The ancient sages let themselves be precisioned, moment by moment.

This is the surefootedness that crosses a river successfully in the winter, making each step with both confidence and also tentativeness. The confidence in each step comes from the body knowing it’s centered and its balance is solid. The tentativeness of each step is the willingness to be precisioned.

What about this rock: does it shift a bit? Is it slippery? Where, exactly, does the foot go? How does the body arrange itself to keep its balance in this step?

And more: our ‘next steps’ can be about more than just keeping our personal balance. They can also be about keeping the balance. We can choose to step with care and reverence, knowing that this world is precious and alive, enormous and beautiful, in ways we can only partially grasp.

Every moment, life is new in some ways; always something more than it was the moment before. If I lose sight of its newness and just feel my sureness, I’m lost. At some point I’ll step where the footing is slippery, and fall. I’ll treat familiar people as if they are as they ‘always’ were; and suddenly discover I’ve damaged them or our relationship.

I’ll act as if the way I’ve always done things needs no change. I’ll so identify with the shape I am used to taking, that I’ll feel as though if I give ‘that’ up I’d be giving up myself. I’ll try to keep from falling apart, and miss the chance for a new way.

If I have only my certainties I won’t feel the unresolved confusion which, if I slowed down and allowed room for it, could take me the first step toward a new understanding. Then new ways could arise, which make sense now.

long ago, there were sages,
deft in their doings
their subtle wisdom and mysterious power penetrating so deep
that it’s beyond ordinary understanding

truly not full of yourself
you can lose yourself
and be newly made

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

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This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

Before my sons were even born I could feel that they had different natures. In the moments after their births I experienced those differences much more precisely. The oldest looked at the world with a hungry intensity.  His muscles were also held more tightly. The younger was softer in the way he held his body and also in the way he gazed.

Giving birth to these two who were already so different at the moment of birth, showed me vividly that people really are born with different natures. The different ways we be are not only a product of different experiences: if you strip away ‘conditioning’ there is still someone. Every person, any moment, is there. Even in advanced dementia you can see this vividly. The person is still in there looking out. Even though they may no longer be able to speak with words, those eyes speak in that person’s own language.

Born with my own nature, my nature is also recognizably human just as the tree outside my window is recognizably a pecan, and my tabletop is recognizably granite. Each is its own something, and different in its very nature, from anything else that ever was. Each is also something which is, in its very nature, very much ‘a’ tree, or ‘a’ slab of granite. And I am ‘a’ human being.

These are not arbitrary classifications. If I am a gardener and know these seeds to be tomato seeds, that tells me some things I can do to help the plants thrive. Likewise with people: there are certain things one can do for a person. For example, to help a tiny new person thrive, we hold it, and nurse it.

From the inside, I can feel my own nature. When I act in accord with it in my present situation, it feels natural, unforced, without deviation from my wholeness. When I (or others around me) act against my nature, it doesn’t feel natural. Sometimes the feeling of it not being natural is glaring, other times more subtle.

Not only does it feel natural to act in alignment with my nature–it’s also more effective. So this inner cue which tells me when I’m acting in accord with my nature is adaptive, and appears to be something I’m ‘meant’ to attend to in the same way I’m ‘meant’ to attend to the pain of a burn so I know what to do and what not to do.

Part of my human nature is a capacity to pause and sense a new way of being that can come in any current situation where the old way doesn’t seem to make sense. Taken together with the capacity to sense whether or not that new way of being is actually natural to me and natural in my situation, this creative capacity makes me and human beings in general, something absolutely amazing: we’re able to act at the edge where nature is doing something new, in conscious self-awareness of whether this bit of new makes sense! That’s wild and wonderful.

But the wildness and wonder go even deeper than that. When you stop and turn and really notice it, everything having its own nature which goes on inseparably in this whole enormous incredibly intricate process we call Nature, is so wondrous it’s hard to even begin to take it in. How can this be? It begs one to ask: What is a ‘nature’ anyway? And where does the nature of something come from?

