What Is Power (3c) Tao Te Ching (3)

Bundle: Usefulness – “what works reliably” 

“What’s perfectly whole seems flawed, / but you can use it forever. / What’s perfectly full seems empty, / but you can’t use it up.” (45)

Things like us, that are waxing/waning, are always on the lookout for “what works reliably,” as they find or make their way to the next moment of being, alive. We recognize the pattern in the evolution of species, and in the way the brain does its work.  

As we were thinking together in the preceding bundle, Lao Tzu tells us that “. . .what works reliably / is to know the raw silk, / hold the uncut wood” (19).  As we honor the sacredness of our world of being in Being, there are imaginings, intentions, attitudes, and actions that keep us in touch with reality, and in right relationship with real power.  

In our lives of constant change, one of LT’s suggestions is to be “mindful of little things” (Le Guin’s title of 64).  We gain insight from things that often are overlooked or neglected.  

Like old Eben Flood, we know that “most things break,” and so we take care with even the very ordinary as instances of real power.  

Knowing that endings and beginnings are always present, we anticipate needs.

Past, present, and future are unknown, so we don’t hold on too tightly, or think that we can bring them wholly under our control.  “What you grasp will be thrown away, what you hoard will be utterly lost” (44)

We don’t presume.

Real power is in the good of usefulness, but with full mindfulness we see that what is most useful is the usefulness of “what is not” (e.g. the inner space of a pot, 11)—where we don’t grasp or try to hoard or control, where the ego’s not, where abuse is not.  

Real power acts in such a way that it appears to the deluded and abusive to be “not acting;” but real power does by “not-doing.”  This seems like a very difficult puzzle; indeed to the abusive it is unsolvable (at least without some serious therapy).  If we read the phrase, “act by not acting, do by not doing,” we begin with the thought of acting and doing, which seems to be negated by “not”; but if we begin with “not acting” and “not doing,” we realize that both are states of being, and thus of acting and doing. LT is proposing that we truly be, act, do, and accomplish, in contrast to the destruction and death that the deluded consider acts/deeds of power, but that, in fact, bring doing, acting, and being to a halt.

This is how we “carve the uncut wood without cutting it” (28, 58 & endnote), exercising real power without violating its nature, integrity, and sacredness. 

In our real power of good action there is not a hint of abusive force. The wise are “good to good people / and they’re good to bad people” (49), because, empowered with reality, they can trust the justifying balance of harmony with being/s.  It seems magical.  And yet, with experience and practice of good, upon accurate observation and clear reflection, it’s not such a mystery.  It happens all the time.  Ordinary people, living the inherent harmony, being well-meaning by inclination and intention, act naturally to live and love well together.  This is ordinary brave compassion—among the extraordinary, deluded abusives who just don’t get it.  Ordinary people respond in kindness; and that’s why, for instance, Bernie can says, truthfully, having talked with so many people, that a great many people are better than their political leaders.

“Return [to the childlike and the mothering source] is how the Way moves. / Weakness is how the way works” (40). We know the mother by these children among us, just as, practicing the good, with its real power, we recognize these children by their mother.

Good use moves to achieve the relaxed tensions that we experience in cooperation and balance, thereby building and exercising real power.  LT’s examples that follow the natural pattern are the bellows and the bow.  From 5:  “Heaven and earth / act as a bellows: // Empty yet structured, / it moves, inexhaustibly giving.”  From 77:  “The Way of heaven / is like a bow bent to shoot: / . . .It brings the high down, / lifts the low, . . .”  Le Guin remarks, in her ftnote to 28, that a balanced ‘knowing and being’ of the dualities “results in neither stasis nor synthesis. . . .the patterns of power lead back. . .to the forever new, endless, straightforward way.  Reversal, recurrence, are the movement, and yet the movement is onward.”  28 ends, “Just so, a great carving / is done without cutting.”

“Return [to the childlike and the mothering source] is how the Way moves. / Weakness is how the way works” (40).

The good is the key to reliable usefulness, which is spiritual and egoless.

Real power does not cling to power; it has no end in view, does not try to achieve by its actions.  The exercise of true power takes the form of “letting go” of the superficial and artificial (e.g. self-serving ego-self delusion), so as to keep the true. (38)

As I’m telling it, like the characters in this novel, being animals, we have a solid, intuitive awareness of what is real/power.  It’s the difference between life and death, staying alive and being dead.  The difference is quite clear and starkly recognizable.  The lives of living beings are tightly patterned, and the models are everywhere.  For example, if you see a bird lying on its side on the ground, you know that it is dead, or soon will be.  On closer inspection, you might see that even as its life is ebbing away, other living beings are following their patterns of transforming it.  If you see a large, passenger airplane in the air with its wingspan perpendicular with the earth, you know that it has violated the design of nature, broken its pattern, and is no longer expressing the human intention of maintaining and extending life by way of use of natural patterns of the flow of energy.

The pattern of animals is to try to enact life and avoid death.  They have their ways of being, consistent with the way of Being.  As far as I know, only human animals knowingly violate what they fundamentally intuit as reality.  When they do, they place a burden upon themselves of trying to reconcile their violation with the inexorable pattern. Really it’s just a matter of cause and effect, and now they have to figure out, futilely (that’s part of the pattern—and by now there are plenty of models), how to finagle another effect than the natural that follows from the cause that they have made of themselves.  At the extreme, they try mass murder or genocide, and try to concoct a lie about it that is commensurately extreme; but that’s part of the pattern.

Life works reliably.  People of real power act in accord with the inclination of Being to promote life.  That’s good.

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