Back again after a bit of refreshing wandering in the autumn mountains and woods with Lenore. Wandering in the elusive, indistinct, recondite Tao. Wandering around in the very real essence of life, the image, the form, accepting the mystery which faith supports and reconciles us all to.

In nature we perceive our natural organism in its natural place and in its proper relationship with creation. Nature covers this chapter better than my words ever could. I suggest getting out there whenever possible. There one can realize the origin of all things. You can feel it.

Back at the desk now, and the word well has filled up again. When I left here, Louis remarked in his last comment here that he hoped when I returned I would share my view with those of us still wondering if there is a path. He said, “I’m not sure there is anywhere to go, so looking for a path seems superfluous.”

I took his comment with me, considering it, and I can share this:

Sometimes I, too, still wonder if there is a path. Sometimes I too am not sure there is anywhere to go but here and now. Yet most certainly I am alive. I have a life. I am always here and now in it, and yet it moves and flows and changes constantly.

The path, then, is our own life, unique and yet completely and wholly common in the Tao, its source and destination.

And there is a way on that path. I believe the “way” we first seek and then refine on our journey involves learning how to keep the symbiotic, essential link between our mind and our essence functioning.

The mind has a simple job, really. It is to inform us if our actions are in accord with our nature, our essence. So long as it remains connected to what we are, to our essence, it functions properly and in its humble place. It informs us if our actions in creation are in accord with our nature, because it has something to compare our actions to.

When the link between mind and essence is broken, mind consults only with itself. In that separation hubris is born, and with it all the antithetical actions humans engage in which are contrary to their nature.

So the way on the path is to learn how to remind the mind that it has to remain connected to the essence which birthed it, or it’s useless.

And sometimes I wistfully wish I could say, like Forrest Gump, “And that’s all I have to say about that.” But I have been beating words out of my particular gong for a long time, and have no reason to believe I will stop anytime soon.

It’s good to be here.

_____

The Path of your Life

Have you remembered your palace, have you seen samsara?
What is your odyssey? What is your story?
Where did you walk in the dark wood, fall in the pit,
meet the crone and angel and devil and god?
How did you return, how did you come home,
to Penelope and Ithaca,
to the cross, the gods, to God?

You will spin like leaves in a chaos of wind churning above the root.

When business and busyness satisfy,
the people happily busy themselves with seeking and grabbing
only what they see.

They become tourists seeking to be thrilled and sated.
They reach for bright, swirling, illusory leaves in an exciting, rootless kingdom.

I do not chase the leaves, I do not desire them.
I behold the leaves like a newborn who has not yet been taught
the way to see the illusory leaves.
I don’t have to chase anything or go anywhere.
I seem to be lazy.

The people have gathered piles of leaves
and desire to possess more than enough.
It seems I have fallen behind.

I do not understand the value of the leaves.
My mind cannot grasp or retain this idea.
I remain a fool about leaves.

People see bright light in the piles of their leaves.
By their lights I am dark and dim and leafless.

People of the world are sharp and alert and vigilant.
They guard their own leaves and plunder the piles of others,
their engagements are full of strife,
and noisy.
Most people have a purpose.

I, alone,
withdrawn and quiet,
drifting like the ocean,
blowing free like a breeze with no place to go,
playful and unrefined,
I am different from most people.

Form neither contains or sustains me.

I am.

This is it for me for awhile, but I will comment in the usual vein before coming to that. It all ties in together, as does everything.

Here in Chapter 20 the sage observes that people, caught up in the mutual hallucination of what they see together, tend to see things from that viewpoint and behold very little of what is true and real. They see, and don’t know.

When they don’t know, people leap manically about, gathering leaves above the unknown root, unaware that the four seasons have cycled through eons and epochs, unaware that the serious and sophisticated enterprise of busyness is nothing more than a distraction dreamed up in the momentary darkness of a blink.

When we know, we become fools at seeing. We no longer understand or grasp or retain the gradient of values created in the mutual hallucination of temporal and mundane existence.

At some time we have all had the desire to see things as they are, rather than what they become when individuals and groups and cultures and societies and religions interpret them from their relative perspectives.

The desire passes and we return to the perspective seen locally. After all, we are immersed in it. We are born into it, raised in it, taught it. We learn to embrace it and incorporate that perspective into our thinking and our actions.

We learn to learn certain things in certain ways; we learn to see things with those ways; we move along defined paths into certain actions and devotions and thoughts; our knowledge of what is good and what is not good is defined and is automatically rewarded or punished by the sophisticated constructs which have been created by local perspective.

The desire to know things as they are returns because the relative perspective of local interpretation sooner or later proves to be dissatisfying.

We become uncomfortable in the skin we have been given, and worse – we discover we have become uncomfortable in our own skin. The first does not fit. The second is not affirmed or validated by what we have learned. So a choice appears. Unlearn, and then learn what is real and true and of substance and become comfortable in who and what you are, really, or  – wear the skin you’ve been provided with.

