What Is Power (3e) Tao Te Ching (5)

Bundle:  So, what are people of real power like?—see if you know some of them, maybe even yourself.

It seems that LT was fascinated by the people who followed the Way, and he took great pleasure in describing their character traits.  As he saw them (or imagined them?) they were mysterious but quite simple and ordinary, straightforward in their ways, and therefore all the more mysterious.

In 15 (which Le Guin titles “People of Power”) he imagines people in the Old Times, living closer to the beginning, more in accord with Being, less in need of forming or re-form.  They were uncut wood.  As you would imagine, they were “subtle, spiritual,..penetrating, unfathomable.”  As neighbors, you would find them to be “cautious, alert, polite and quiet, elusive, blank, empty,” but able to bring clarity to troubles, and to quicken life. Throughout TTC, he implies that people of any time, who live in accord with reality, have those same characteristics.  But in our time, they can be hard to see, because hard to imagine.  We are told that they are illusions, make-believes that are impossible to believe in.

Our dominant, abuser, cultural vision, with its formative teachings and pervasive patterns of practical life, is so deluded (for instance in the negative psychopathologies of American democracy, within our abusive, systemic structures and practices, including our reward system) that we live far from an accurate perception of natural reality, and far from accord with the everlasting patterns of Being.  The inevitable result is that for many people, much of the time, the Way seems too indeterminant and fleeting, too insubstantial and uncertain, to support a viable dwelling.

But a person who gives herself to the Way is at home in the Way. (23)  Given personhood by the Way, she finds images in it that are the seeds of perception of the real.  These are of the common origin, from which sprout inner radiance and personal confidence—confidence in spirit, feelings and thoughts, things and imaginations, and intuitions of the sacred real that has endured since the beginning.  As Wallace Stevens imagined it, in the light of a sunny “Sunday Morning,”* “Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, / In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else / In any balm or beauty of the earth, / Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? / Divinity must live within herself: /  Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; / Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued / Elations when the forest blooms; gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the winter branch. / These are the measures destined for her soul.”  

It’s a recurrent, but conflicted, theme in American poetry from as early as Anne Bradstreet in the 1640s:  the heart-felt sufficiencies in the real power of ordinary being to provide a vision of harmonious Being.

Le Guin titles 21, “The Empty Heart,” and begins her translation:  “The greatest power is the gift / of following the Way alone.” Then 22, “Growing Downward,” continues the ironic riddle of the empty heart that is full because whole, and of the seemingly powerless who are nevertheless full of vitality because they “hold to the one.”  Abjuring the seeming power in assertion of ego, they “return” to the Source, the beginning, and thereby to the power of what is truly real.  But they accomplish wisdom through a process that seems, to the foolish abusers, to be the opposite of accumulation and exertion of power:  because they “hold to the one,” the wise become whole through being broken, straight by twisting, renewed as they are wearing out.  Unconfused, they gain much by having little.  Not competing, they are beyond competitors.  Thereby, in self-evidence, they shine forth.

As a general pattern, people of real power are raw silk, uncut wood, valleys of flowing life.  They are the reliable potential, and when a reliable use is needed, they are naturally formed into the practical.  Because of their integrity of harmonious wholeness (from a religious point of view, their holiness), even in Warlord culture, they are not driven by ego.  During trouble they can, by stillness, bring clarity and vitality. They are untroubled by feeling unfulfilled, because they feel no need for fulfillment.  They do not need renewal (recharging), because, in harmony with being and its Way, they are inexhaustible.  They are the alert, aware, capable conduits of power—naturally politic and psychically invulnerable.

“Growing Downward” is the movement of free spiritual imagination.  “Sunday Morning” concludes:  “Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; / Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; / And, in the isolation of the sky, / At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”

In some ways, the people of the Way are like everybody else, every other being; and yet they are so different from the abusers.  Sometimes they are a bit self-conscious about it.  There are times and places where they feel rather out of step or out of place.  Among the abusers especially, they are aware that they appear naive, like such a baby.  And that’s all true enough.  “What the people fear must be feared.”  Things have a tendency to go from good to bad to worse.  Sometimes they see too much.  They see, for instance, how yes and no, good and bad, life and death, are so opposite, and what a difference that difference makes (indeed the deluded make it a basis for abuse) but at the same time these dualities are inextricably, cyclicly, intertwined.  They see this because they get their nourishing vision directly from the mothering way of the source of it all.  (20, which Le G titles “Being Different”)

Those who are empowered by the Way have the skill of integrating the intangible and tangible, not violating either; and so they are good at caring for people and things.  Neglecting no one, they recognize potential, honor it, and instruct its realization. (27)  Living in harmony with the Way, they give themselves to the qualities and conditions of changing nature, and make themselves naturally at home. (23, 34)

To live in nature, to be a part of nature, is to live in change.  The power exerted by nature is finite, including the exertions of humans; therefore  people who do not give themselves to the Way are disempowered by their own abuse, and lose by their gains.  But those who are at home in the Way are at home in its enduring power, and gain from their losses.  Naturally empowered with softness, modesty (humility, not arrogance), moderation (generosity made possible by self-restraint), mercy, and fearless compassion (67).  They are able to live in trust, both giving and receiving. (23) In the “small matter” of living aligned with the Way—in mutual trust, enacting its way toward others, laying no claim, asking nothing of others, they achieve greatness. (34)

*”Poetry” magazine, 1915; Harmonium, 1923.

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