It lies in the nature of the Grand Virtue
To follow the Tao and the Tao alone.
Now what is the Tao?
It is something elusive and evasive.
Evasive and elusive!
And yet It contains within Itself a Form.
Elusive and evasive!
And yet It contains within Itself a Substance.
Shadowy and dim!
And yet It contains within Itself a Core of Vitality.
The Core of Vitality is very real,
It contains within Itself an unfailing Sincerity.
Throughout the ages Its name has been preserved
In order to recall the Beginning of all things.
How do I know the ways of all things at the Beginning?
By what is within me.
The Grand Virtue is the transcendent Good that can only be
known once we have shed all our local, one-sided opinions about what is best
for us. The Tao Te Ching isn’t therefore amoral; it rather takes the position
that good and bad cannot be understood intellectually; must therefore be
expressed spontaneously according to the unique needs of the moment. The Taoist sage will appear highly
inconsistent to anyone who believes that the moral life can be learnt, codified
and then taught.
To abide by the Grand Virtue is therefore more akin to art
than science. It is not any behaviour in
particular, but rather the attitude of one who understands how to subdue
one-sided intellectual judgements. To
live this way is to live spontaneously, and this is the way of the Tao.
Now what is the Tao?
It is something elusive and evasive.
Evasive and elusive!
Evasive and elusive because the moment we define it , we
have missed it. Like water, the Tao
slips through the conceptual fingers that seek to hold it.
The Tao is the highest possible category. Whatever we could name, point at, sense, is
an impermanent phenomenon. Phenomena
vanish in the moment we perceive them – they exist for nothing more than the
briefest flash of time. The Tao is that
stable place which notices all this occur.
The Tao itself is an emptiness, a total void. We cannot see it, hear it
and we cannot even think it. A thought
is just another phenomenon which is the Tao’s momentary manifestation.
And yet It contains within Itself a Form.
Elusive and evasive!
At any given moment the Tao is taking on a form: it is
always one or other of the myriad things that are in the universe. But when it is that one thing, it is no other than that one thing. All else is gone. The moment is the universe itself! And with
our spiritual selves we can feel the depth of this moment deeper and deeper
until that single object is a thing of great immensity.
We can be observing the simplest, smallest of objects, and
yet it is sufficient for us to perceive in it the whole depth of the
cosmos! Just to stare at our hand can
give us an immense sense of meaning and beauty. We understand intuitively that
there is no actual limit to what might be known through this hand. We just feel immensely grateful that we can
see the hand is this incredibly profound light.
And yet It contains within Itself a Substance.
Shadowy and dim!
Even in everyday life it is difficult to communicate our
sense of the substance of things. We can
only imagine for ourselves how differently we respond to something real,
like our house, and something that appears only in our thoughts, like a
fairytale castle. There is a belief and
a conviction and a trust in that which we believe to have substance.
When we have become adept at concentrating on reality
itself, all things, whether thoughts or perceptions, take on an equal
significance. A thought of a desert
cactus becomes as real (and therefore as unreal) as the sight of the tree in
our garden. The feeling of substance
does not die away, but rather becomes a feature of every possible moment. When everything becomes unreal, everything
becomes real…and therefore everything we feel to be equally substantial.
Thought and action, we now see, are one and the same
thing. There is no such thing as
activity and passivity: all moments of our life are of the same nature and are
part of the flow of reality. When the
sage describes the substance of the Tao to be ‘shadowy and dim’ he is pointing
out that substance no longer has the glaring obviousness about it as it does
when we see through the world through everyday eyes.
And yet It contains within Itself a Core of Vitality.
The Core of Vitality is very real,
This is a reference to the basic feeling of aliveness, of being, that cannot be explained but which
stays with us throughout. This feeling
is something we all know. We imagine
that it has something to do with being a living, as opposed to a dead human
being. But the truth is that this
feeling is the absolutely essential state of the universe. It transcends living and death. Indeed, spiritual realisation is the
realisation that the feeling of living has nothing to do with being alive.
The feeling of being can therefore be felt in ourselves; and
it can be perceived not just in people and animals but in every plant, rock,
sound, light and smell in the universe.
It can never be escaped. To
imagine that the corpse is bereft of being is nothing other than a
superstition. The corpse partakes of
your own freshness and vitality – the two cannot be separated, except as an act
of the superstitious imagination.
It contains within Itself an unfailing Sincerity.
Throughout the ages Its name has been preserved
In order to recall the Beginning of all things.
It has been preserved because it is here right now! The temporally minded will imagine that the
awareness of the Tao has been transmitted through the ages through an unbroken
teaching lineage. The spiritually minded
will know that its presence Now, is its presence at every moment since the
beginning of time. After all, limitless
time is nothing other than an idea in the Now.
If it is Now, it quite literally cannot ever not have been.
How do I know the ways of all things at the Beginning?
By what is within me.
What we find within is that which transcends all time. When we know this, we know all things. Time is nothing other than a metaphor, a
teaching aid. By knowing what is within
me now, I can teach you about the beginning.
When you have understood what was there at the beginning I no longer
need to talk about such nonsensical things!
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