I can feel my own nature pulsing into the world right here and now. So… what if I turn, and look at where it all comes from, right here in me? What do I see there?

I ‘see’ something that can’t be seen. I ‘hear’ something that can’t be heard. But even though I can’t see or hear or taste or smell or touch it, I can still feel, very very intimately, that there’s something with no beginning or end which my ‘I-ness’ comes from, and not just my own ‘I-ness’, all I-ness all the way up to the great big huge I-ness of the whole big system.

It’s like the pattern for the biggest tapestry that ever was–except the tapestry is alive and growing and constantly doing something surprising. It’s like a pattern in which a billion billion points unfold in a choreography both precise and free, where I come in in the middle for a little while. It’s not quite predictable, and yet… somehow, it is order…. or a drive towards order… toward something like making sense, itself.

we try to see what can’t be seen:
the invisible
we try to hear what can’t be heard:
the inaudible
we try to touch what can’t be touched:
the subtle

these three are aspects of one, unfathomable
unclear even where it’s revealed
and utterly obscure where it’s hidden
an unnameable, infinite, continuous thread
which stretches out, and returns

it’s form, without substance

you can’t see its beginning or end

hold fast to it in its becoming
to move in the here and now
as part of the ancient unbroken thread

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

Concerns about ‘fitting in’, ‘honors’, ‘what others will think’ and so on, can do such damage! It’s especially insidious because dishonor can be mistaken for a loss of your own personal integrity, and not fitting in can be mistaken for not being part of the human community.

But honors are external and are not real anyway. The ‘self’ of self-importance is not your own person.

The student is not the grade they receive, and an athlete is not the Olympic gold. Public office is bestowed–or not–and is easily lost even if it’s gained. If we become deeply invested in any of these, we are setting ourselves up for a constant fear that obscures what really matters.

Anything that happens in the public eye can be like that. What will ‘they’ think of this speech? This act? This sentence? This post? –But have I said what I know in my heart? If I do say it, then I’m untouchable.

This kind of untouchability which will not allow someone to be dishonest with his own person, is what makes someone trustworthy. This kind of untouchability is what we yearn for, in our leaders. We don’t want leaders who are blown about by every change in public opinion. We want leaders who stand true as they respond to world events, who know that sometimes their response will be unpopular and who are swayed by neither favor nor disfavor.

when honor
is bound up with our sense of self
both gaining it and losing it
fill us with fear

we fear we won’t gain it
we dread losing it
because of a limited sense of self

without self-importance
what dishonor can touch us?

if there is nothing
for which he would damage his person
someone might be entrusted with the world

because he cherishes his person
the world can be given to his care

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

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This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

In the last chapter we were focused on the kind of comings and goings which allow us to fulfill our own particular kind of being. This chapter makes it clear that not all comings and goings do this. Some can actually take us away from ourselves.

There’s an easy way to tell the difference: I can notice what sustains my energies, and what dissipates them.

If I allow myself to be taken away by this and that so that I lose myself in the process, this dissipates my energy. But if I come back to my belly, I can come back to myself.

What does it mean to come back to my belly?

The simple answer is that instead of eating just for the flavor of it (or out of habit), I am noticing whether I’m actually hungry right now. But the answer goes deeper than that.

If I eat a fantastically delicious slice of chocolate cake right now, will it replenish my energy? …Or, what about this canteloupe, on this hot summer day? Flavors can be wonderful, but if the flavor of something overrides my ability to sense whether this particular food will replenish me and sustain me, the flavor has taken me away from something crucial.

Music is nice: but if the music functions to still an anxiety, keeping me from experiencing something inside that’s maybe not quite comfortable, I can lose track of valuable information about myself and my situation.

Any entertainment, and anything money can buy, can distract me from my own inner promptings.

