Lao Tsu

  “As you are about to leave the world behind, could you write a book for my sake?—Words of the Keeper at the Frontier Gate to the departing Lao Tzu, who was despairing of conditions in his native state of Chou. 

  As I prepare to temporarily leave the world of North America behind and travel to China I’ve been boning up on my Chinese history lately. Will I return? We’ll just have to see!

  Anyway, with that in mind I figure I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching another go beforehand. 

  There is a mystifying simplicity to the Tao Te Ching that have baffled and beguiled us Westerners for centuries since it was first translated. Recommended reading? Hardly. But there are moments of shimmering limpidity and undeniable poetic beauty that shine through the mish-mash stitched-together compendium nature of the work, supposedly written by ‘Lao Tsu,’ which loosely translates into ‘wise old man.’ 

  Call it what you want, Tao, Way or One, but at heart we are dealing with an ancient unmythic inexpressible grasping of the eternal Flow of Life.

  For centuries now, verging on millennia, we in the West have done a bang up job in complicating and obfuscating just about all matters when it comes to history, the humanities and our collective place in the world, Nature and Life. 

   But as Lao Tzu intones: 

  “The way that can be spoken of

  Is not the constant way;

  The name that can be named

  Is not the constant name.”

  Very Zen that, eh?

  We learn and use language from a young age. It sets us apart and is our supreme competitive advantage over the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms, in fact over all the kingdoms of Life. But it has long been a curse too. For it accords a community—or humanity in general nowadays—a deceptive dominion over Nature that has begun to threaten our very existence. 

  There is a simple reason for this, and it has to do with how our brains function. For the frontal cortex, the most recent part of our brains to evolve by the way, say somewhere loosely around 100,000 years ago, is where our command over language developed. It fires on minute electrical impulses and much like a computer essentially relies on billions of simultaneous ‘on’ or ‘off’ charges. The images, in other words the sums of those billion ‘on’ and ‘off’ impulses are therefore fixed, static. That is, we excel in holding and retaining hard unchanging images or defined words and can then more or less convey those fixed images to others who hold similarly defined images in their brains. 

  The problem is nothing in Nature is fixed or static. Nature is forever dynamically fluid. It Flows! 

  Hence our static thinking and our language leave us out of sync with Nature, and ourselves into the bargain. Simply put, our language is inadequate to the task of comprehending and conveying the reality of the ever-changing Flow of Nature and Life! 

  Lao Tzu, if there ever was such a wizened old sage, put it this way:

  “As soon as there are names

  One ought to know that it is time to stop. 

  Knowing when to stop one can be free from danger.” 

And no one can deny we live in dangerous times.

  The story goes, like many a poetic legendary figure who vanished and left a vague promise to return, that Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching and then disappeared for good into the wildlands across the border. 

  Into a place with no name…