Chapter 1
Thoughts and Applications on the Tao Te Jing through the lens of Master Zhu's Teachings.
The Tao that can be expressed, is not the Eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
“Non-Existence” I call the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
“Existence” I call the mother of all individual beings.
Therefore does the direction towards non-existence lead to the sight of the miraculous essence, the direction towards existence to the sight of spatial limitations.
Both are one in origin and different only in name.
In it’s unity it is called the secret.
The secret’s still deeper secret is the gateway through which all miracles occur.
Tao-Te-Jing - The Richard Wilhelm Edition
Some Commentary…
The Tao that can be expressed, is not the Eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The eternal Tao… What is that? I think of it as the natural world, the entirety of the Universe, the everything and the infinite. From a human perspective it is everything we know, everything we can know, and the unfathomable unknowable we live our lives oblivious to. The eternal Tao is layers upon layers of cycles interwoven within each other. Cycles of the seasons, cycles of night and day, cycles of life and death, cycles of planetary trajectories, cycles of creation and destruction. Even within our bodies our lives are filled with cycles, cycles of wakefulness and sleep, the citric acid cycle in cell respiration that creates the energy that supports our mind and bodies. Our lives are like caterpillars transforming into butterflies, our DNA reflecting our ancestral patterns as we cycle through the seasons of our lives. The vastness of the universe is incomprehensible, I think this is the eternal Tao.
At the top of this essay is a tree, a visual representation of a tree. Even the sentence that says “At the top of this essay is a tree.” is a series of symbols (manmade words) that have sounds and meaning associated with them. This is the membrane that separates our internal world from our external experience. Even the visual representation of a tree has no similarities to an actual tree in “reality”. The image above is a series of binary bits that are programmed to light up as a representation of a tree. The image of the tree was saved as a digital file, created with a digital camera that was manufactured to mimic the output of the human eye. In our discourse of change the photo at the top of this essay is of an actual tree that grew in a vacant lot. The tree and the vacant lot no longer exist, the spot has since been built up and taken over by a convenience store and parking lot. The image itself is a digital memory of a small section of the Earth at a moment in space and time that will never be replicated.
In The Shape of Understanding I talk about the Tao as the shape of our mind witnessing the eternal. The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao refers to the idea that we are creatures witnessing an eternal, infinite universe. The shape of the mind is like an instantaneous lightning bolt connecting Heaven and Earth. Everything we know has this binary shape as we strive to understand the cycles of the eternal. As a modern man, I think of the eternal Tao as an infinite binary tree or as an infinite fractal. But even this understanding misses the point! Is the universe a layered nexus of cycles? Or is that how our human perception witnesses it? We are more than likely unaware of our own limitations…
I think this is what the first two sentences of chapter 1 are saying, we always have limiting factors as we experience and try to understand the universe. The limiting factors are inherent within us. We observe the universe only as we as human beings are capable of.
Figure 1
“Non-Existence” I call the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
“Existence” I call the mother of all individual beings.
The next two sentences we see non-existence and existence, this is the first Yin-Yang pair of the Tao Te Jing. This is a description of the Wuji - Taiji - Yin/Yang pattern in Taoist theory (Figure 1). The idea of this 3-way relationship is a template of how we understand the origins of anything. In this first chapter we are referring to the Eternal Tao and the Void as the first Yin/Yang pair. A relationship between everything and nothing. In physical science this would be the moment just before the big bang. In the Judeo/Christian understanding we see it as the precursor to the first sentence of the book of Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This could be read as from nothing comes heaven and earth, a Yin-Yang pair, where “God created” could be the forming of tai-ji at the moment of creation, a pattern of void to form. The second sentence shows us more of the absence of Wu-ji, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”. With the statement the earth was formless we can deduce this as a Yin-Yang pair with the formless and the formed, same with empty and full. Further on in the Tao Te Jing it talks about Yin-Yang pairs creating each other. The last part of this sentence “and the spirit of God was hovering over the water.” To me this is Yin-Yang pair as well. I understand water symbolically as the unknown, in the shimmering reflections we are unsure of what lies below. The Yin-Yang pair is the waters of the unknown and the spirit of God hovering is the known, the known contrasted with the unknown.
Figure 2
Therefore, does the direction towards non-existence lead to the sight of the miraculous essence, the direction towards existence to the sight of spatial limitations.