Good luck.

 ___

I’m going to take a break for awhile from my commentary on the Tao Te Ching. There is a benefit in words, a benefit in quietude.

For me there has always been a season of words followed by a season of quiet, and I seem to be approaching that passage. The reflective moments of autumn often mark this passage, and here it is again. Lenore and I live in the mountains, close to the rhythms of the seasons. They are powerful, and we move with them.

I will be quiet for awhile. I have the idea in my head that I want to go out into the woods and sing the song of my life without words. It’s a song which only belongs in the ear of the universe. I want to sing of Lenore. I want to sing of the wu-wei thunderbolt that welded us together and forged one true human being in a miraculous moment. I want that one true human being to sing about the fires walked through and survived, the losses and lostness, the gains and what was found. I want to sing joys and sorrows and let their tears stream down my face and leave me as still and empty as when I first came to be in this life.

I want, as the sage says in Chapter 20, to withdraw and be quiet, and drift like the ocean, and be free like a breeze with no place to go. I want to play there, be natural there. I want to be different from most people. I do not want the forms of the people to contain or sustain me. I want to be filled with my source and know that I Am.

It’s not an approach, it’s a return, and it’s calling me. It’s called before. It’s always called me. I have a record of its call in my archives in a piece written many, many years ago in a time when I was lost, and seeking:

             Old bones rattled in his gut, old scars ached in his heart. In the woods autumn gnats and miniscule milkweed tufts carved energetic treble-clefs above the forest floor, floated errant and aimless down a trailing breeze. The seasons had circled. Death littered the forest floor, thin light and weak breezes mixed listlessly upon the hillside. Once again he had become the time-shocked sleepwalker shuffling through rattling leaves in a crumpled-russet fall.

             Music hung in the edge of his consciousness, unwinding out of him into the high heaven, faint and faraway. Skying electric guitar, cosmic and ancient. An autumnal chorale of fatal, fading Lorelei called to him from just beyond the edges of pale sunshine and chill nights. It was time to go. Time to chase those crying voices sinking down the horizon.

             The prospect of open ground and fierce movement rose with taut wings in the space between his gut and heart, filled him with memories of old celebrations of fire and blood and freedom. He felt the hot exultation of speed waiting for him out on the unbroken, endless blacktop. It would carry him to austere reigns of stern, snow-burned mountain ranges and the dry, vast mystery of the high desert plateau beyond. There he would seek again a contemplative calm and a timeless, certain perspective of where he had been, where he was, where he was going.

The year before I met Lenore I wrote the following vignette, and it seems appropriate to share it here now. It reflects the sentiments of Chapter 20 well, where the sage talks about the ways of “the people”.

Its epilogue is the song I will sing in the woods as the one true human being embodied in Bob and Lenore, we two who are gathered together as one.

 Running On Empty

The days passed one after the other, each the same as the one before. He would leave the mountains and go into town and wander the streets looking into other eyes with his silent question, wondering how deep the soul might be buried in this one, or in what manner it might be chained to a weight within the heart.

Once in awhile their eyes threw a certain light and he would study that person and wonder; how alive are you, what is your weight and how have you borne it?

In town they moved dully, they moved manically, always under the brunt of a nameless attack, always on the verge of a final capitulation. In his own time he had resisted and been defeated, had fallen sullenly and then attempted to take their ways as his own, had savagely sacrificed himself in pursuit of a place among them.

Always the desperate days of enforced busyness had ended and he went back to his own way, a way apart, back into a nameless, unknown seeking for a place he had rarely seen, a place where shadows faded in the burgeoning light of each successive passage.

Now the aching harmonies that sounded in him were those of endless blacktop, a melodic mystery unfolding, unwinding in a high heaven far above him, a yearning for another beside him, an adoring heart, a deeply grown-in lover. These things were not in the streets of town.

They rang in the pale tenors of a high midnight moon over lonely hillsides, in the empty vastness of desert canyon lands and the flat floors of endless highways in the empty spaces between the western cities.

A shared love, a shared adoration, two who were one, each selfless and happily sacrificed to each, running down the road together in a cloud of brimming music.

That was the dream, and the emptiness.

________

And now it is the reality, and the fullness. Off I go, to sing.

So. Ruling and being directed is always an interesting subject. There is something in us which rules and directs us, something outside us which rules and directs us.

A  person could think the sage has lost his mind here. Or at least his way. The rich, esoteric depths of the Primal Origin and a focus on unity and oneness lulls us into an introspective calm, and now suddenly we have dualism, rulers and people, and love and fear and hate and commands and curses.

As Louis W. noted in his observations of Chapter 3 of the Tao Te Ching “for centuries much of the Tao Te Ching was viewed as sage advice for the ruler…” There is a mind-boggling amount of scholarly material about the roots and branches of this work as it has come down through the centuries, it is still branching, and now it is viewed as sage advice for anyone.

