Nature everlasting.
Heaven and earth can long endure,
Because they do not give themselves life,
Hence they can long continue to exist.
The wise person places his life last yet life comes first,
Is outside his life, yet lives life.
Non conforming so as to void personal evil!
Hence he is able to succeed personally.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Word for Word
Limits: Translations, even the nearly literal one above, lose some of the original meaning due to the cultural context of contemporary words. Studying the numerous synonym-like meanings of the Chinese characters in the Word-for-Word translation mitigates this. (Click graphic at right for on-line Word-for-Word.)
Third Pass: Chapter of the Month
Chinese character translation and commentary archive
Corrections?
None this time
Reflections:
Nature everlasting.
Heaven and earth can long endure,
Because they do not give themselves life,
Hence they can long continue to exist.
To the extent I do not give myself life, I am able to see my personal likes and dislikes as a bio-hoodwink, and not as true or real as it feels. In the end, don’t all issues of life essentially come down to one’s personal preferences — likes & loves vs. dislikes & hates? We are just unable to take ultimate responsibility for ‘the buck stops here’ truth of life. Being the intelligent species we are, we devise rationalizations that allow us to blame someone or something for life not always serving up what we like. Chapter 18 puts it bluntly, When intelligence increases, there exists great falseness.
The wise person places his life last yet life comes first, parallels Christ’s, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it”, Matthew 16:25. The more we hold on, the more fearful of actual or imagined loss we feel. Then again, perhaps I’ve put the cart before the horse. From a symptom’s point of view, the reason we hold on arises from a visceral apprehension of the void, emptiness, nothingness… or more fearsome yet, entropy. When we feel unsafe, we naturally seek the safety that holding onto something offers, even if there is no real or immanent threat.
Is outside his life, yet lives life. Any true and immanent threat warrants a response from animal and human alike. That is simply living life! That’s not the case for imagined threats. When I am certain that I know, any imagined threats easily feel utterly true and real. This places me inside my life. This ‘disease’ just causes me unnecessary sorrow. As good old chapter 71 hints, Realizing I don’t’ know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease.
To counteract this, I hold in my mind ‘a Taoist story’, so to speak, that helps puts me in sync with nature’s ebb and flow, pain and pleasure, gain and loss. This story doesn’t offer salvation from the ebbing side of life, the pain, and loss. However, it does offer me salvation from being overrun by my imagination or by any story that touts impossible and unnatural promises of salvation from the side of life I don’t like.
More specifically, knowing the connection between that which troubles me most and the all-pervasive hierarchical dynamics of civilization brings me significant closure, as they say. In effect, that helps me place my life last. I suppose it is the therapy of just knowing why, what, and how things are the way they are… Why it is what it is. That helps me be outside my life, yet live life.
I now always suspect ‘the civilization process’ to be responsible for whatever troubles me at any given moment! That initial suspicion stimulates me to seek the connections (cause and effect details) that supports or refute my suspicion. I appreciate that there is an ongoing conflict between humanity’s innate egalitarian nature vis-à-vis the all-pervasive hierarchical dynamics of civilization. All I need do is fill in enough details to resolve each personally troubling situation. Finding those details, those connections, helps confirm for me emotionally the reality of ‘it is what it is’.
All that is necessary I feel, is to appreciate the overall outline of how we ended up here, The Tradeoff humanity made, yet keep to the present and apply that ‘appreciation’ to the troublesome issue at hand, at any given moment. Keeping one eye on the ‘big picture’ and one eye on the solid ground of the moment-to-moment, helps avoid being buried alive in the moment-to-moment.
Non conforming so as to void personal evil!
Hence he is able to succeed personally.
It is all too easy to like this and hate that. Recognizing this feeling as a personal love vs. hate bias helps neutralize it. Not conforming to this bias is a way to [a]void personal evil. Succeed personally happens when I own failure as an integral part of success. As success feels like failure (and vice versa), and personal feels universal (and vice versa) my mind’s eye knows chapter 56’s, This is called profound sameness. The only thing standing in the way are my personal biases — good riddance!
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