How many of us were raised with the admonition that we needed to make
something of ourselves? Without ambition and effort, we are destined to be failures as human beings. Most importantly, as we were, we were without value. Unless we made something of ourselves, we were thought of as worthless. And not only did our parents think of us as worthless, but a part of our own selves bought into the ideology of self-worthlessness. This is the Wound, the belief in our fundamental inadequacy.
So we put our noses to the grindstone of making something of ourselves. But to get that right we needed direction. Our first bosses were our parents, then came teachers, and, of course, organized religion put on the crowning touch. If you didn’t follow their rules, well then you merely risked an eternity in the fires of hell. Talk about coercion.
We learned that to succeed required more than anything else obedience to authority. Too much misbehavior and people would say, “he isn’t making anything of himself”, “he will never succeed”, “he’s just a failure”, “he’ll wind up in jail one day”, “he’s spoiled”, “he doesn’t know how to take directions”, “he needs more discipline at home”, “he obviously was raised in a disorderly environment”, “he’s going nowhere”, “he’s just a bad kid”, etc. etc. etc.
Everything was about making something of ourselves, but not
as yourself. No, you needed to be re-molded into the image of success as defined by society and not by ourselves.
We were compelled to reject who we were if we were ever to make something of ourselves. Success demanded that we forget our authentic selves. Thus begins a lifetime of
becoming without ever arriving.
And you know what happened? It worked. We forgot who we were. But there was one thing that stayed with us. And that thing was the Wound that made all of this subjugation possible. Death takes quite a toll on a living human being! But just as the Christians sometimes say, “you have to die before becoming reborn”, conventional society made the same demand.
But we didn’t fully die. The memory of the authentic self lives on, often in the pit of our stomachs. It’s that longing for return, that lingering sense that we took a path that wasn’t quite right.
It’s there. But how can we return to the lovable and loving child that got talked into his own sacrifice? The
Dao De Jing presents the Way (Tao) and Verse 37 pulls us back again to that place where we never had to make something of ourselves, where we can be who we truly are. Let’s reach out into the
feeling of this Verse and re-unite with our who we really are under the many layers of indoctrination and domestication. Let’s find the wistful wildness of the real world that still lives within us.
As translated by David Hinton:
Way is perennially doing nothing
so there’s nothing it doesn’t do.Ahhhh. No on ever told the Dao to make something of itself. It never needed to be obedient. Its actions have never deserved punishment. It just is and that’s quite enough.
When lords and emperors abide by this
the ten thousand things follow change of themselves.When the ego body, the body socialized to make something of itself, is seen to be a lie (i.e., “When the truth is found to be a lie” Jefferson Airplane), everything evolves just as it will. This is the returning to the Dao.
Desire drives change,
but I’ve stilled it with uncarved nameless simplicity.The emotion of desire is what nurtures the fulfillment of our indoctrination and domestication (see
The 3 Bodies). Once awake to our authentic selves, what we desire is the world itself.
Uncarved nameless simplicity
is the perfect absence of desire,
and the absence of desire means repose:
all beneath heaven at rest of itself.To find ourselves we first have to see who we are not. This is the purpose of meditation and self-reflection. We need to take the journey to the root of our Fear-Based Selves. Of all the journeys we will ever take, this is the most difficult, for the destination is a place where everything we have believed about ourselves is discovered to be not true. This is what it takes to be a
Spiritual Warrior. To live without psychological fear, means to unlearn what our false selves believe to be essential for their survival. Know that the only thing it fears is what threatens its existence. From the perspective of “nameless simplicity”, this is exactly the medicine that is required.
It is this journey which is described in my book
Liberation from the Lie: Cutting the Roots of Fear Once and for All. It is the manual to finding out who you are not - because until we uncover the false self in
all of its guises, we will always sustain that which is false in our own selves. Partial medicine only works partially. Completion of the journey requires the full dose.
Liberation from the Lie is that medicine.
Verse 37 concludes Part One of the
Dao De Jing. With Verse 38 we enter the world of De - Integrity. We must awaken to an even larger realization that our own spiritual pursuits must ultimately be put aside for something far more fundamental. That is the journey we will take in Part Two of the
Dao De Jing.
Download:
Verse37
Tags: identity, Fear, healing, religion
