Where Limitations Stop

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We begin with the Tao, the eternal, the Way, which cannot be told. And then we begin to try to tell it, right? Or at least to tell something. Why? Because “the name that can be named is not the eternal name,” but we really, really need to name things.

Remember in the last post how I talked about how naming = capturing and tying down? Well, you can’t do that with the Tao itself, but you have to do it to plant a tree or build a house or develop an identity. The writer of the Tao Te Ching, traditionally known as Lao Tzu, understood this:

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

http://tiltonfenwick.com/2012/09/paint-is-boring/

So the nameless, the Tao itself, gives rise to the basis of creation – and then the stuff comes creeping in. “Ten thousand things” means “all the stuff in the world” – rocks, trees, squeegees, wall clocks, incredible bouncing balls, etc. Now, there are lots of “things” we don’t need, surely, but there are some things of which I’m awfully fond – cooking implements and substances used to create shelter jump right to the top of that list. No “things”, it seems, no life. We need the named, and the ten thousand things to which it gives rise (at least some of the them).

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Where we get tripped up is when we start thinking that either

1)   the ten thousand things is the totality of the Tao and there is nothing more than this materiality that we can see,

OR

2)   the ten thousand things has nothing to do with the Tao and being in harmony with the Way means being out of harmony with all the stuff that’s around you (especially the stuff you don’t like, be that water pollution, urban sprawl, the gun lobby, the anti-gun lobby, your neighbor mowing his lawn at 6 am on Saturday morning, whatever).

So if the Tao isn’t comprised of the ten thousand things, and getting in harmony isn’t about getting all rarified and separated from the ten thousand things, then just exactly how are we supposed to understand the relationship between this great Way and all the cluttery little stuff that we find around us? Turns out, it just depends on how we ask the question:

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.

Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.

So when we are able to be at play with the moving colors of the iridescence rather than trying to pin them down, in harmony with what is, flowing without desire from one moment to the next, then we are aware of something more like the Way in and of itself. At other times, when we want to find the paci so the baby will stop crying, or buy a new car to replace the heap in the driveway, or get that promotion that we really deserve, then we are looking at the ten thousand things. But – and here’s the fun part – they aren’t really different:

These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

                                               this appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery.

The Tao and the ten thousand things, the harmony and the craziness – it’s all the same. It just depends on which way you are looking.

We want to trace a logic line through all of this, but Lao Tzu tells us that when we try to do that we are missing the point. The “darkness” he talks about is that place where the logical mind can’t draw lines, where words fail to capture the essence anymore. It’s the place where limitations – like the limitations between harmony and craziness, things and not things – stop. It is darkness, it is mystery, it is Tao. And it’s all good.

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