In the next section we see that it matters which way we’re looking, this changes our perception. If we’re looking towards non-existence we see the miraculous essence of wu-ji. If we look towards existence we see the endlessness of spatial limitations. This statement has broad implications on how we understand anything in the world. In the essay Human Metaphors I talk about a Taoist understanding of who we are as human beings, within that essay there are ideas of the spirt and mind as a yin/yang pair, the spirit and mind shapes our perceptions. If the mind is definitive then the spirit is relative… If the shape of the mind is the shape of the Tao, our mind separates our perception. The mind sees the world as an array of spatial limitations heading towards a future filled with infinite possibilities. If the mind is half of the Yin-Yang pair, then the other half is the spirit. With the spirit we understand ourselves as part of the whole, we become a living breathing extension of the natural world. This is where the idea originates “The mind separates, and the spirit connects.”. The direction we’re facing within this pattern effects the outcome of our experiences (Figure 2):
If we wrap our lives and ideas around our perceptions and understandings of ourselves within the natural world, this leads to intelligence. This is the way of the Spirit.
If we wrap our lives and ideas around abstractions, rules, or dogma, this leads to delusion. This is the way of the Mind.
For me this is the understanding that has shaped my world view. Its vastness gives a foundation to every aspect of our human existence from science to religion, to political ideology: conservatism to liberalism, and every other binary pair we create in the modern world.
Both are one in origin and different only in name.
For example if we look at the Us and Them dichotomy. The “Us” is a connection to where we are and how we see ourselves, but there is a split when the mind creates the “Them”. Our mind separates the groups by some criteria into a Yin-Yang pair: Rich/Poor, Male/Female, some group/any other group… What is the view from a perspective of the spirit? I like the idea of grouping all of humanity under the heading Human Being. This is what connects all of us, we are all human beings. This is what we are before we become anything, everything we will ever do is an extension of us as Human Beings. You can see this in the native view, the Athabascan word we call ourselves is “Dena” which means people or the people. Where we see our selves as the people or human beings, when being compared to the Elk beings or Deer beings. If we take away another layer of separation we can group Human, elk, and deer beings all under the heading living beings.
In it’s unity it is called the secret.
Here the secret is referring to the state of Wu-Ji, the secret is that everything is a part of the unity of the entirety that we are a part of, that is brimming with unlimited potential. If we look at our relationship with the pattern our mind as we wander through our lives, we see a series of decisions connecting our past to our future. Each decision reduces our overall potential as we limit and constrict our lives. In the eternity of time our lives are a blip, an instantaneous lightning bolt of decisions, a flash in the immensity of the endless, infinite cycles that we are surrounded and engulfed by.
The secret’s still deeper secret is the gateway through which all miracles occur.
If the secret is the idea of Wu-ji, what is the still deeper secret? More Wu-ji! There are layers of Yin-Yang pairs that obscure and hide the origin from our day to day lives but it’s presence is there in all things. The deeper secret is the root of our creativity. The origin of everything flows from this spot. Every inspiration for every poem, novel, film comes from this deeper secret. The first time I remember seeing it I was working second shift and the commuting 10 miles by bicycle at night. I would be thinking about something and these ideas would start to pop in my head. It was like a stream and I could grab an interesting idea and examine it as it flowed by. I’d think “I’ll write that down when I get home” but I’d get home and wouldn’t remember it. I started carrying a small notebook and pen to write down the ideas, but by the time I get off my bike and opened the notebook, they were gone. It was in the drifting of the dreaming mind where I found the creativity. The creativity was spontaneous forms flowing from my unformed mind. I realized I had to hold onto some root essence of the thought to bring it from the wu-ji flow into the world. Now while I’m walking I can stop and write a paragraph or so to examine and capture the interesting aspects of these thoughts, for me this took years to figure out.
In the essay Shao Yang and Chronic Illness I talk about the auto-immune disease I had. The gateway through which all miracles occur had to do with removing the emotional stagnations from my body. The idea was I had pathogenic patterns in my body. Through a process I removed those patterns, returning my body to a relative state of wu-ji where my body was healthy. The removing of these patterns was a move towards wu-ji the gateway to all miracles.
I think the way of the spirit is when we peer towards the state of wu-ji. Searching for a glimpse into our origin. Where we become aware of the patterns of our mind and its effects on our lives and the world. When we will begin to see ourselves and the world as part of a unified whole. Only then will we see ourselves in reality, where we understand ourselves as nameless beings on a nameless planet, wandering through the universe in a continual state of wonder…