be found?

Certainly, one’s potential is not something that can be pocketed and released when convenient, or else all mankind would rise to godhood. But that is not to say that it is a thing inaccessible. On the contrary, it is a thing one is and has always held in his possession. For one’s potential is rooted deep within every aspect of himself. It is in his biology, his instincts evolved over generations of ancestors. It is in his innate talents, his interests, and his moral choices. It emerges from these things when fused with his time and place in the universe. By another name: fate, destiny, the will of God, dharma. One’s potential is like a far-off target and a composite bow. It is like a judge who knows one’s every fault because he knows precisely how far one falls short of who one ought to be—a standard set in a time primordial, before mankind ever looked to the heavens, before gods and spirits populated the earth, before there were names by which places could be known—there was what would, what could, what ought to become.

Lao-tzu. “Chapter Four”. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014. p.12