Going Someplace Else With The Tao

“You can’t get there from here;
you’ve got to go someplace else first.” 

That’s what my father-in-law used to say about places you could see from a road but couldn’t find any roads leading TO. The locals always know the right path, but the sojourner has to hunt around a bit or stop and ask directions before he or she can figure out how in the heck you get from here to there. (And if you’ve ever been caught in the labyrinthine streets of the small medieval city of Toledo, Spain, where the streets twist and curve back in upon themselves, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

So what happens when you get to the next street, and the next and the next, and you’re still not there? Well, then you might just be in search of the Tao.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1

What we hear right off the bat is that if you can talk about it, then it’s not the real thing. Why? Because the real thing is beyond words; words are just too puny, too limiting, to hold it. It’s like that place you can’t get to: if you get there, then you are in one spot, and that spot may be great, fantastic, terrific, like no where else – but it’s just one spot in a big, wide universe. So if you’re in that one spot, you know it can’t be the All. And the Tao, it’s the All, the Way. So if you want to know it, you have to keep going someplace else first, metaphorically speaking, because you can never capture it, you can only move with it.

We humans, we like to capture things, to tie them down in nice neat packages, but “capture” and “tie down” are exactly what you cannot do with the Tao. It is the way of harmony in the universe, and harmony both includes everything (no need to capture) and is constantly in motion (cannot be tied down). Think of something that is iridescent: can you capture its color? As soon as you define one of the colors, you have defined yourself right out of all of the others – and the whole changing interplay – that makes it iridescent in the first place. The best thing you can do is let your eyes play along with the movement of colors, understanding all the while that this movement itself is the source of beauty and harmony. Just like the Tao.

More on this next time.

Quotation from Tao Te Ching, trans. Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.

Photo by Ute Esser, found at http://www.astronet.ru/db/xware/msg/1194022