MEDITATIONS: TAO TE CHING CHAPTER SEVENTY

the ancient child asks
can you keep my teachings
everything I am saying to you
both my words and what they teach
are very easy to understand and put into practice
yet so few people on this planet
are able to do so

the ancient child says
complicating my teachings will turn them to nothing

the ancient child commands
speak for me

my words and what they teach are a time-binding song
with ancient roots and an infinite length

my corporeal actions reveal a time-bound method
that seeks to keep me aligned with the universe

my words and my action are so oblique
that logical attempts at understanding me are futile

knowing          me       not       me       knowing

know me by not knowing me
and I will appear elegant and sacred to you

know me by not knowing me
and I will open my precious heart to you

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

We often get in our own way. We imagine obstacles on the Road and fall for mirages that tempt us off the Path. But really, living the Tao way of life is how most of nature lives. It is easy if it is allowed to happen, if we just habituate ourselves to the condition that is ever-changing-condition. And yet, this seems to be the one thing most of us refuse to do.

Instead of assenting to life, most of us choose to weave great webs of explanations and excuses. We become spiders, bitter, venomous, and resentful. We become solitary predators, liars and ambushers who hunt through cunning, deception, and subterfuge. That is what the masses of us choose, to live as isolated lurkers and vampiric web-spinners.

But we don’t have to.

There is a song in the heart of every many—not the sound itself, but a pattern—an instinctual map reaching back to the first of our ancestors. With each generation, it was shaped; in each generation, there are numerous subtle variations. Like the world tree whose roots are embedded in the foundations of the world and whose branches reach ever upward, our songs exist beyond the singular moment—and at the same time—within each moment as well. How and when and where they manifest themselves in our individual behavior is variable, just as the branches and leaves of the tree are all different despite their common connection.

Don’t feel the need to explain or justify to others what a meaningful existence means to you. It does not involve others. It does not involve words or labels. It is not knowledge nor wisdom nor cleverness. It is the experience you intuit when you are engaged in open-emptiness, in deep self-reflection, and in spontaneous acts of creation. It is the act of welcomed becoming within the present.

Lao-tzu. “Chapter Seventy”. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014. p.131