Look, it cannot be seen – it is beyond form.
Listen, it cannot be heard – it is beyond sound.
Grasp, it cannot be held – it is intangible.
These three are indefinable;
Therefore they are joined in one.
From above it is not bright;
From below it is not dark:
An unbroken thread beyond description.
It returns to nothingness.
The form of the formless,
The image of the imageless,
It is called indefinable and beyond imagination.
Stand before it and there is no beginning.
Follow it and there is no end.
Stay with the ancient Tao,
Move with the present.
Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of Tao.
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 14, Translated by Gia-Fu Feng, 1972
In my opinion, some moment of solemn reflection is owed after the ingestion of this chapter.
Of all the 81 installments that comprise the Tao Te Ching, this is the most entirely mystical, even more than the first chapter. It dwells entirely on the ineffable. Indefinable. Beyond imagination. Without beginning or end. It can neither be seen, heard, nor grasped. Neither light nor dark. Beyond description. One might reasonably wonder what I am hoping to accomplish by speaking on the chapter whose subject matter can only be hinted at by a series of intentionally vague and baffling aphorisms. And yet, we do have plenty to discuss. If anything, I hope not only to illuminate the chapter but to create a kind of model by which you might approach some equally perplexing task or topic in your own life.
Since the chapter is filled with negations (cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be grasped, and so on), I would like to add a series of negations of my own. What is it that is not said in this chapter? He does not exactly say that it is the Tao. Many chapters contain the construction “the Tao is,” but not this one. It’s also worth noting that he never says it is within you. He doesn’t say it is your soul, or consciousness, or awareness, or enlightenment. He also never says it is out there somewhere. You can never get entirely in front of it, and you can never come to the end of it and therefore into a space beyond and without it. So you cannot go seeking it, either at a temple or a pilgrimage site, for example. He does not say that it is God, nor does he position it as the origin of lesser gods. He doesn’t say that it came from somewhere (from God, for example). He doesn’t say that it wants to achieve some goal, or that it wants something from you. He also doesn’t describe some process by which you can, say, bring yourself into alignment with it.
These absences are worth dwelling upon, because the tendency of many readers will be to look for something to latch onto, and many will treat the Tao Te Ching like scripture. The word of God, or of a prophet: the eulogizing of a power beyond your ken, to which you can do nothing but submit and make an appeal for mercy. So, we should be clear that nothing of the kind is happening here.
So far I have presented a chapter filled with negations and introduced another series of negations by omission. What is it, then?
As is so often the case, the last couple lines contain the language which decodes the preceding lines and finally makes it clear that the rest of the chapter was priming us to receive the concluding idea, which itself retroactively explains what came before.
Stay with the ancient Tao.
Move with the present.
Let us be very simple and look at this simply. Staying with the ancient Tao is the way to move with the present. Maybe these two instructions are a single instruction presented as a pair, because there is no way to say it once and be understood. There is obviously some link between what is ancient and what is current.
Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of Tao.
Well, now we are really getting somewhere. Knowing the ancient beginning is how you move with the present. The essence of Tao is shared by both the ancient beginning and the present.
This feels considerably more definite than the previous lines, which only define by way of negation. But to call these last three lines clear and concrete is also a bit desperate, isn’t it? This is the explanation we were promised? Incomprehensible aphorisms about the present and the ancient beginning?
The very beginning and the present both share something. They are linked. By grasping one, you now have a bridge by which to reach the other. You cannot go to the “ancient beginning,” and you have no surviving artifacts from it. It is also impossible to define— when exactly was this beginning? And what was it that began? Time? Space? Matter? Human civilization? Raising the questions should expose the futility of doing so. It seems obvious to me now that the ancient beginning is a symbolic idea. Hold something in your mind that is represented, symbolically, as the ancient beginning, and you will find your way back to the present moment, will be able to move with it, and will be in contact with the essence of Tao. So, the key, then, is to infer the correct meaning of ancient beginning. We have two words to decode, and even something provisional, sensible in context, will be sufficient: this is an achievable task.
What do the words “ancient beginning” bring to mind? Simply, a time before. The beginning is, by definition, a point before anything has accumulated. Nothing came before the beginning. That is what “beginning” means. And to know this virginal primordial state of newness is the essence of Tao. To know it is to move with the present.
