Chapter of the Week: #34

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I’ve said this before, and I must say it again. Using more word can easily obfuscate the issue at hand. This is especially true with existential matters. Understanding what is being said hinges on what one already knows at the gut level. In other words, existential matters cannot really be taught. This is not unlike that, ‘you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink’.

For example, I usually understand what the Tao Te Ching says when reading it in the terse original Chinese. Not that I’m fluent in Chinese – far, far from it. Rather, I figure that I have a gut level ‘taoist’ worldview formed through an innate (genetic) ‘taoist’ disposition, life experience, and the adoption of ways to cognitively model all this from various written scriptural resources (e.g., Yoga, Buddha, Tao, Christ). However, perhaps the most effective resource for me was Correlations. These may come closest to being a word based ‘teaching that uses no words‘.

Overall, I find that the fewer words used to portray a core existential view, the few words there are to obstruct that view. Oddly then, translating the original into what must be a more wordy English version (to make grammatical sense) is the hardest part of what I’m doing here. Why bother? Perhaps I’m just poking around in the void to see what comes out, or rather, to see how I interpret what seems to come out.

The moral here: how you interpret what you see (or read) is the weakest link in existential learning. This is because your understanding is purely a reflection of what you already know. Thus, truth is not to be found ‘out there’, but rather ‘in here’. It is not important what the ’sage’ says, rather, it is how you interpret it that matters. Thus, you can exterminate the sage, discard the wise, and the people will benefit a hundredfold. The only true authority is one’s own self honesty:

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows.

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