Into The Mystery Podcast, Ep. 21: Tao Te Ching, Verse 39

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Into the Mystery,

Where we are exploring the Tao Te Ching.

In this one,

We're talking about a number of really interesting subjects such as our relationship to technology and the natural environment,

And what it means to live a life that harmonizes with the Tao,

And what that means for our relationship to the world and our relationship to others.

We hope you enjoy it.

Okay,

So today we're talking about verse 39 of the Tao.

Shall I read it?

Yeah,

Please.

In harmony with the Tao,

The sky is clear and spacious.

The earth is solid and full.

All creatures flourish together,

Content with the way they are,

Endlessly repeating themselves,

Endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,

The sky becomes filthy,

The earth becomes depleted,

The equilibrium crumbles,

Creatures become extinct.

The master views the parts with compassion because he understands the whole.

His constant practice is humility.

He doesn't glitter like a jewel,

But lets himself be shaped by the Tao,

As rugged and common as a stone.

I don't know how many times I've heard these verses,

Read them,

Heard them,

And still each time it's sort of like,

Well it's brand new and it's just as beautiful,

If not more,

Than it ever was.

I think over time the words,

Well we just have more of a well of experience and observation and insight to apply the words to.

It's our own richness deepens and it's reflected in our experience.

And then there are certain things that you're working with in your life that just make something within the text stand out fully.

So what stands out for you in this today?

Well the last lines stick out the most.

You know,

You and I have had a couple of conversations recently about what's called the wisdom of the ordinary.

And that's something that's really a prominent theme here and also in a practice like Zen,

Because the personality is set up so much to aim at becoming something special,

Something extravagant,

Something extraordinary.

And this notion that not only that humility is a virtue,

But that it's possible to let life,

Let the Tao shape our life for us,

Right?

And to consider ourselves more a vessel or vehicle for the Tao rather than for our own personal enhancement or aggrandizement.

It's such a simple concept and yet the implications are so far-reaching and profound for what that means.

I think that's a difficulty of modern life really,

That because we're so immersed in media and advertising and others' expectations and because we think that we need to somehow live up to them,

That we torment ourselves with this feeling of never being correct,

Never being enough,

Never being content with what we simply are.

Never really seeing the perfection and the beauty in that and instead thinking that we have to gild the lily all the time,

That we have to add on to ourselves,

Which can mean anything,

Of course,

Whether we're adding wealth or we're adding beauty or trying to stand out from the crowd in some way.

And so we're always distorting ourselves for the benefit of what?

Some feeling of security,

Some feeling of visibility,

And it's wholly unnecessary.

And yet,

You can know that intellectually and then when you try to drop it,

It feels like dropping some essential part of your identity.

It's like,

Who am I if I'm not these things that I've been told I have to be?

You know,

All of these standards,

Especially the ones that I feel like I've lived up to or met in some way,

Like I've made myself somehow special or I'm an important person.

So to be ordinary,

I have to drop that perception and then what do I do?

We live sort of at the crossroads or we live in such a paradox where,

You know,

Maybe I've never heard it better said than Zen master Suzuki Roshi.

He said,

You're perfect as you are and you could use a little improvement.

And we're caught right there in that paradox where it's not enough to just settle and sort of say,

Well,

This is as much as I'm going to grow.

This is as much as I'm going to expand.

I'm done.

And yet,

It's also not fruitful to be constantly aiming at an unrealistic ideal.

And so we're right at this place where our whole life is an act of evolution and at the same time we have to learn to accept ourselves as we are,

Love ourselves as we are,

You know,

Be where we are.

It's such a paradox.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Staying in the moment which is already exactly as it should be.

And you know,

I find this paradox in yoga class,

For example,

When I teach yoga classes is I'm constantly reassuring the class that they don't have to impress me,

You know,

They don't have to be the best yogi in the room,

You don't have to win the class or best the person next to you.

And I think a lot of us,

You know,

Came into yoga with that sort of feeling that,

Oh,

You know,

I have to be just so in class or the teacher is not going to like me or whatever.

All of our insecurities are brought out because they're meant to be by yoga.

Anyway,

So there's that aspect of yoga,

But there is also,

You know,

The aspect of yoga where we are purifying ourselves.

We are trying to bring our bodies into a state where we can live as part of the whole,

Where we can live with divine energy flowing easily through us.

So yeah,

We have a goal and yet we have to be content in the moment and the brain has a really hard time with that.

