What is the Tao?
The Tao Te Ching, if you’re unfamiliar, is a collection of brief entries attempting to describe what the “Tao” is and how an individual can flow with and experience the “Tao” in everyday life. The author is supposedly the ancient figure, Lao-tzu (there are a variety of spellings attributed to his name), and the story goes that, at a certain point in his later years, he set off beyond the limits of his village to spend the remainder of life in isolation amidst nature. It’s said that the keeper of the gate made a request of Lao-tzu, asking if he would write down a few lessons on how to live well before leaving, and these lessons combined to create the Tao Te Ching.
Whether or not this story is true or if there even is an historical Lao-tzu figure, the words within this collection hold quite a bit of power - a power to point the reader back into themselves to realize something they already know, that you already know, that never needed be written or said, only remembered. The first line of the text even points out the absurdity of trying to put this thing into words: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” If you’d like, you might substitute a variety of words for “Tao,” such as “This” or “Presence” or maybe “God.” I recently came across a quote from Eckhart Tolle that goes, “God is Being itself, not a being.”
Someone asked me the other day, “What is the Soul?” To ask this question is to inherently separate oneself from the “Soul,” the unfortunate byproduct of using dualistic (subject-object) language to talk about something nondual. Below are a few of my own words inspired by the Tao Te Ching (particularly entry #74), and you could substitute any word for those capitalized words wearing quotation marks:
“Here” both exists and does not exist.
”It” is happening and is gone.
”Tao” is running water.
”God” cannot be grasped.
To look for “This,”
Or try to intellectually understand “My Self,”
Is like soap trying to clean soap.
The present moment
that can be described
in words
is not
the present moment.
-
But it’s still fun to try
to put “It” into words.
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