The longevity of the Tao Te Ching is owed to its simplicity and depth. It speaks to the basis of human being in ways that transcend cultural context. It lends itself easily to personal interpretation. It was written in a single language with particular, now lost and unknown, denotative and connotative words, in a specific age, in a local context. Yet even now, two and a half millennia after it was written, it offers a clean, bare-bones matrix of understanding which we can flesh out with the words and thoughts and awareness of our own individual experience.

It would be easy to think this chapter deals with rulers. It does, of course. Yet there’s a deeper context here, a perspective taken from a wider view. To our modern sensibility this chapter could be a particularly brutal reflection if we take a look at what we allow to rule us.

What rules us, what directs us, and how do we feel about it? How many of us have the courage and honesty to even consider such things? In our existential experience, waking to the truth of these matters might feel as though the sage has taken a butcher’s cleaver and chopped through the meat and bone of our lives.

There are some tough questions here. Are we willing to ask them?

What Rules Us?

What if we discover what rules us? What if the gnawing subliminal core of us about what we have submitted ourselves to were to suddenly see the light of day? Haven’t we already chosen to avoid such honesty out of fear that the truth will not set us free, but bludgeon us into numb despair with the recognition of our own unmindful acquiescence to things we do not love? What happens if we discover that we have chosen to be ruled by things which  we fear and revile and have no faith in as this chapter observes? How would we feel if we woke up and realized that we have chosen to be unmindful of our choice to be ruled by those things?

I marvel at the delusional gymnastics of the existential rational mind. It devotes itself most often to rationale-ist comprehension and its most beneficial use often goes begging for small bits of time in quiet corners not often available to it. It is no more concerned with reconciliation of its nature to the universe at large than a suet ball. There are times when I despair at the seemingly endless capacity of the human mind to deny and deflect the reality of our common and communal human being.

Clarity is not common. I encounter people who only use their minds and see only in darkness. They see darkness everywhere, and deny the light which cannot be seen and yet can be clearly and simply known. There are times when, if I did not remember what I know, I could easily believe that the blindness, insensitivity, and ignorance of humanity was endemic and incorrigible.

In the next chapter, chapter 18 of the Tao Te Ching, the sage speaks of the “intelligence of the body” and remarks upon the effects engendered when it declines. The intelligence of the body reminds us that corporeal, materialistic existence is transient, brief, and microcosmic. In the light of the body’s intelligence we can see acceptance and peace and a sense of community and friendship with all who share this transient existence.

When that knowledge, that intelligence, declines – fear appears in the mind, and our separation from one another is accomplished. The manifestations of this fear are then created and become real to us in our existential experience.

We become susceptible to the fear-sourced definitions and mandates of our culture, our society, the purely mechanical and materialistic universe we choose to perceive. We become desperate, held tightly in what we feel to be the inescapable clutches of a destiny we resist and fear. We devote our minds and bodies to the lost cause of materialistic survival in a vast universe.

And so we become deluded kings and pharaohs, dragging worldly knowledge and accumulations of goods and accounts of our virtue into our tombs in the belief that such things matter and will secure our existential survival in comfort eternally.

And worse than any of these is the life dedicated to these pursuits which has emerged triumphant in its existential achievements and, in its dedication to small things, has become small itself. In addition to creature comfort it has achieved smugness and fluidly practices a fluent and unconscious moral sloth

Here’s what I know for sure. Selfishness, not mammon, is the ruler which sources all evils. It sources greed and gluttony and envy and lust and wrath and sloth and pride. It sources fear, and fear is the existential denier of the divine self, the destroyer of our conscious awareness of who and what we are, really.

Taking personal responsibility for bad choices and making good choices instead is often just more than a person cares to bear, no matter if the eventual result is clarity and freedom and new life. The pain we fear in the discovery of our own fault holds us back from ever finding peace or being truly awake. And perhaps we might find ourselves less comfortable and curried than our present circumstances afford us, no small matter to the existential requirements of our egocentric predicament as spiritual beings in a seemingly separate material body.

In 1950, David Reisman wrote a landmark book, The Lonely Crowd. The Wikipedia entries about Reisman and his work includes the following:

“(It was) …a sociological study of modern conformity, which postulates the existence of the “inner-directed” and “other-directed” personalities. Riesman argues that the character of …American society impels individuals to “other-directedness”, …where individuals seek their neighbors’ approval and fear being outcast from their community. This lifestyle has a coercive effect, which compels people to abandon “inner-direction” of their lives, and induces them to take on the goals, ideology, likes, and dislikes of their community.”

And this:

“…people who were inner-directed… discovered the potential within themselves to live and act not according to established norms, but based on what they discovered using their own inner gyroscope.”

We can choose to not be ruled by that which inspires curses and hatred and fear, to not be ruled by things we have no faith in. We can choose to be ruled by what we love and praise and the unseeable thing we know but are at a loss for words to express. The best of all rulers is the divine unknowable essence of all, known but not seen by mind, present in all.