As the young Nietzsche writing The Birth of Tragedy might say, he has refined his tastes as to be sustained when drinking from the cup of the tragedy of Nature. The experience and treasures are his, for he has made himself a dragon-slayer, undaunted by the dark, capable of traversing the abyss without need of fear of being swallowed up or possessed by it.

What is authentic knowledge?

But to fail to do this, to fail to let go of one’s belief that he is correct is to isolate that man from the real world. His order becomes decrepit, his sensitivities senile. He comes to assume he knows almost everything, and therefore all that he doesn’t know must by definition be wrong. Thus, monsters appear in the dark corners of all his thoughts. Inoffensive things become grave threats capable of destroying his very identity. He becomes less and less capable of assenting to how life actually is, favoring instead his presumption as to how life ought to be.

"sit quietly
focusing
forgetting
summon order from the void"
—Tao Te Ching Chapter Forty-Five

There is a social tension at the time of writing this Meditation, a tension that seems to have always existed with humankind but that has perhaps exacerbated recently. It is the divide between the materialist and the religious world views—a difference specifically of values . . . In Chapter Forty-Four, Lao-tzu weighs into this conflict amicably with questions for each of us to answer.

"water will always wear down a stone"
—Tao Te Ching Chapter Forty-Three

Many times during the course of these meditations we’ve discussed being, “in accordance with the Tao source of life,” though what exactly does that mean?

"practice does not make perfect / practice is perfect to begin with"
Accepting imperfection in Meditations: Tao Te Ching Chapter Forty-One

A brief guide to meditation this Friday from the Tao Te Ching Chapter Forty

Who are you really? It is a question that ought to be immediately answerable by every man, and yet both you and I suspect that very few would be able to respond without asking for clarity—as if someone else can tell a man who he truly is . . .

What is the "voice of conscience?" What is it really for, and what does it mean that we have one? Authenticity and inauthenticity discussed in Meditations: Tao Te Ching Chapter Thirty-Eight

If you haven't kept up, today's Meditations on the Tao Te Ching is a great place to start. Chapter Thirty-Seven summarizes much of what has been discussed thus far in a more easily digestible form.

To see the future—potential yet made manifest—one must look no further than inside the self and at what one already possesses.

What does Lao-tzu mean to “hold and embody?”—to be in possession of while simultaneously being that thing. I believe he means that we ought to bear the wisdom while at the same time acting upon it, that each of us ought not only to know but also to live out the Tao way of life by each of us finding our own balance.

We are meant to meditate on the power of reconstitution—the power of the relationship between the us and the unknown. What is that relationship? It is one of ignorance and admittance. We are finite, and it is infinite that which we do not know about ourselves and everything else. To realize this is to open the Eye of Shiva which possesses the power to disintegrate all within its sight.

With our minds open, Lao-tzu suggests that we can better understand the external world through self-reflection, and that the opposite is also true, that we can better understand ourselves by looking from an outside perspective. These are not paradoxes but sage advice.

The Tao is the Way to that which cannot be named nor grasped nor comprehended. What is the point? Why bother with something which we cannot ever hope to even speak about? What does something matter if it is, by definition, eternally unknown to us? It matters for the same reason a cliff matters to the blind man who is at risk of stepping off one.

Violence is more a part of our lives than most would like to admit. Though sometimes overt, mostly violent force hides behind politeness, ritual traditions, and institutions whose members wear various costumes to obscure the fact that they are no different from any other man; and therefore what they do is no more noble than if it were done by any other. In this way, violence becomes coercive force—ever-present yet unacknowledged, not that it needs to be known for it to bring tragedy forth.

The wise traveler is first and foremost a leader, an example, a pioneer and ideal. He teaches not through lectures nor dialectics, only by showing what we all ought to be. Thus can he teach anyone, even those who do not share his language or values. They can see for themselves his virtues and the fruits produced by those virtues. Likewise can the wise traveler learn from anyone or anything. As the ideal exemplar, he must be the ideal learner as well, open to the wisdom hidden in even the dullard’s or the madman’s ravings.

We cannot control the universe, only ourselves—and not even ourselves but for our determinations as to what is good and what is bad. We can affirm life as it is, or, because it will never conform to our wills, we can decide that it ought not to be in the first place. We can choose to dance with life, or we can scar it beyond recognition.