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

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

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

It’s said that the sage treats all nature as straw dogs. This sounds at first as though the sage treats nature with contempt. Not so.

A straw dog in ancient China was a sacrificial object. It was treated with utmost reverence before its sacrifice. But once it was sacrificed its time was over. It was no longer treated as something alive. It might then be gathered up by the fuel gatherers. When its time was over, it was over.

So the text actually invites me to treat everything in nature–human beings included–with great reverence while they are alive. (And not reverence as merely a feeling: reverence as something active, which actually gives the highest I have to give.) But the invitation is a challenging one at its core. It requires me to recognize that we, just like the rest of this whole precious-cargo, insanely beautiful world, are not permanent.

If I really take that impermanence seriously, it only deepens my reverence and cherishing of all nature–including myself and other human beings–rather than making it contemptible. We have so little time. And when our time on earth is over, it’s over.

I don’t think this means that we should forget those we’ve cared about after their deaths. The fuel gatherers don’t forget the straw dogs–they use what’s left, for fuel.

It’s in our nature to continue to love what we love. A cat or dog will mourn a lost loved companion and we’re no less than that.

What’s here is simply an invitation to accept impermanence as basic: an invitation to love what we love with all our hearts as the creatures we are, to know that now is what we have, and to lay down our own lives when our time is over.

Coming from here is very different than relating to others as a ‘good’ person doing ‘good’ things.  That’s an obligation which grows out of an abstraction about what I ‘should’ do.

But if I embrace the way of the world, how can I do anything but cherish the new mockingbird I saw last night singing his first songs? –then my heart just does what it does, without thinking of  ’good’ or ‘bad’.  It’s in this sense, that the sage is ‘inhumane’, if ‘humane’ is seen as a kind of ‘being good’ that is put on like your best clothes. That’s sentiment. The sage is not sentimental, but reverent.

Now if I feel for what reverence needs in order to be alive in me, I find my way back to the quiet again. Reverence needs a quiet space. Quiet makes room for it to express itself as a living impulse, instead of dead sentiment.

heaven and earth are not sentimental
seeing all creatures as straw dogs
the sage isn’t sentimental either
treating everyone as straw dogs

the empty space between heaven and earth
is like a flute from which our breath produces music
because of its very hollowness–
or like a straw with which our breath can feed air to the fire

that emptiness is never exhausted
the more it works, the more comes forth

now, many words–those fill up the silence
those lead to exhaustion
many words make it hard to hold fast to the center
to the inexhaustible emptiness within

— 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