We can now further clarify the meaning of the chapter. Move with the present is also, clearly, a winning survival strategy. To be alert, to recognize what is happening around you, and to act in accordance with the exact and specific reality of now, without impediment—this is a condition of peak fitness. How could any accounting of survival or success, how could any description of aliveness or vitality fail to mention or incorporate it? To lose the focus, energy, and agility to move with the present is to lose your edge. To fall behind. To be overtaken by a successor, to fall into irrelevance and obscurity. Every activity depends on this active dynamism. Move with the present is good advice for a jaguar, a jazz musician, a woman caring for her children, a man engaged in a sword fight, a couple trying not to grow apart over time, and a corporation trying to contend with fierce competition and a changing marketplace of both consumer demands and its own hiring pool. Moving with the present is our only chance for survival.
So what does the link to the ancient beginning tell us about how to move with the present? That we do so by managing the accumulation of buildup. You call a plumber because of the gunk that builds up and the materials that wear down. Your joints can become painful and stiff because of calcium crystal deposits. Your bowel can become blocked by a buildup of stool you have not passed. Couples get divorced or stop having sex because of a buildup of unresolved disagreements and unmet and unmodified expectations. Entire families stop speaking to each other because of the backlog of serious conversations that never happened, or were shut down whenever someone tried to have them, until there is so much buildup that a simple good morning or happy birthday or Merry Christmas is simply impossible. What can cause a heart attack? A blood clot that blocks blood flow to the heart after accumulated arterial plaque ruptures.
You might say this is starting to sound more like conventional self-help and less like a commentary on a mystical revelation. I agree. It’s true that every line of the Tao is polyvalent. The Tao is not for the mystics alone. It must be for you and me, too. It must be with us every day and in all things, great and small, grand and banal. But, as you surely object, isn’t it also and primarily a mystical experience? Yes, absolutely. And do I have any business posing as the translator of mystical experience into practical steps? Absolutely not. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent – Wittgenstein).
But, of course, we cannot return to any point in the past in a literal sense. This isn’t merely semantics: these words temper its meaning as a symbol. If I tell you to do the impossible, then one of two words was not meant to be interpreted strictly: either it is not truly impossible, or we do not truly do it. One, or the other. If the impossible thing is truly impossible, then something worthwhile happens when you try. There is some perfectly possible thing that can only be achieved by trying to do something truly impossible. Now, isn’t that something!
When you attempt to see the invisible, hear the inaudible, grasp the intangible, and follow the endless, you move appreciably in the direction of an unreachable goal. And because it was always unreachable, and obviously so, you never attempted it before. Therefore, the real purpose of the undertaking is not the achievement of the goal, but the discovery of a hitherto unknown faculty within yourself, which is suddenly brought to your awareness as you attempt the impossible goal. And what is this faculty? Ironically, you discover it by attempting, for the first time, to disengage it: the ability to form, grasp, and employ constructs. Concepts. Mental maps of the world. The storehouse of recognized patterns. These constructs build up as you learn to navigate your life, to move through the world. You come to see yourself, your life, and other people, in a certain way. You have some part of your mind that holds onto these. And, let it be said, this is what you ought to do. You ought to remember that a red light means stop, that the siren of an ambulance or firetruck or police car means get out of the way. You ought to remember that sharp or glowing hot things can hurt you, and so on. But think of the mechanism of grasping. Think of a hand clenched into a fist, holding something tightly. Think of the prolonged contraction compressing blood vessels and restricting blood flow. Think of the uncomfortable tension setting in, and the eventual cessation of the many ways in which the hand can move and be articulated. All from refusing to let go, and eventually forgetting how to do so.
Thinking of the marvelous mechanism of the hand, the injunction to “let go” should be much clearer: it is not an indictment of the sorts of things you have been holding onto, but an invitation to reclaim the use of your hands! Similarly, the joy of running is not the joy of running away from one place and toward another. The movement itself is the reward. In the process of running we undergo a kind of change. We revitalize ourselves. The joy of having hands is a bit more prosaic, but think of all the things you pick up, put to use, and set down again when cooking a meal. When assembling furniture. The challenge implied by the words stay with the ancient Tao is to learn to unclench your mind. Or, if you like the running analogy better, for your mind to get up off of its butt and move. The idea is the same: you’ve been stuck in the same place for a long time and you’ve forgotten what the full use of your faculties feels like. Little by little, your experience of life is more and more mediated by concepts, and further and further away from direct experience.
