Peeking Through the Covers

Seeing what isn't there

I think of the Tao Te Ching as a manual(*) that attempts to help us peek through biology’s covers, revealing what and why as best it can through words. It often acknowledges the difficulty of this, e.g., “My words are very easy to understand… yet no one in the world can understand…”. One problem is that we are both inside and outside the covers (like Schrödinger’s cat ?). Words, being the linear beast they are, can’t convey the big picture view easily, if at all. Nuts! Yet I struggle on to convey what I see. (Perhaps it is the challenge lures me?)

Essentially, things are just not what they seem… or so it seems. We see this view wonderfully stated in chapter two: The whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly; the whole world recognizes the good as the good, yet this is only the bad.

For example, take the current ideal of ‘joy in the moment’. Ironically, there is less joy in the moment, the more in the moment you are. This is just another way of saying, life is all about contrast. Whatever seems to be ‘there’, is often (if not always) a reflection of what is ‘not there’. In this case, the moment has both joy and its compliment, sorrow (again, like Schrödinger’s cat). This makes ‘truthful’ expression in words virtually impossible. Any comment on ‘what is’ emphasizes ‘is-ness’ at the expense of ‘isn’t-ness’. Simply put, something and nothing produce each other… simultaneously no less. Little wonder we have the admonition, one who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know.

Another example: Why do those who have everything seem to want more? The more wealth people have, the more they tend to spend it on raising their standard of living. Beans to caviar, Fords to Rolls Royce, houses to mansions, and so on. From a symptom’s point of view, the inescapable fact is that the simple and mundane ‘cheap’ things never did bring contentment. Thus, we spend what we can afford to upgrade our things in the hope that better and more will bring contentment. It doesn’t in any lasting sense, and so our quest continues. Riches never bring contentment. It is just the other way around: He who knows contentment is rich. ‘Having’ (no matter what it is) is an external object oriented experience. Contentment is an internal subjective experience. The former, the ‘getting and having’, promises contentment, and so we chase after whatever we value. Ironically, only ‘giving up and letting go’ brings contentment. Yet even then, we can only feel this in the moment of giving, moment-to-moment.

It is the lack of contentment that sows the seeds of desire. From a symptom’s point of view, this lack of contentment is the true troublemaker. Thus admonitions to not desire, or rid ourselves of desire, or even to desire not to desire are a wishful but impossible fantasy. The advice to ‘just relax and be happy’ is even more far fetched. Like “just say no”, such advice ignores underlying causes and thus fails. That said, I still find ‘desires not to desire’ a helpful sentiment, even though I know it can’t work.

Why can’t a struggle against desire work? Most obvious is the fact that desire is the mover of life. Need (and its cousin desire) pushes living things to get out there and take what they need to live and be content. You could say discontentment is built into life’s genome to push it to live. The promise of contentment (illusionary though it is), allows hope to spring eternal. We feel that if we just get, avoid, accomplish, win, succeed, etc., this or that, we will finally be happy. Nature is awesome, eh? The fundamental process of Natures portrayed in chapter 2 is another way to see this. To paraphrase:

Taking and giving produce each other,
Need and contentment complement each other,
Desire and happiness off-set each other,
Wrong and right harmonize with each other,
Competition and cooperation follow each other.

Fight we must, but knowing and accepting that war (whatever the enemy) never succeeds can take the edge off life. We make life much more difficult through our expectations of what it should be. As the Bhagavad Gita puts it: “Prepare for war with peace in thy soul. Be in peace in pleasure and pain, in gain and in loss, in victory or in the loss of a battle. In this peace there is no sin.”

(*) As ancient as it is, this manual is still utterly relevant to contemporary times. On this site, I suppose I am attempting to help put it in context with these times, as best I can.