Tao Te Ching 14

Approach it and there is no beginning; follow it and there is no end.
You can’t know it, but you can be it, at ease in your life.
Just realize where you come from: this is the essence of wisdom.
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I’ve considered knowledge to be something of great value. Only recently have I become a little more skeptical, as I realize that my so-called knowledge is infested, if you will, with concepts, extrapolations and judgments of my own making. What we “know” is often little more than what we believe or perceive, and what we believe or perceive goes through a host of filters and lenses of varying focal lengths.

To me, the challenge is to move from knowledge to wisdom, which is the careful application of truth to the moment at hand. Wisdom is being in touch with the real world, being grounded and freed from common thinking – the thinking of an ego-centered mind that discriminates between “me” and “you” and “good” and “bad” and “right” and “wrong”. Judge not, said Jesus.

This wisdom leads to truly being alive. “You can’t know it, but you can be it.” As others have said, we shift from living as a “human doing” to living as a “human being”, which leads us to the essence of wisdom – an earthshaking realization of where we come from.

We come from good stuff. Metaphorically, we are waves arising from an eternally present ocean, an ocean that has an infinite power to create waves of every kind. We are, indeed, created in the image of God, the creative power that is forever the ground of our being.

One of the greatest errors in the thinking of mankind is the notion of original sin, the idea that women and men come into this life in a depraved condition that, absent some external intervention, will lead to damnation in one form or another. That idea is the creation of a priestly class who led institutions that assumed the role of being the vehicles of our salvation. We need no such vehicle driven by no such people bearing no such notions.

As the Apostle Paul said, “continue to work out your salvation…for it is God who works in you.” It is the act of discovering our true nature, which is God working within us, as surely as it is the ocean working within the waves, that leads us out of the “fear and trembling” experienced by those who are not aware of who they are.

We come from good stuff. Good stuff is in us. Those who are aware of their deepest and truest nature are filled with the wisdom that leads them from fear to love to happiness to peace.

Go to the mirror – and find the wisdom to smile.