Well,

You know,

If we visit the last few lines of this verse against the very first line in harmony with the Tao,

Right?

So it's one thing if we try to settle ourselves outside of harmony with the Tao and it's an entirely different thing to settle ourselves within the harmony of the Tao,

Right?

And I think that may be where we get things wrong is that when we hear someone say something like,

Well,

You're enough as you are,

You're good enough.

I mean,

Personally,

When I hear that expression,

I find it depressing because it's like,

No,

We're never complete.

We're never total.

We're always becoming.

But something in being in harmony with the Tao means that we're right there in that paradox of constantly evolving,

Constantly becoming and at the same time perfect as we are.

Let's look at it this way,

Right?

There's a threshold for growth where if we're just comfortable all the time,

We don't grow,

We don't expand,

We don't learn anything.

And if we don't have some degree of order and establishment in ourselves,

Life is too chaotic to even live,

Right?

So there's that fine line and that to me is where the Tao exists,

Is right there on that fine line between perfect as you are and use a little improvement,

Right?

Being outside of the comfort zone,

If you will.

Yeah.

I think that the pivotal idea here is that it's an and situation.

I am evolving and I'm okay in this moment as part of that evolution,

Which doesn't mean I'm perfect,

Doesn't mean I've arrived anywhere.

Which we know,

The way humans are built,

We're driven to keep going forward anyway.

In some ways,

Our bodies are going to move to the next stage of their development and in the same way so are our souls and our minds at the same time.

But being comfortable with that,

Already being as it should be is the difficult part.

And there's this temptation,

Of course,

To think that you can,

Especially if you don't have a spiritual practice,

That you can accumulate the right amount of money or enough goods or you can out-compete your fellow business person or something and come to a place where ha ha,

I'm king of the hill and it's all good.

Except we know,

Of course,

That that doesn't satisfy us.

Right,

Right.

Yeah,

I mean,

If we look at that evolutionary impulse of the human being as being one that takes us toward the Tao,

There's a way.

It's like we're both driven by it,

Moved by it,

Molded by it,

And at the same time,

We're conveyed to its essence,

We're brought to its essence.

That's a really beautiful way to state that.

Anything stand out in this to you?

Anything come into relief?

Yeah.

When I first read it,

The first thing that leapt into my awareness was that movie,

Koyana Scotsy,

Which I saw when it first came out in the theater in the early 1980s.

And the word itself,

Koyana Scotsy,

Is Hopi and it means life out of balance.

Have you seen it?

No,

I don't think so.

You said you hadn't seen it.

So it's a documentary,

I guess,

Or you could call it a movie without a plot.

So it's just a juxtaposition of images of technology in humans interspersed with news reports and things of problems on the planet that are kind of the unintended consequences.

And long time since I've watched it,

I really would like to watch it again.

But as I recall,

The overwhelming impression that we get is that the more we think we're going to find our salvation in technology,

The more we discover that it simply distorts the natural world into unhealthy places and our heart in that world becomes beholden to the technology as opposed to flowing naturally with all that already exists.

So I highly recommend it for people who are looking for something thought provoking to watch.

I'm sure you can find it probably on Netflix or somewhere.

It's really beautiful.

Philip Glass did the music for it.

And we'll have to watch that.

Sounds fascinating.

I think you'd find it interesting.

And anyway,

So that combined with the verse got me to thinking about the ways that we build our technology and our machinery.

And there's a way in which that's,

You know,

Divine creativity as well to see what the human being is capable of inventing,

Accomplishing,

You know,

Different ways that we can envision living on this planet.

But of course,

We tend to do those things a little bit over enthusiastically and without due diligence at times because we're just,

You know,

Like in Jurassic Park,

I think it was.

What's the actor's name?

I forgot.

One of the actors at some point says you were so preoccupied with,

You know,

Figuring out whether you could do this,

That it didn't occur to you to question whether you should.

Oh,

Yeah.

I love that.

That's beautiful.

That's a powerful line.

That's a Daoist line.

So we have all these unintended consequences.

And so now instead of devoting our energy to simply living and loving each other and,

You know,

Exploring our spirituality and expanding our boundaries and just playing our part in the world,

We're now having to fix all of these problems that we created as an outcropping of these technologies that we thought were going to save us effort.

You quoting that movie really strikes me deeply.

And here's why.

Because when you ask a question,

Could you repeat that quote just one more time?

It was Jeff Goldblum now I remember.

