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

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

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