The heavy is the cause of the light.
The still is the ruler of the restless.
Because of this, the noble man throughout the day never abandons seriousness.
Even if he flourishes, watches, enjoys and dwells detached.
How wasteful to be in charge, yet take life lightly.
Light follows the loss of the cause.
Restless follows the loss of the ruler.
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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:
I can’t help but feel an emotional yearning for the ‘good’ over the ‘bad’. Peace on earth and good will to man is a comforting ideal to entertain, if not cling to for dear life. This chapter reminds us there is no ‘one’ without the ‘other’ — heavy vs. light, still vs. restless. Of course, it doesn’t end there. Our thinking mind is trapped in a virtual world of ostensible opposites. We spend our waking and dreaming lives waging a kind of war in this cognitive duality. Believing this duality is reality only exacerbates the struggle. Fortunately, there is a natural order and process that when honestly embraced can establish a truce in this war.
The heavy is the cause of the light.
The still is the ruler of the restless.
It helps to ponder other opposites as well. Take chapter 40…
Tools of Taoist Thought: Correlations can deepen the sense of this process by neutralizing the inherent word bias though which we view life. Having correlates to wealth’ and gain; death correlates to poverty and loss. By stringing these basic words together as a correlation statement, we can gain a deeper and universal insight into the natural process. For example, ‘wealth divides as it gains’; ‘poverty unites as it loses’. The former is the yang side of the process; the later is the yin side of the process. Civilization is certainly yang — a manifestation of the wealth divides as it gains side of the cycle. The resulting imbalance is palpable even if we lack awareness of this cycle per se. We, like the building imbalance of magma beneath a volcano, or the building pressure of tectonic plates, only experience the imbalance but are unaware of the overall process driving destiny.
Our biology innately biases us to see death and nothing as the ‘bad’ side of reality’s coin. We do all we can to favor ‘having’ and ‘living’, and avoid ‘losing’ and ‘dying’… and there-in begins our troubles. Being thus biologically biased in one direction is only truly balanced and healthful in the wild. In the wild, nature constantly pulls us back to the natural median with a balancing dose of ‘losing’ and ‘dying’, i.e., the metaphorical equivalent of hardship and insecurity. Nature in the wild continually thwarts ‘more is better’ survival instincts driving life.
Civilization’s fundamental objective has always been to optimize ‘having’ and ‘living’, i.e., the metaphorical equivalent of comfort and security. Nonetheless, hunter-gatherer instincts underlie and drive our civilized lives. Civilization can’t eradicate instinct; it can only redirect its now unbalanced expression in atavistic ways. Given this, is it any surprise there is much imbalance along with a growing list of negative side effects? Simply put, our instincts evolved for survival in the wild, not in civilization’s rapacious drive to maximize human comfort and security. The disconnecting, unbalancing results we experience are the price nature charges us. (See The Tradeoff.)
Because of this, the noble man throughout the day never abandons seriousness.
This line and the observations of chapter 40 above help put the brakes on ideals run amuck. Indeed, ‘peace on earth’ is only possible if there is also ‘war on earth’… metaphorically if not in reality. This is a very hard pill to swallow when every instinct says that having, living, flourishing, and enjoying must be our priority. Only with an always-present serious sense of the primordial value of nothing, death, stillness, and heavy can I see beyond my own projected self-interest… Nearly rising beyond oneself as chapters 52 (see below) and 16 put it.
We innately want to avoid the heavy, serious, and all-to-sober side of life. We want our pleasure, carefree and happy. That is fixed in instinct and natural in the wild, but in civilization, we find ourselves at a loss. The ‘meaning of life’ is not so viscerally felt for us as it was for our distant hunter-gatherer ancestors. We sense a wasteful life and scurry about rushing to fill it with meaningful ‘havings’ and ‘doings’.
How wasteful to be in charge, yet take life lightly.
Light follows the loss of the cause.
Restless follows the loss of the ruler.
Life in the wild was the ruler we have lost to varying degrees. Civilization removes much of the deep survival causes driving life in the wild (hunt and gather circumstances), and so our lives are too light, and without core meaning.
How are we to feel core life meaning without returning to the old ways — hunting and gathering? First, realize the solutions to our life’s problems have not panned out as we had hoped… year after year, solution after solution. Next, it helps to look in another direction than the direction we’ve always been headed. As chapter 40 said, “In the opposite direction, of the way moves.” Chapter 52 lays it out well.
Chapter 52, along with most of the Tao Te Ching, shows us a way to feel meaning (see the ‘Meaning of Life’) without returning to our ancestral ways. The difficulty lies in the fact that nature isn’t forcing us by dint of circumstance to live meaningful and balanced lives. The bad news: We must draw upon our free will to do so — ha, ha, ha! The good news: We have some degree of what I call ‘pseudo-free will’. It ain’t perfect, but at least it is something. (See A case for ‘pseudo-free will’ in Free Will: Fact or Wishful Thinking?
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