So he said you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could create the dinosaurs that it never occurred to you to question whether you should.

Okay,

Right.

Good.

So,

You know,

What really strikes me about that is that for us to ask a question,

And I think this is very much in keeping with how to harmonize with the Dao.

In order to ask a question about what we should do,

It introduces the idea of values and morals.

And our society seems to,

Especially in the West,

Has undergone a radical deconstruction of the moral and value constructs that we live within.

And I think it has a lot to do with why we see things breaking down.

Because I mean,

I think there's generally a very relativist attitude toward morals,

Like the idea that we all make up our own morals and values.

And when we do that,

Our morals and values are different,

Right?

So for a scientist creating dinosaurs,

There may be a different moral value than a person who's affected by what those dinosaurs do,

Right?

And without a common moral and ethical – I was going to say code,

But that's too much – at least a moral and ethical communication and conversation,

We naturally lose the harmony with the Dao.

Because the Dao is written into our life as moral and value-based codes to live by.

I don't know,

I just really was caught by that example and that quote from that movie.

That's a really appropriate piece.

Well,

Just a few days ago,

I almost sent you a link as a matter of fact,

Because I read a story about some scientists who have created monkey-human embryos.

So they're actually monkey embryos,

I think,

That they inserted some human genetic material into.

Here come Planet of the Apes.

Right,

You know?

I know,

That's the first thing I thought of.

And the reported reason to do this,

Or why they think this might be a good thing,

Is because they want to be able to grow organs for organ transplant.

First of all,

If you're going to create any kind of a being to use its organs,

I don't even know where to start on that.

That's totally violated every moral precept that I would live by.

But there was also a quote from one of the scientists who did this.

They interviewed him for the story and he said something like,

Oh,

We're never going to use this to create actual beings that are going to walk around the planet.

And it's like,

Well,

Sure,

You can say that now.

But once that bottle is opened,

Right?

This scientist won't live forever.

Maybe 50 years from now,

Somebody picks up this technology and decides to do something nefarious with it.

And God knows what happens after that.

That is so perfect,

Rishika.

Okay,

So let's go to line two and three for a moment.

Or sorry,

The middle section.

When man interferes with the Tao,

The sky becomes filthy,

The earth becomes depleted,

The equilibrium crumbles,

Creatures become extinct.

That's exactly what you just shared in that story,

Is exactly the problem we face.

It's like,

I don't think people who designed the first automobiles conceived of the pollution that was going to be created 30,

40,

100 years later.

And that's how we get ourselves into trouble.

We take one little deviation from the Tao,

One little deviation from doing what is right and what makes sense.

And then it's another little deviation and then another little deviation.

And pretty soon we're asking ourselves,

How the hell did we get so far away from what works?

And it's just like that,

Right?

It's just with,

We create something,

We say,

Well,

We're not going to use it for that purpose.

And then the next person comes along and they use it for a slightly different purpose and a slightly different purpose after that.

And I don't mean to hold a pessimistic or cynical attitude here,

But this is the kind of thing we have to pay attention to.

So I'm glad you're bringing it to attention here.

Well,

Especially because there are people being born into this technology now who don't know a time when it didn't exist.

So like my kids grew up with the Internet and cell phones and computer games and all of that.

So they don't really have anything to compare it with.

And so I think you've made this point before,

Too,

That there's a sense that this is just how the world is now.

And yet we see that,

I mean,

Just this pandemic shows us that we can't take anything for granted.

Unexpected things do happen.

Calamity is possible,

Not just at a personal level,

But on a global scale.

And it's because,

As you pointed out,

The Dow has been ignored,

Distorted,

Thrown out of balance.

Yeah.

And like you,

I don't want to be pessimistic about it because I think we are building our awareness of that with activism.

But holy cow,

It's a big ship to turn.

And just in conversations like this that you and I get to have and then share with other people,

It's like to some degree where we're learning like,

Oh,

Maybe things are a mess because we've fallen out of a chord with something that is so ancient in us.

Yeah.

That's one thing I really love about spiritual conversations in general is that whenever we can take a fearless look at these things and question our understanding of them or why we're drawn to doing things the way we've been doing them and see if there's an alternative,

I notice a lot of little freedoms that we don't even realize we have.

Just things like,

Okay,

Take childbirth,

For example.

So when I was giving birth to my children,

Natural childbirth was a sort of controversial alternative to the whole hospital setup with the tubes and the drips and the doctors on call and everything.

