How The Big Picture *Actually* Helps Us Make Peace With Life

Deep down, everyone is looking for the fountain of youth.

Or, said another way, everyone is looking for a way to make death less scary.

Whether you’re

taking care of your health to ensure that you age gracefully,

hoping your name will live on by meaningfully contributing to your professional field, community, or family,

or cultivating faith in reincarnation or an eternal reward in heaven for a life well lived

We are all, in our own way, taking steps to minimize the negating power of death. If our bodies must die, let it not happen any sooner or more ungracefully than necessary. Let us be survived by successful and happy children. Most of all, let us do something with our lives that makes them worth the time, the toil, and their ultimate brevity.

If you have not yet awoken to this concern, trust me, you will: from antiquity to today, it runs through our culture at every level.

Is there a solution to this age-old problem?

Yes and no.

As I’ve stated in other blogs, wisdom and peace of mind have less to do with making problems go away and more to do with rising above them through understanding.

To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “the solution to the problem of life appears as the vanishing of the problem” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.521).

The world doesn’t necessarily change, but your attitude about it can. You can look at the same world and no longer see a problem.

The sorts of changes that bring about significant positive improvements, then, are not circumstantial, but perspectival.

My intent for this and similar articles is to facilitate perspectival change,

And I do so by presenting teaser trailers, so to speak, for what life might look like if seen through wiser eyes.

This is how I changed my own perspective and thereby my own life: I read, reread, and eventually memorized (yes, really) an English translation of the Tao Te Ching, or “The Book Of The Way,” written by Lao Tzu some twenty five hundred years ago in ancient China.

Today, I’d like to share my thoughts on the fifty second of its eighty one chapters, which is the one and only chapter where we are told precisely, if obliquely, how the fear of death is to be overcome.

I’ll reproduce the entire chapter, and then go through it one idea at a time, so we might make a small but irrevocable step in the direction of wisdom, and away from avoidable suffering.

Chapter Fifty Two

The beginning of the universe
Is the mother of all things.
Knowing the mother, one also knows the sons.
Knowing the sons, yet remaining in touch with the mother,
Brings freedom from the fear of death.

Keep your mouth shut,
Guard the senses,
And life is ever full.
Open your mouth,
Always be busy,
And life is beyond hope.

Seeing the small is insight;
Yielding to force is strength.
Using the outer light, return to insight,
And in this way be saved from harm.
This is learning constancy.

You may have noticed one of the strangest lines in all literature;

“Knowing the sons, yet remaining in touch with the mother/brings freedom from the fear of death.”

No, talking about serious or deep topics does not mean we are forbidden from acknowledging that we are perplexed, or that we find something opaque, unclear, or even ridiculous.

A serious conversation demands that we be open, and say what we really think: that is the beginning of seriousness, because it cannot be a performance. And I am thus demanded to say that when I first read that line, I found it utterly absurd. I granted it some hidden, deeper meaning, on principle, but decided it was something I was going to have to come back to. It simply made no sense, sounded silly, and did not inspire serious reflection.

Not at first.

Let’s walk through it together slowly, and I think you’ll come to see what I see now: the tip of a sort of iceberg; a mere thread that unravels an enormous knot if tugged at tenaciously.

The beginning of the universe
Is the mother of all things

This seems straightforward enough. He is simply defining terms: the ultimate beginning is here called “the mother.”

Knowing the mother, one also knows the sons.

If the mother is the beginning of the universe, then who are sons? The universe, by necessity. He frames it as an obvious consequence: knowing the mother, one also knows the sons. Of course! In older, traditional societies, you didn’t know someone in isolation. You knew them as part of a lineage: if you knew a mother, you knew her children.

The familiar thing, the thing that should be taken for granted, is used to make sense of the esoteric thing:

If you know the world, and of course you do, then you know the source, the beginning of all things, far better than you realize.

The meaning of this will soon become clear after we put the last piece in place:

Knowing the sons, yet remaining in touch with the mother,
Brings freedom from the fear of death.

In light of the minimal decoding we’ve already done, we might rephrase this as

“Knowing both the present and the past removes the fear of the future.”

If this is true, why is it true?

Because the past is just a present moment that has already happened, and the future is a present that is yet to happen: besides their temporal arrangement, there is no difference between any of them, just like an old woman, a girl, and an infant daughter may all be the same person on different days.

What was it like in the very beginning? Just like this, but longer ago. What will it be like a long time from now? Again, just like this. Our lives are being lived now, but we didn’t exist in the past and will not exist in the future: the future in which we will be absent is no more dreadful than our absence in the past.

If this is still too abstract to resolve real feelings of existential anxiety, and I say that it is, then think back to a time in the past that you know you experienced, and yet no longer remember. Some random point in your childhood, like the daily events of your eleventh year.