It goes deeper still though: my belly is the center of my power when I am moving. If I stay with my belly, I’m staying in my power. My belly is also the open space at my center, where I am free for new possibilites, and am open to comings and goings in such a way that I remain precisely connected with my own nature and the universe.

too many sights
and the inner eye goes blind

too much music
and the inner ear goes deaf

too many flavors
and taste becomes jaded

hunting and chasing about
makes one mad with excitement

precious commodities
hinder one’s natural sense of rightness

the sage is guided by his belly
rather than those outer pulls
leaving those, to stay with
that which is within

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

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This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

It is common to think of everything, even other people and our own selves, as a resource–that is, as something for ‘use’. Every time we take even a minute to pause, something in us says we are ‘wasting time’.

The Taoist approach offers a corrective here. One example is the well-known story of a tree whose wood was of low quality. No one ever cut the tree down, because it was ‘useless’. So it lived to a great age.

Yet this chapter is apparently focused on what makes things useful to us!

I think the mistake comes in translating the character ‘yung’ as ‘useful’. ‘Fulfills its destiny’ might be closer; ‘allows it to serve’ holds another bit of it; ‘expresses its nature’ touches on a slightly different strand; ‘in its power’ yet another.

A wheel is its own beautiful shape, but also its shape makes it possible for it to engage directly with the ground to move a vehicle forward, with as little energy expended as possible. Its generous circular shape is just right to do this.

But the wheel can’t do this by itself. In fact, in a sense the wheel doesn’t ‘do’ anything at all, other than to be the shape that it is. It has to be connected to the cart in such a way that it is completely responsive to the energy and direction that flows ‘in’ to it. The empty space at its center where it’s exactly fitted to the axle, makes this possible.

A clay pot is beautiful just in its own shape, too–and in its nature accepts the flow of something into it. It wouldn’t be a pot if it couldn’t do this.

The third metaphor used in this chapter is especially interesting because it’s not the empty space of the room itself that’s highlighed, but the doors and windows: the means by which we come and go from the room.

The Tao Te Ching is always about our own nature. If this chapter were only about what makes something work, that would be trivial. No, the ‘wheel’ and ‘pot’ and ‘room with windows and doors’ that’s meant here, is me!

–And far from telling me to ‘get busy’ and ‘make myself useful’, the text invites me to do the opposite: instead, to be the beautiful shape that I am, really.

It highlights that If I’m my own real shape, I will have room at the heart of me to welcome the comings and goings which are intrinsic to my particular kind of being.

The previous chapter is widely understood as being directions for meditation. And meditation is deep-related to this chapter as well: after all, in meditation we’re letting go of our busyness in order to be at rest, welcoming what comes and goes in us. The less we do and the quieter we get, the more connected we become to the ‘whole big thing’.

Meditation lets us practice our own natural shape and pace, and the awareness of when we’re ‘in shape’, and when we’re not. We become more sensitized to when we’re forcing things and when we’re not; when we don’t ‘have room’, and when we do.

Our ordinary doings also start to become visible as a way we’re in our own shape and pace–or not. As we play with this over time and learn to stay closer to our own nature in the midst of our doings, our regular lives become more and more connected to the ‘whole big thing’.

thirty spokes are joined
upon a hub
to make a wheel–

that hole in the center
is the source of its power

clay is shaped
to make a vessel–

in its hollowness
is its power

when windows and doors are cut
it makes a room a room–

those openings
make it habitable

being can be beneficial
only because of the open space
that lets it function

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

This is maybe the most important chapter in the Tao Te Ching.  Approaching it, I’m nervous: can I do justice to it?  It’s so deep that I don’t really feel I can.

In my nervousness, I’m not fully embracing the writing.  Something is holding back.

But the text is asking me, ‘can you be undivided?’  –There are no hedges here; it’s not ‘can you be undivided while you’re sitting on the meditation cushion and nothing else is happening?’  It’s an invitation right now, to totally embrace what I’m doing.  It’s an invitation to embrace it as just plain me–and to embrace it with all of me.

And this is possible.  Now I’m with my energy, and my energy is with this.