And in talking to my own obstetrician about it,

He was pretty skeptical of it.

He was all for the technology.

It's the safest thing you can possibly do.

And we want your baby and you to be safe,

Etc.

I chose to forego a bunch of things,

Still gave birth in a hospital.

But I admire the people who are willing to just go for it at home in a natural setting and trust.

And because we have this sort of addiction to control and this fear of trusting the natural world,

Ultimately,

Both of those things are rooted in a fear of death,

Which we all know is coming.

But we seem to think that we can make sure it doesn't come for a long,

Long time and then we don't have to think about it.

Because we have that fear and we've never really confronted it.

We're drawn to anything we see around us,

Any shiny object or technology or strategy that we think is going to keep us safe.

We're such fearful beings that way.

Yep.

Well,

There you are,

You're right on.

You're identifying what it is that brings us out.

One of the things that certainly brings us out of alignment with the Tao,

Which is fear.

Fear.

Right?

It's not a form of escape in the form of security seeking or some other form.

It's fear that moves us to act in ways that are deeply unnatural,

Deeply inhuman.

Because without fear,

The way we respond to life,

The way we move within it,

It's not only natural,

But it … well,

The sky is clear and spacious,

The earth is solid and full and all creatures flourish together.

In fear,

We think we need to improve,

We think we need to compete.

Because fear is also,

In one sense,

It's just a sense of lack and lack makes us act in all sorts of crazy ways.

Yeah,

We think that there are limited resources and that nothing will be there for us if we don't hoard.

There's such a … I mean,

Animals do that too.

I have mixed feelings about the whole hoarding idea.

Animals hoard?

Well,

Sometimes,

Yeah.

Have you ever seen … What animals hoard?

Just squirrels,

Right?

Squirrels.

I've got hummingbird feeders outside my window here and the hummingbirds chase each other off because they want to have the feeder to themselves.

They're very territorial.

Oh,

I see.

You know,

Or they hoard mates,

You know,

And they fight over those things.

So I don't know,

Maybe that's just rooted in our animal past,

Our animal DNA.

Well,

I think,

Yeah.

One thing that I'm kind of struck by in that middle section is the idea that the sky becomes filthy because how long ago was this written?

Oh,

Gosh.

Before cars,

Certainly.

That's a good question.

Oh,

Yeah.

Well,

Long before cars,

That's for sure.

Yes.

Oh,

Well,

I do know that it's worth mentioning that Stephen Mitchell has taken some poetic license and liberties with this text.

So I think in some ways,

I think he captures the essence of the text,

But some of the literal lines are not fully accurate,

As I understand.

Yeah,

I was going to say the sky becomes filthy,

The earth becomes depleted,

So maybe Lao Tzu knew something that we didn't,

Or that other people didn't back then.

That's possible too.

The master views the parts with compassion because he understands the whole.

What comes to mind with the lines you read here is,

It speaks to me so much of the story of Christ,

And specifically in him being crucified and saying,

Forgive them for they know not what they do.

Because when you're being tormented,

Let's say,

There's every impulse to want to attack your perpetrators,

And only when you understand the whole can you meet your perpetrator with love and forgiveness.

That's the larger view that our problems,

Both personally and societally,

They're calling for that larger view,

That wholeness of understanding,

Because without it,

We can't really find a motivation to be compassionate or forgiving or loving or accepting.

And that goes back to our mistaken understanding that we are somehow separate from each other,

From the whole.

If we didn't see ourselves as separate,

There'd be no need to compete,

There'd be no need to have wars,

There'd be no need to accumulate more than one person or group or organization needs.

And I guess maybe I'm kind of a Pollyanna on some level of my being.

No,

That's not the right word.

I suppose in my most idealistic moments,

I have this vision of,

I don't want to use the word utopia,

But of a way of being on this planet in which we all simply greet each other as brothers and sisters and inhabitants of this learning environment that we share without suspicion,

Without feeling like we have to defend,

Without fear.

And I've been in a lot of places in the world where,

You know,

Different,

Different,

And you have too,

You've traveled a lot,

And different societies have different sort of levels of fellowship and common cause.

I think the US is a very individualistic and competitive arena compared to where I am in Mexico,

For example,

Where there seems to be more of a spirit of helping each other out in a lot of ways,

Which I attribute to the relative lack of infrastructure here.

There's always sort of,

Like,

There's nothing,

There's no institution that you can automatically rely on here.