They took place, you witnessed, experienced, and participated in them, and they presumably felt as real then as this moment does now, and yet it is lost from memory. Lost from memory, and yet a link in the chain of moments that led you here: your childhood self is the mother to your present day self, you might say.

When the final days come, then, they will seem as natural in their temporal context as today’s events do now: unique and special in some ways, perhaps, but unremarkable and banal in other, larger ways. Whatever is happening now is at the end of a long series of cause and effect relationships that are neither unknown nor mysterious, even if major details have been forgotten: it is actually all quite ordinary. As ordinary as the fact that you were once eleven must seem to you now.

Surely, then, you can bring yourself to admit that the thought of yourself a decade from now isn’t that hard to imagine. You were once eleven, and then twenty one, and then thirty one, yet forty one is unimaginable? Sixty one some terrifying specter? Hardly. Whatever you are doing now must eventually become as distant, as undeserving of recall, as whatever you were doing during your eleventh year,

And this should feel relieving.

We arrive at the deeper meaning, at least in my mind, of this passage:

The mother is the level of the general, and the sons are the level of detail.

What is the justification for this interpretation?

The beginning of the universe is surely something none of us has experienced, but the present moment is the only thing that anyone has experienced.

In exactly the same way, nobody has experienced anything in general terms. Only the specific can become an experience. And, yet, a sense of the general emerges after enough encounters with specifics. Knowing the sons, one also knows the mother.

Is there such a thing as the specific in logic? Absolutely not. All logic is general, by definition. So, while nobody has ever, by definition, experienced the general, or experienced logic as such, logic nonetheless works. Generalities do explain, because what is wisdom if not the generalized explanation that makes the particular bearable, while still being too vague to replace detailed behavioral prescriptions in the present, toward the particular?

This, then, is the real, or rather a further meaning of the couplet

Knowing the mother, yet remaining in touch with the sons
Brings freedom from the fear of death.

It means that we have to operate at the level of the particular: life is to be lived, and it is a hands-on activity. The details matter. The timing matters. They will always matter, and nothing supersedes them. And yet, the inferred sense of life that we are here calling the generalized, is like a kind of divine cosmic mother that gives birth to and eventually receives all the tumultuous activity at the level of the specific.

The big picture, the conceptual frameworks, the insights into life contained in literature, poetry, art, theater, music, the lessons of history, and, most importantly, our own memory: these come to the aid of the person wholly immersed in the present. They are not an escape from, or an alternative to life in the here and now, but they both enrich its myopia with their vastness and blunt its conjoined urgency and futility with their evidence of undying continuity.

The fear of being brought to nothing, coming to naught, and living in vain, is something of which we can be readily and repeatedly disabused by simply reaching out to the stratum of the generalized, where both the remembered past and the inferred future live: the past and future both live with us in the present at the level of the general, and thus the inevitable demise at the level of the particular seems less consequential, and, on days of rare exaltation, even illusory.

Keep your mouth shut,
Guard the senses,
And life is ever full.
Open your mouth,
Always be busy,
And life is beyond hope.

The meaning of these six lines, in isolation, is fairly straightforward and does not demand elaboration, except to say that a life of restraint, of observation and reflection, is an easier life to live than one of hot pursuit.

Be still, and both perceive and receive life’s fullness: it pours into you when your movements cease. One need not change drastically, but merely notice the reliable correspondence between the slowing of activity on the one hand and the deepening of experience on the other.

To connect it to what has gone before, then, I might add that the proper relationship between the specific and the general is what tempers the addictive craving for novel stimulus in the present. To generalize is to strip a thing of its novelty, and the wise use this strategically.

I can tell you that I’ve talked myself into many a good thing and out of many a bad thing by doing precisely this: extrapolating into the unseen future by applying generalized reasoning and logic when the specifics available in the moment were insufficient.

My last point leads us perfectly to the concluding passage:

Seeing the small is insight;
Yielding to force is strength.
Using the outer light, return to insight,
And in this way be saved from harm.
This is learning constancy.

The “outer light” is objective reality, the specific phenomenon happening now. Returning to insight, and being thereby “saved from harm” means returning to reflect on the repository of collected experience, or the general.

Using the language of the first stanza, we might say that, rather than fight with the sons, discuss the matter with the mother, “and in this way be saved from harm.”

Again, a modeling of the correct relationship between activity in the present and action informed by the generalized sense garnered from experience and reflection. The truisms, the patterns, the wisdom, the principles that exist only at the level of abstraction nonetheless steer us clear of danger as we navigate the particular.

When he says, in closing, that this is learning constancy, he means just what he says: that if we both participate in and observe life properly, we should only become steadier with time. We should expect to accumulate enough of the general to become ever more unphased by the particular, the culmination of which is to be unphased even by the termination of all particulars.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon

-Jas