What Is Power (3a) Tao Te Ching (1)

Good is power (in case, dear reader, you don’t have time to read further).

Consulting Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (trans Le Guin*), I find that he is all about power—its source, its simply-natural nature, how best to apply it (as we seek the good life), and how deluded people abuse it.  He addresses these matters in 51** of 81 poems.  So there is an awfully lot here. I’ll try to keep this consultation brief (on this page and a couple more), offering some of his main insights.

His vision is conservative-reformist, a radical rejection of the (his and ours) prevailing, Warlord cultural view, which is delusional and deathly.

Since Lao Tzu views human perceptual reality of beings as a yin/yang play of dualities, within a wholeness of Being, he perceives good/bad (see “What Is Good?”), and he perceives a true, creative form of power/a false, destructive form; in her translation, Le Guin uses the terms “mysterious,” “great,” and “true” for the real thing, which I’m calling “real power,” as opposed to the “lesser,” egocentric delusion of power, which I’m calling “abuse.”*

As I said on the previous page, in this episode I’m thinking aloud particularly about power as exhibited in human society, as a feature of relationships between persons and among people.  Both real power and abuse are exercised within relationships.  So power is a matter of the soul; real power is lived by the healthy imagination, while abuse is a hallmark of the sick imagination.  Abusers move to nullify relationship and deny soul.

In order to know real power, and to live powerfully, we must perceive and be true to reality, as sacred Being, in its beings.  And it’s a stark reality:  “The way of heaven plays no favorites. / It stays with the good.” (TTC 79) (Try to get the abusers, Putin/Trump, to understands that.  Lots o’ luck.) Sometimes the result of this unwavering way of Being, as experienced by us who are humanly being, is blissful; but at other times it is exhausting, because we are able to abuse and exhaust life on such a grand scale (e.g. nuclear, global); but that is not to know Being as sacred, and it is not real power; it is a constant cycling & recycling of disempowerment by the disempowered, the self-alienating (a stark example, in my opinion, is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

In this cycling yin/yang of reality, by knowing yang but staying yin, knowing light but staying dark, knowing glory but staying modest, we pattern our lives  in accord with the eternal, unfailing, unerring, inexhaustible power of rebirth, “turning back” to “the great oneness” (65), the source (40), with its natural boundlessness (28).  So we “hold the Way sacred / and obey its power,” with reverence and obedience that are “unforced and natural.” (51)

Often LT is paradoxical, featuring the inevitable return as ironic reversal, as seen when we view the wrong-minded cultural ways of abusers, from the point of view of reality.  He was up against the same foolish Warlord Culture as our own.  We have the same need for clarification, and it seems to me that his insights remain true.  He was up against the same fundamental conditions of reality that we must try to live wisely with, especially change and human limitation.

In the matter of power, perhaps more than any other (except maybe love, which is the powerful opposite and nemesis of abuse—although abusers often masquerade as lovers), we see how very very wrong our culture has gone—which is to say our global culture of predatory male domination, exemplified by warlords like Putin and warlord-wannabes like Trump.  Lao Tzu is all over that.  “Wanting souls” (see “Good” page III) can never be fulfilled.  Delusion is self-subversive (indeed self-abusive); the deluded, blind to reality, think that things are the opposite of what they actually are.  In their delusions about power and about self, they fail to see that they naturally have real power, and so they are driven by their delusional fear of weakness to seek power through self-destructive abuse of an other(s), and thereby, of themselves.  But things are not what they seem.  Indeed in a world viewed as triumphal duality, denying wholeness and integrity, there is no center to hold to the heart, and everything falls into irony and paradox, destruction and death.

Meanwhile, “unwanting souls,” the loving and peaceful, receive the gift of reality, and go on their way, peacefully loving.  Not needing to seek power, because they are so richly empowered, they simply live the good life together.  Unfulfilled is fullness, dissolving irony into fact. Mystery transforms into wonder and contentment, even awe and joy.  Nobody does anything and great things are done.  Powerless is powerful.  Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.  And all of that seems ironically paradoxical, from within our warlord point of view.

When good returns to itself, cycling back upon itself, without irony it affirms itself, amplifying its power and going on forever; when bad returns to itself, cycling back upon itself, ironically it abuses itself, amplifying its delusion and destroying itself.

Within Being being the beings such as we know, what is natural, in the natural cycle of things, is that “the soft, the weak, prevail / over the hard, the strong.” (36)  Trust in the power of that reality, and figure out how to live together in that light.

*All translations of TTC, unless otherwise indicated, are from Ursula K. Le Guin, Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching:  A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, Shambhala, 2009/2019. I look at a bunch of translations, but especially Le Guin and Marcel Conche (Presses Universities de France, 2003) and their commentary. **I’m thinking 1-2, 10-15, 17-19, 21-23, 25, 29-45, 51-59,  60-61, 63-66,  76-79.

[Episode “What Is Power?” page (1) Intro; (2) basic position; (3a) current; (3b), (3c), (3d), consulting Lao Tzu; and (4) further reflections.  Contents page to chapter, “WhatIs?”]