You know,

Roads aren't necessarily very good.

There's not a lot of warning signs.

You can step off curbs and hurt yourself.

So you've got to be careful.

And you have to be available to each other to ensure mutual well-being,

Which,

You know,

The US that kind of doesn't happen so much.

It seems like we're much more on our own.

I don't know.

It's an interesting thing.

I love the juxtaposition of living here because I get to see how those forces play off of each other.

Yeah.

Well,

That to me brings to mind a number of different,

Really interesting meditations on why that is,

Why that exists,

Why that difference is present.

You know,

Like for example,

You mentioned the institutions that will be there to put out a warning sign and,

You know,

Sort of tell you how to act and what to do.

I think one of the reasons we're in the trouble we're in right now in the US is because we're overly reliant upon order in some sense.

And you know,

As well functioning as that makes our systems,

It also creates its own problem.

You know,

You mentioned Utopia and I want to give that some of its worthy due because I think when you start speaking about Utopian ideas or idealistic ideas,

Beyond the shortcomings in our Utopian and idealistic visions,

There's something there that's truthful about it.

And I think it speaks to the presence of the Tao in us,

In the sense that we have a natural sense that things should be better than they are.

Right?

That we should be able to get along,

We should be able to,

Everyone should be able to be taken care of,

We should be healthy,

Our skies should be clear,

Our water should be clean.

We have a natural sense of that.

And you know,

Even for those people who create problems in those arenas,

There's still some kind of basic desire for that Utopian idealistic life.

And I think it's because deep inside of us,

The seed of the Tao lives and it lives in us as that dreaming quality that knows there's a better way to be.

So I love that you brought up that point because I think it's really an important aspect of this.

Yeah.

And I love that you summarized that so succinctly.

I do think there is something in us that longs for that.

And we know it as children for the most part.

You know,

As small children,

We greet each other with great joy.

And you know,

It's like,

So delighted to be on this planet.

We don't know what's going to happen next.

There's no plotting,

There's no planning,

There's no accumulating things.

You know,

Maybe a little spat over a toy now and then,

But children get it.

It hasn't been sort of trained out of them yet.

And then as we learn about the idea of judgment,

That there's some things are considered,

Quote unquote,

Better than others,

And some people are more important than others,

And that there's competition for resources,

And all of that gets kind of buried in this place in us.

And I think we grieve that a little bit.

I think there's part of us that just,

It knows it's there,

But well,

This is the world we live in,

And we're just gonna have to deal with that.

And so we put our armor on,

And we go out and you know,

We fight our battles in business or work or relationships or whatever it happens to be.

And we're sad,

You know,

Some part of us just never gets over that.

I agree.

And it wants to be expressed.

I agree.

Without being ridiculed,

You know.

Yeah.

Well,

When Christ says,

To enter the kingdom of heaven,

You must be as a little child.

It's in keeping with this same idea that the Tao expresses,

Which is we have this original innocence in us.

And unless it's remembered and recalled and further put into action,

Right,

That the prospect of living in that harmony with the Tao,

It remains elusive.

Your point there about the child is an important one,

Because I think we have this idea that to become adult is to become sophisticated and intelligent and lose the naiveness of the child.

But we lose the innocence too,

And with that innocence goes our awareness of the Tao.

Yeah.

But the child,

Like I said,

The child is still there,

And there's a sort of a heartbreak that I think if it's not attended to,

Can make us even more cynical and driven and competitive,

Because you get the sense that like,

Well,

I mean,

We'll even tease each other about this.

If somebody is way too sunny or cheerful or trusting,

We call them naive.

We call them Pollyannas.

We call them,

You know,

Because we don't trust that at all.

We feel that that's a recipe for getting yourself hurt,

For letting the world take advantage of you.

Well,

Sometimes it is.

I mean,

Sometimes a person can be too agreeable and too compassionate for their own good.

Well,

Okay.

But I mean,

There's a bias toward being hard-edged and cynical,

Because that feels safer than to be one of those people who's very trusting.

That's maybe one of the more sinister symptoms of being out of harmony with the Tao is cynicism.

We become cynical.

Yeah.

Maybe let's talk for a moment about,

Or I'd love to just,

I'll put this out to you as a question,

Is what do you hear?

What do you sense when you hear all creatures flourish together?

Being in harmony with the Tao,

All creatures flourish together.

I see a humming ecosystem.