I soften.  My breath becomes soft, too.  All of me is now here doing this.  Nervousness has dissipated like clouds in the sun, and my vitality rises.  I’m just being interested in this text, and the interest is giving rise to these words.  It’s almost like the words are landing here by themselves, it’s so easy.

And no, I can’t yet do this ‘without deviation.’  But I’m learning!

can you bring the whole of you
and keep yourself undivided?

can you gather your energy
and make it soft as a baby’s?

can you clean the dust from the mirror
and see things, including yourself, clearly?

can you lead without cleverness?

as life comes and goes from the world
can you be strong like a woman?

seeing clearly
can you stay innocent?

a mother gives birth and nourishes
but does not own
works but does not take credit
leads but does not dominate

this is a deep, secret power

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

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©2010 Kye Nelson

A skilled archer knows when he’s pulled the bowstring back just enough, but not too much. He knows if he pulls it too far, he may injure himself or the bow–and the arrow will not fly as true. The practiced archer knows with ever greater precision where to stop, because he’s devoted to the art of archery.

Where is the stopping point, though? How does he find it?

–He discovers it via his interested care for the effect of his action. He practices a restraint that doesn’t feel restrained, but attuned.

Writing’s like that too. I’m attuned to what this chapter invited me to say, and sensing ‘it’, I remove any excess that isn’t it.

Now I feel the point approaching where I’ve said it.  It’s time to stop.

overfilled,
a bowl will spill

oversharpened,
a blade won’t last

too much gold and jade
can’t be guarded

and worse,
you start defining yourself
in terms of an excess
that’s doomed to be lost

when it’s completed, stop!
that’s Heaven’s way

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

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This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

The word devotion is sometimes misunderstood as meaning that you have to be less authentic in order to ‘be there’ for the other person. This chapter makes it clear that that is not what is meant.

No, what we’re exploring here, is how one goes about living the most meaningful life possible.

A meaningful life is not a choice between ‘them’ or ‘us’. It’s something magical where our very being, allowed to flow freely, nourishes the life around us. Then our doings are intrinsically meaningful ‘both directions’: they do something significant in the world, and our own natures are fully in play.

So how does that happen, in practice?

Going into my own experience here, I’m noticing that working on this commentary is a good example. I’m devoted to it in a special way that comes from having said I would write a new chapter every week. But that’s no hardship because it’s so satisfying to work on. I don’t even feel like I’m working, exactly. It’s enjoyable.

The commentary pulls me toward itself. I’m in flow. I follow the text searchingly, like water following the land. I’m deeply interested in it, and the more closely I attend to it, the more interested I get.

This is what I meant when I used the word devotion, before. This is how it is for a mother with her child. The mother has an interested care that keeps deepening, the more she engages with her child.

You can’t pretend interest–that is, not on the inside where you actually live. You really are interested, or you’re not. If you’re not, then the thing you’re doing won’t feel meaningful.

What’s being talked about here is not ‘me’ doing good things as an object in an out-there world cut off from my own experiencing. No: it’s the feeling I have at this very moment, a feeling of the good effect of my being, in the world.

the very most meaningful life is a lot like water

water is good at benefiting everything
but it doesn’t fight against itself to do so
it’s content to flow in its own natural path
it doesn’t disdain its path just because it’s ‘low’
it flows wherever it naturally flows
even if that’s where the ‘lowest’ people are
in this way it’s very much like Tao

in building a dwelling, what matters is to sense the solidity of the ground and the structure
in things of the heart and mind, what matters is to sense yourself diving into your depths
in human relations, what matters is to sense your own humanity in the relating
in speaking, what matters is to sense yourself speaking faithfully
in leading, what matters is to sense the way that
all these ingredients can work together to make a harmonious whole
in serving, what matters is to sense what you in particular can contribute
in acting, what matters is sensing the right moment

but above all, what matters is to sense that you’re not going against nature
don’t fight your own nature, and you won’t experience resentment

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

Often the Tao Te Ching seems to be skipping around all over the place.

