The outside world passes for the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
Still and silent, it alone does not change,
Goes round yet does not harm.
It can serve as the mother of all under heaven and earth.
We don’t know its name.
Powerful, of words we call it the way.
Striving, of reputation we call it great.
Great we call death, death we call distant, distant we call reversal.
Hence, the way is great, heaven is great, earth is great, and man is also great;
In the center there exists four ‘greats’, and people reside as one.
People follow earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows the way,
And the way follows that which is natural and free from affectation.
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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
Archive: Characters and past commentary
Corrections?
None this time
Reflections:
The outside world passes for the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
Still and silent, it alone does not change,
Goes round yet does not harm.
It can serve as the mother of all under heaven and earth.
When I read the outside world today, I thought to myself, the outside world doesn’t feel still and silent. Fire sirens, birds chirping, wind blowing… Not still and silent. Then I returned to reconsider… passes for the beginning of Heaven and Earth. Of course, the outside world itself isn’t still and silent, what it passes for is! The metaphor of a bowl fits here. A bowl is like the beginning of Heaven and Earth; the contents of the bowl are matters of the outside world. All the changing, the waxing and waning, the ebb and flow of the outside world exist in the still and silent bowl.
This also matches what I define as consciousness. Consciousness is like a bowl in which exist the changing objects of awareness. Consciousness is universal, non-local, eternal… However, living life invites our attachment to the changing objects of our awareness which makes it very difficult to perceive the subtle ‘magic’ behind the outside world’s curtain. (For more on consciousness, see Is Rock Conscious?, Seat of Consciousness, Thinking clouds consciousness, What Shapes How You Think?, Placebo Effect, to name a few forays I’ve made into the subject. To continue blowing your mind, check out Quantum nonlocality too.)
And this brings me to the idea of immortality… You are Immortal! Well, at least that bowl of consciousness is. The light shines; the object illuminated by the light are all that dies when ‘you’ die.
And this brings me to Great we call death, death we call distant, distant we call reversal. As life forms, we instinctively favor life, and all things that support it. We, and all other living things, can’t help our innate bias toward what we like. The reason we like ‘it’ is because ‘it’ doesn’t harm us; ‘it’ benefits us.
So, you may wonder, how is it that Heaven and Earth Goes round yet does not harm.? The lion eats its prey, a volcano eruptes, a tornado wreaks havoc — all these involve harm to something. Harm is a concept that arises out of our innate attraction to that which benefits our life, and our innate aversion to that which endangers our life. This is a natural self-serving survival bias that swirls around inside the bowl; the beginning of Heaven and Earth. Still and silent, it alone does not change, Goes round yet does not harm. Simply put, harm and benefit are both projections driven by self-preservation instincts. It is a Bio-Hoodwink, plain and simple.
Great we call death, death we call distant, distant we call reversal. The pro-life bias in all living things is a natural and necessary bias. It is a core part of Mother Nature’s life design. However, that same bias makes seeing the universe as it actually exist extremely difficult. Now, that is certainly not a problem for all creatures living in the wild. For humans, this is more problematic, especially in our hierarchical social systems that skew and exacerbate our innate biases. Chapter 40 attempts to push back on that bias, and set nature’s record straight.
People follow earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows the way,
And the way follows that which is natural and free from affectation.
This is one of my favorite passages. Viewing this as a natural hierarchy helps alleviate the divisive perspectives that wear us all down in time. Essentially, everything — everything — is born of nature. There are no exceptions. Of course, our innate bias creates the exceptions we see, i.e., child abuse isn’t natural. Alas, this along with all other ‘unnatural matters’ we experience are mostly the result of civilization’s hierarchical structure. We evolved to be hunter-gatherers, not isolated cogs in a social hierarchy. The ills of civilization we experience are merely symptoms of humanity’s extremely successful attempt to maximize its own comfort and security at the expense of natural balance. (See The Tradeoff.)
To be sure, this outcome is no one’s fault! Humanity never knew what it was doing, and still doesn’t. Nor do any other creatures. Life didn’t evolve to know the ‘truth’ of any situation; life evolved to know the ‘truth’ that serves its own short-term survival best. Only in the wild does that short-term response tend to bring long-term benefit. By taking matters into our own hands, short-term responses easily deliver the opposite of what we wish for long-term. Chapter 16 sums it up.
We didn’t evolve to “know the constant”, to “allow”, or to be “impartial”. Life is innately biased toward its own survival. Thus, how can one “rise beyond oneself”? We can’t! That is why chapter 16 states, “nearly rising beyond oneself”. Still, any movement in that direction brings us peace, and closer to perceiving… Still and silent, it alone does not change, Goes round yet does not harm.
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