I see,

I experienced this in my own life,

That a need arises and it's usually met in some way without much effort on my part.

That there's a harmony and an intelligence to the way that that happens.

That it becomes more efficient the more I trust it,

The more I offer gratitude toward it.

What was the line again?

All creatures flourish together,

Or harmony with the Tao.

Yeah,

All creatures flourish together.

That the system is self-balancing as long as a creature doesn't try to,

Too strenuously to change itself or to operate or behave in some way that's artificial to its nature.

I mean for me this all comes down to fear of death.

The way that we distort ourselves and the way that we step outside of the Tao or ignore it or pretend we don't need it is rooted in our fear of death.

If we lose that,

If I'm a gazelle and I have no fear of being eaten by the lion,

Then everybody is happy.

If I'm a gazelle and I don't know what would a gazelle do not to get eaten,

I run around with armor on or something if I somehow devised a way to do that,

Then everything changes.

I mean the body changes because there's a greater burden on it.

Our understanding for a lot of people is that this is it.

You get one life and then it's over and therefore there is no philosophical opposition to the idea that I should just accumulate as much as possible or I should do whatever it takes to keep myself comfortable,

To keep myself seemingly safe,

To acquire the mate or the thing or the prestige,

The status that I want.

I mean what's lost?

I'm going to be dead and it'll all be gone.

The moment that you understand that,

Oh no,

This isn't the only time you're going to be here and that you're part of this system and you will regenerate somewhere as something somehow into that same system and that you actually are the system,

I mean from another perspective,

If you see that and you're not afraid of the death part that goes with that,

Then you're happy to live in harmony with it.

You're happy to be simple and simply perform whatever the task is this time around or simply be the way you were built this time around,

Whether that be a master of the business world or a simple garbage collector.

I hate to cite a profession here because I don't want to make it sound like something is better than another,

But you could be simple or you could be complex.

Some people are very intelligent,

Some people are not so intelligent and we can be okay with that understanding that it's just this particular span of our existence,

Of our being.

So if we lose the fear of death,

We can be happy.

But as long as we're trying to accumulate as much as we can before we get to that final end point,

So we can somehow be significant or we can somehow have made our mark on the world and live on after we die,

Then now we're distorting things.

Daishi Gosh,

You raised so many good points in what you just said that I'm a bit overwhelmed with what to do with it because I think it's actually more useful in living life to assume that this is all there is,

That you get one life,

That's it.

You get one chance.

I actually think it's more useful,

But I agree with your point that most people use that in a distorted way because I think if you realize this is one life,

That's all you get,

Make the most of it and you really understand that you want to live your life with as much meaning and love and purpose as you possibly can.

Let people misunderstanding that,

Channel it into what greed and dominance and what have you.

But I think your point there is really an excellent one in that in either case,

We lose our awareness of the bigger picture.

We lose the possibility of understanding the wholeness of things and I think that brings us around to the latter point that you made there,

Which is our ability to appreciate each other's differences and allow each other to flourish in ways that are creative and novel,

Unique,

Precious and having some kind of wholeness that includes the vast variety of differences and understanding in some sense that establishes a sense of equality.

Whether it's the manual laborer or the college professor,

That there's an equal value to each,

But an obvious set of differences that can be appreciated.

Yeah I think you make an excellent correction there because it's the way you approach this one life idea.

You can approach it as a gift,

As I have been dropped here miraculously into this incredible planet and let's,

You know,

What are we going to do here?

And that might mean building technology,

You know,

But from the attitude of someone who wants to honor the Tao,

That wants to live as a creative force in the world as opposed to serving the ego or ending up here and cursing your luck,

You know,

Because the world is so broken and my life has been so horrible and these experiences that came to me.

This reminds me of one of the favorite things I've ever heard attributed to Stephen Hawking.

Somebody asked him once whether he,

I think they asked him whether he ever got depressed or whether he was angry about his physical limitations.

And he said absolutely not.

He said what could be more miraculous than this life?

And I think that's the attitude you ideally should have,

You know,

To live in alignment with the Tao is okay,

This is the situation,

Now what do we do with it?

What do we create?

How do we love from here?

Yep,

Yep,

Right.

Yeah,

That miraculous viewpoint,

That's the bigger picture.

It's like,

I mean,

Even if you don't believe in the Tao or experience the Tao,

Let's say,

If you have no conception of spirituality or divinity in your life at all,

I think we can all relate to the sense of beauty,

Right,

And the sense that there's actually the miracle of existence.