Chapter 5 was the ‘straw dog’ chapter. There, heaven-and-earth are said to be ‘inhumane’. Then comes a detour to ‘valley spirit’ and ‘Great Mother’ in chapter 6, which is often translated so it seems the whole life-process turns on ‘emptiness’. In chapter 7 we’re back to heaven-and-earth again: this time, heaven-and-earth are said to be ‘not self-interested.’

In this common reading, ‘inhumane’ and ‘not self-interested’ are uneasy bedfellows and the Valley Spirit chapter seems to be stuck in between them arbitrarily.

But there’s actually a nice sequence to the chapters starting to show up when I stay strictly with how the text can make sense from inside the experience of my own life process. Read this way, ‘inhumane’ could actually be an invitation to a heartfelt, near-instinctive reverence for the natural world and human beings as part of it, instead of the rule-based ‘goodness’ (see chapter 5 commentary) implied by the word ‘humane’. The core quality of the ‘Great Mother’ could be ‘devotion’ instead of ‘emptiness’. We’re beginning to uncover a different, more heart-centered way of reading the Tao Te Ching.

And chapter 7 builds so easily on this! The chapter tells us that the sage acts without self-interest and thereby has himself.  I know that experience of acting without self-interest, and having myself more fully in those moments.  So how does that happen? -what’s going on there?

Immediately I get right back to devotion! When I’m devoted, my whole being is acting for the sake of something that matters; something I care about in a sustained way. And that devotion is self-sustaining. It feeds on itself. I’m energized by my devotion.

I think about the mother Inca dove I watched feeding her two fledglings in my windowsill a few weeks ago…  And the trees pumping sap up to the new buds, a few weeks before that. This beautiful world is fueled by devotion, if you look just below the surface!

Turns out we may actually need the valley spirit chapter in between ‘inhumane’ and ‘not self-interested’: with it, the whole thing opens up beautifully.

heaven is eternal
earth endures

why? what is their secret?

because they don’t live for themselves
they are long-lived

thus the sage puts his self in the background
and yet finds his self in the foreground
treats his self as incidental
and his self is safe

is this not because
he has no thought of self?
thus, he has the power
to realize himself.

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

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This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson

Surely the power of the Great Mother is something more than emptiness!

In many commentaries and translations of this chapter, what’s emphasized is the emptiness of the valley, and its lowness. It’s even been said that the Valley Spirit is immortal because in its emptiness it doesn’t really quite exist!  I protest.  Even though I know that emptiness can be very fecund indeed, still…

I think what’s being talked about in this chapter is something that does very much exist–but on a different and more subtle level than the purely physical.

The text does say (depending on how you translate it) that the Valley Spirit is the Great Mother–and the spirit of the Great Mother findable in each of us, by us ourselves.  But what exactly is that spirit? In other words, what is this active principle which we can access any time?

I’m a mother. So I’m pausing here to contemplate my experience as mother, for clues.  I’m noticing how it is to be intimately related to a bit of the unending flow of life, a bit which has passed through me.  Raising children, giving birth, all of that was a lot of work! Still, in another way, there is an effortlessness to my relation to that flow of life.

As I sit here with the feel of this, suddenly I begin to be viscerally connected with the Valley Spirit. I feel myself as Valley, changed by the action of the water over time.

But at the same time, there is something that doesn’t change. I can feel its presence in me, working powerfully. What is this that doesn’t change?

It’s what nurtures. It’s got love as its foundation. It’s a special kind of love which is primal… instinctive… powerful… neverending. It cradles life.

It’s devotion.

the Valley Spirit never dies
she is the primal spirit of Woman

she is the very first dwelling place
she is creation’s root foundation

her spirit is like a neverending gossamer thread of silk
nearly invisible
very strong

it’s ready at hand
never exhausted

— Kye Nelson: translation and commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

Comments?  Burning questions? Leave them here

This post was written as part of the tao together project.  Would you like to join us?

©2010 Kye Nelson