To stay with the analogy of the hand, it is not about the utility of any particular thing your mind might pick up, but rather that you picked it up and have been holding it ever since. How many moments are there in a day? In a week? In a decade? Your mind should be picking things up, trying them out, putting them to use, learning their limitations, and setting them down again, over and over, all the time. Making new ones, discarding old ones. Rediscovering things you haven’t used in ages, and perhaps remembering you set them down for good reason, or perhaps finding completely new uses for them, or the ability to use them correctly for the first time. The real value in all this is the fitness of the mind itself. Just as you have to be able to ascend a long flight of stairs without being winded, the mind has to be able to recognize the need for a specific kind of idea and to utilize it until it is no longer needed, and then to promptly discard it. You don’t continue to raise your knees up so high once the last stair has been ascended, but instantly “go back to normal.” If you notice you feel out of breath or your heart is pounding, hopefully you make a note of this and remember to walk more, to take the stairs more, or maybe to sleep better and eat better: the difficulty in using a normal aspect of your own body is a signal to put your faculties of movement to use more frequently, not to hide from stairs! Your mind is no different. Try picking up a new idea. You struggle first to open up the mind and let the old mental construct fall from its grasp. You then marvel at the momentary feeling of there being nothing there to use, and then you endure the embarrassment of attempting to use some unfamiliar way of thinking and responding for the first time. This is the messiness of moving with the present. But the point is not to be clumsy and amateurish! The point is to become capable of recognizing both the proper and improper use of the familiar tools, limiting their use accordingly, and creating and acquiring new ones. Imagine yourself standing before the unformed world at “the ancient beginning,” free from convention, habit, or mechanical automaticity: the only question would be, “what do I need in order to do what must be done?” You would soon become adept in the process of setting down, picking up, creating, revising, and retiring ideas. Stay with the ancient Tao. Move with the present.
To return to the initial spirit of negation that animates chapter 14, let me say more about what is not being said, either by the text or by me. This is not meant to inspire you to reject your identity, traditions, culture, or the basic constructs your society is built upon. The message is not nihilistic, or politically radical, or positioned against anything in particular. You are not being asked to turn your life upside down, to try to remove all conditioning and live as if time and all mental abstractions simply don’t exist. A flexible form is not trending in the direction of formlessness: you must be held together by something if you are to move at all. To use myself as an example, I don’t feel the need to radically change my life in order to honor the spirit of this chapter. What I do feel when I read it is a kind of testing of my mind: am I capable of feeling awe and reverence? Wonder? Can I look up at something immense and limitless and feel both small and supported at the same time? Can I feel this subtle essence pervading both the world around me and my very person? When I pose these questions to myself, or simply try to feel something when I read the chapter, it usually feels like struggling to get up at the sound of an early alarm clock. I’m able to respond in the way it asks me to, but not with the alacrity I would like to see. It comes too slowly. This tells me I have a cluttered heart. The wide-eyed little child within me is somewhere in a crowd of smarmy adults and struggles to make his way to me when he is summoned. I notice this and think to myself, I must find a way to clear the room a bit. An empty room is bleak, sad, and paralyzing, but a crammed and stuffy room is paralyzing too. I want something that feels more imaginative, responsive, brisk, and cheerful. You have to think through this for yourself, and all I can do is model what that looks like for me. To demonstrate rigorous earnestness.
By thinking of the ancient beginning, you turn back time, in a sense, by imagining yourself with less of the accumulation of buildup. Simply by reminding yourself of innocence, and contemplating it assiduously, you climb back up the slippery downward slope of corruption. By remembering how you felt when you were younger, you start to remember what you used to do that you’ve stopped doing. You retrace your way back to the activities and the attitudes of a younger person, and you can become more active, agile, and adventurous. Remember how you treated the man or woman in your life when you first fell in love, and see that beginning not as something irrevocably lost, but as “an ever-fixed mark, that looks upon tempests and is not shaken,” and you will recover some of it. And any of it whatsoever will be the most precious thing in the world to you.