The fact that a flower rises up and blooms and gives off its fragrance,

That's a miracle that blows your mind.

Right?

Exactly.

Right?

Yeah.

You're again touching on it as you did before,

That's what brings forth the spirit of the Tao.

It's that mindset,

It's that way of being that brings it into,

Well,

What does it do?

It doesn't bring it into existence,

It furthers it,

It extends it,

It.

.

.

Witnesses.

Yeah,

Yeah.

All of those things together.

Yeah,

Just the delight in the humming of the natural world as it is.

The delight in the humming of the natural world,

Yeah,

That's a beautiful phrase.

And our place in it.

Uh-huh.

That's our flourishing,

Right?

I remember,

I think it was Osho has a statement,

He says,

If you see a flower,

Don't pick it up.

That's the idea,

Is the idea is if you found something beautiful,

Don't try to possess it.

Don't try to keep it.

Let it exist in that moment of absolute adoration and appreciation.

Let it flourish there just as it is.

Don't touch it.

That is love.

Yes,

It is.

To let the flower fulfill its purpose.

That's exactly what love is.

I love that.

That's a beautiful conception of love.

I was wondering what new ideas might arise out of this one,

And I thought we had a number of good riffs.

Well,

You know what?

I started that book I showed you last time,

The Artist's Way,

And boy,

This humbled me.

There's a little pledge in the beginning of the book where you make a contract with yourself and you sign your name and everything saying,

I'm going to commit to this course and I'm going to do the exercises for 12 weeks as written,

Etc.

I had already filled it out in 1997 with my name.

You hadn't finished it?

No,

I think I did maybe a few weeks.

On that date in April 1997,

I must have been just pregnant with my youngest child.

That would have distracted me quite a bit.

I don't know what happened,

But I'm going to do it again.

I signed it all over again.

One of the non-negotiable exercises is that you do morning pages.

It's basically automatic writing.

You sit down first thing when you get up,

Three pages written longhand,

Nonstop stream of consciousness.

It doesn't matter what it is,

But you do this every single day.

I started doing those.

That whole meditation on death and our fear of death and how it distorts the Tao,

That arose out of something I was writing yesterday in the morning pages because I suddenly just saw it.

If we weren't afraid of death,

And you had said if you're not afraid of death,

You're not afraid of anything,

But if you're not afraid of death and you're not afraid of your presence here ending at some point and you don't feel that compulsion to be important,

So many problems just fall away.

They cease to exist because you just trust that this is good.

This is fine.

It doesn't matter who I am.

Let's keep going because I think this is a great point to elaborate actually for us because what you're saying is important.

One of the problems we face in talking about it is that most people hear fear of death or they hear you quoted me in saying that if you're not afraid of death,

You're not afraid of anything.

I think most people hear that trivially or in a superficial way and fail to grasp the meaning that you're really pointing out here,

Which is that within every other fear is a disguised form of the fear of death.

Why does the fear of death exist?

But because we see ourselves as a separate individual entity that is disconnected from everything else,

The whole.

When that idea dominates our consciousness,

Even if we're not aware of fear or the fear of death specifically,

It's the sense of separation,

The way we're playing it out,

The way we're living it that actually is the fear of death playing itself out in real time.

Even an experience of greed is a fear of death,

Though we may not associate those two things in our mind.

I think that that point you're making is so valid is that with our awareness of the Tao comes an alleviation of that fear of death and a sense of oneness with the whole,

With it all.

Yeah.

And also the understanding that that doesn't diminish you in any way.

As this reading makes clear,

Content with the way they are,

Endlessly repeating themselves,

Endlessly renewed.

They talk about the master here,

His constant practice is humility,

As rugged and common as stone.

And yeah,

You see,

Instead of feeling lesser than because you're not aware of the Tao,

You're not aware of the importance of your place,

Regardless of your station in the flowing of the Tao,

You can simply see the beauty of,

You know,

Maybe I'm a stonecutter,

Maybe I'm a butterfly,

Maybe I'm a snail,

You know,

Maybe I'm the fly that just got eaten by the bird outside.

All of those things are equally necessary and equally perfect and beautiful in their very existence.

Well,

That takes me right back to that line of all creatures flourish because if we understand that what is truly good for one is good for all,

It's a different kind of consciousness to walk through the world with.

Yeah.

Oh,

I have total movie consciousness today because now I'm hearing the circle of life from the Lion King.

