The Way of Life

On Wednesday, May 9th, I couldn’t write any more. I had grown tired of my anger. My postings became increasingly focused on the insanity in Iraq and the inevitability that nothing much was going to change there until January 2009 when, hopefully, the country will turn to a different kind of leadership with a radically different vision of how to combat terrorism in the world.

So the postings stopped. A part of me wanted to shift to a different focus but I was unable to ignore the war and its damaging impacts on America, Iraq, the Middle East and the world. I could not get beyond the view that my president and his advisors were actually fostering rather than fighting terrorism.

Enough of that, at least in that form. I want to do something different with these pages for a while.

For the last two to three months whenever I’ve taken my evening walk alone I have listened to a reading of the Tao Te Ching, as translated and read by Stephen Mitchell (http://www.stephenmitchellbooks.com/). Mitchell’s bio in his translation of the Tao Te Ching says he was “educated at Amherst, the Sorbonne, and Yale, and de-educated through intensive Zen practice.” I love that line.

I intend to lift a quote from each of the 81 chapters of the Tao Te Ching (each chapter is less than a page long) and add a short commentary. If all goes well, that will be what I write about for the next 100 days or so. After that, we’ll see.

The authorship of the Tao Te Ching is attributed to Lao-tzu, who we’re told may have been a contemporary of Confucius (551 – 479 BCE) and may have been a library archivist in one of the small kingdoms of the day. Whoever penned it, the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching has reverberated throughout the world for more than 2,500 years. That alone makes it worth reading. Its content makes it worth studying.

The Tao Te Ching speaks about the Tao, something that does not lend itself to definition. Chapter 1 tells us, “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” Often translated as “the Way,” to me the Tao refers to “the way of life”; the way in which and through which all of life unfolds without regard to what we do or don’t do. It is the source, the immutable, the reality, the river and the energy of life. It has also been aptly described as “the eternal present”.

Those of us who live in accord with “the way of life” - those of us who live in the present moment rather than in the past or the future; those of us who realize that reality lies beyond our concepts, judgments, opinions, ideas and views - are freed from the suffering that comes from living contrary to the “the way of life”.

The Tao Te Ching is about freedom. We’re told that the war in Iraq is about freedom and that “the enemy hates us for our freedom.” The Tao Te Ching teaches us that no one at war with an enemy is free and that no one who hates is free and that no one who fears is free. It’s time for enemies everywhere, the hateful and the fearful, to find the freedom that comes with living here and now in accord with the way of life. It's certainly time for me to do so.