Yeah,

There you go.

That little dialogue between Simpa and his father and Mustafa says something like,

The antelope eats the grass,

We eat the antelope and then when we die,

We become the grass.

Exactly.

Exactly that.

And that's the awareness of the whole because if you lose that understanding that everything feeds everything else,

That everything is interconnected with everything else,

You lose that and it goes to what you said,

It becomes self-striving,

Living for oneself.

Which if you don't succeed too,

Then this turns into a whole other form of suffering where if we mistakenly think that the glorification of an individual in some way,

Whatever that means to you,

It can mean anything,

But if we think that we're here simply to make ourselves some fantastic version of a human being and we don't achieve that because basically we'd be going against the Tao to try and do that,

Then that can turn into the self-loathing and some feeling that we've failed or that we're inherently flawed and go down that dark rabbit hole.

So your understanding of the wholeness of everything,

Of one's place in the Tao is kind of essential to mental health too.

Ah yes,

I like that.

That's a good point.

It's a good point.

And what's ironic about this is that it is the birthplace from which a person makes their life fantastic.

In the sense that if we're trying to achieve a fantastic life,

I think everybody's set up to want a fantastic life,

But if we're trying to achieve that solely on the grounds of just for me,

Just for my fame,

Just for my security,

Just for my pleasure and comfort,

It's useless,

But when it's real,

When it's a really fantastic life,

It's driven by the Tao and so it causes this,

What does it cause it?

A chain reaction of flourishing around us.

Exactly.

I was going to say something like that.

It kind of ripples outward and when we're sharing each other's fantasticness as integral components of the Tao,

It's a completely different experience when we're looking at an individual and either envying them or hoping to be envied by them or to station ourselves above or below.

It's a much more satisfying,

Uplifting way of being in the world.

As you were speaking that just now,

I got this impression and I was sort of envisioning someone being in a crowd at a concert,

At a show,

Music show and I could see two different kinds of people in the crowd.

One person is looking at the musician on stage and saying,

I wish I was like that and the other person is contributing to the energy and the intensity of the music that's happening.

They're being caught by it.

The musician who is sharing a part of his or her greatness is extending it out as the music and if the person is receptive to catching it,

They begin to flourish.

They begin to dance.

They begin to become elated versus the person who is stuck in the paradigm you were mentioning of envy and comparison and whatnot.

There's something here in the Tao about being swept up in the spirit of things.

If you don't succumb to the temptation to constantly compare and measure yourself against other people,

You can,

And I'm really guilty of this actually because I spent a lot of my earlier life envying people who I thought,

I kind of had this sense of,

Oh,

It's always my nose pressed up against the glass and I would look at people who were more successful or had more money or more talent in some way.

I constantly was striving to find the thing in me that would make me achieve that same level of greatness.

So,

I mean,

Without breaking that down too much,

That caused me a lot of suffering.

I should say,

I caused myself a lot of suffering in that way.

But more recently,

I've come to really understand the joy inherent to being in the audience,

To being able to,

Because I am as necessary as a recipient of,

Like,

For example,

I went to see Pavarotti live one time shortly before he died and his voice was so big.

We were in a 20,

000 person arena.

I don't even know if he had a microphone.

I'm sure he did,

But it didn't seem like it.

His voice was so big that it resonated my body at times.

I could feel those vibrations in my body.

And for that dynamic to occur and be noticed by me,

I had to be the recipient.

I couldn't be the star on the stage.

And that was as beautiful a thing or a place to be in that exchange of energy as it was to be him.

Mmm.

I love that.

I love that.

That's so perfect for what we're talking about today,

Because you don't have to be God.

You can be there catching the reverberation of life singing itself.

Exactly that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's precious.

That's precious.

I think that's what we're getting at in the last line here of,

Let himself be shaped by the Tao.

Right?

Yeah.

A life shaped.

I think we,

Going back to your point,

The one you just made,

When we see the greatness of someone else or something that's been created and we want to replicate it or we want to embody it in some sense,

I think that's a natural impulse in us in some sense.

But what we don't realize is that the greatness we perceived is because that person has been shaped by the Tao.

They have let themselves be crafted by life.

And we don't understand that from the position of envy.

We don't understand that when we're looking at how do I repeat that greatness.

And then that's the beautiful thing about the Tao is it will exalt us,

But in the way it needs to and not by our own command.

Thanks for your patience.