Liberation from the Lie

This industrial civilization is dying. It is a consequence of fear, of obedience to authority, of discipline, and of the negation of the child. May this dawning New World be born of love and through love.

We are living in the final stage of industrial civilization. This phase of the human explosion began in (ironically) the Age of Enlightenment. And with its death, so will the philosophy of European enlightenment also die.

This age is predicated on two things. Plentiful cheap labor and plentiful cheap energy. People eager for industrial slavery will always be available, but cheap energy won’t. This is the key lynchpin upon which the whole edifice rests. This will disappear and it will disappear sooner than most of us like to think. This is the end. The curtain is closing.

Are you ready for the Age of Turbulence that rises now just beyond the visible horizon? Most of you are not.

Are you ready for the utter chaos that now dawns? The time of wrenching change is very near.

My hope is this: I hope that people awaken from the nightmare of the endless need to achieve. I hope that people see first the wonderfulness with which we are born. I hope that people will be embarrassed by dreams of inequality, that I need to have more than you, that I am better than you, that I must serve you.

A whole new generation of liberated human beings must arise from the wreckage of this age. These are the little babies who ask only one thing: to be loved for who they are and not as we would want and need them to be. It is they who must be seen as sacred. This is how we are to prepare for this truly new world

We must liberate ourselves from all inequalities. We must love ourselves as our brothers and sisters. We must reject as ugly that which separates, that which says I know better than you.

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A number of years ago, I taught criminal justice on the university level. Anytime you talk about crime, particularly person-to-person violent crime, you can’t avoid the issue of race; with respect to prejudice and the incidence of violence.

I would ask my students, how do we explain the observation that our prisons are mostly black and brown? They would answer with a firm and certain claim of racial bias in the law.

The FBI data show that black people commit violent crimes at a rate of about 7 to 1 compared to whites. It’s a little lower for sex crimes, but it’s higher for robbery. That’s a HUGE difference. Can it be explained as a simple outcome of prejudice in the law?

The answer is a resounding NO. While there is some bias in the nature of law enforcement, it is not nearly high enough to explain these enormous differences. By and large, it is an observed fact that black people do commit violent crime at rates of about 7 to 1 over whites. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies, have sought to show prejudice in the way law is administered in the US, but the differences they show fail to explain the enormity of this difference.

So the question remains, are blacks more violent than whites? The crime data collected in the United States seems to answer that question beyond any shadow of a doubt. Black people are more violent. But is this true?

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We’ve heard it a thousand times, enlightenment is not of or by the mind. This is true. Awakening to the light, sees the mind in ALL its many forms.

Meaning, purpose, having an agenda, desire, knowledge, body, and the universe of objects and sense experiences are of the mind. This too is seen.

Living as the awakened space, we are the well of existence. Perhaps it is more precise to say that the well is us – for everything we sense as ourselves arises from within this well of light. It is nothing more and nothing less. All that is – is seen from within this well.

Nothing matters to the awakened light. And, nothing doesn’t matter to the awakened life. It is all embraced and seen as fleeting.

There is space within the light. Certain objects are closer to its source. Thus I can experience thoughts that arise from this light, but cannot experience or see thoughts that arise from other sources. Even they are all one. Ultimately, we can only experience our own Tao (or this Tao – which is both personal and impersonal simultaneously). It concentrates here, but is connected to everything else through space and time. If we could reduce it only to this moment (a time that does not exist) it might appear either unlimited or totally limited depending on the point of view. But since no such limit exists, nothing else can be said about its existence or the reality or falseness of the perceived universe. It is as it is, but only now and even then is passed.

This language is hobbled by its reliance on nouns and verbs as separate fields of knowing. This is neither a noun or a verb. It is both simultaneously.

Everything is connected, directly, to itself within the well. The well is defined by the objects and sense experiences that are seen from within it. All that is seen is fleeting. Only that which sees endures. How long it endures I don’t know.

When everything is seen as connected within the well of light, everything is seen to be of this light. Change to one part will create waves of change through the whole field.

Thus we are, ourselves, the Tao.

Does this mean we suddenly do nothing and fixate exclusively on the light? No.

The Tao operates from itself and thus renews and re-invents the universe in each moment. Aliveness to this every-changing moment is life.

Untied from the belief-laden knot of personal identity, we are truly free.

Verse 31 of the Dao De Jing is so closely aligned with Verse 30 that it requires little to no further elaboration or clarification. It is the third verse of what I am calling the Force Group (verses 29-31). Like 30, it acknowledges the inevitable occurrence of conflict and war. These are things that happen and are likely to continue to happen, but the “old Taoist” never celebrates them. They are, in all cases, the very last option used to settle a matter. The striking similarity of Verses 30 and 31 can possibly be attributed to the importance of their content. War is a nightmare. It cannot be said often enough.

As translated by David Hinton notice how different the view of war and the technology of war as described in this Verse so powerfully contrasts with that propagated and celebrated in the United States and much of the world today. The difference is striking and instructive.

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At a time when America is engaged in endless war against an elusive enemy, there are few verses in the Dao De Jing more important for our time than Verse 30 – what I have called “The Ravages of War.”

Were we to refine our understanding the of the Dao De Jing into just single terms, some of the key words would be trust, tranquility, flowing, and allowing. Thus when the text deals with the issue of force its message is strong and direct. When we employ force to affect an outcome, ruin and failure are the very likely results. Yet the Dao De Jing, does not avoid the problem, because life possesses every potential and serious conflict is one such potential. This document was written primarily to instruct leaders in times of great turbulence and the author clearly acknowledges that problems inevitably arise in life where force becomes one of several options that can be used.

In this Verse we are guided to “prevail” without the use of force or only its most minimal manifestation. Thus the purpose of Verse 30 is to describe just this pathway. Using the translation of David Hinton Verse 30 begins:

If you use the Way to help a ruler of people
you never use weapons to coerce all beneath heaven.
Such things always turn against you.

The weapons, the methods, the emotions we use to force situations and to pressure people to do what we would like will turn against us. It is a powerful irony that what we do to be safe, to “do the right thing”, is exactly what must happen to allow for precisely what we don’t want in life. The text continues:

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If I hate something, what difference does it make? There is a brief energetic charge and we left depleted.

If I love something, what difference does it make?There is also a brief energetic charge and that too passes.

But in either case, I am always with that something. Being with something must come before love or hate. Is it possible to just stop at with and see the impotence of declaring the self as loving or hating what we are with? We are always with something and that “with-ness” can never end.

The small self loves its many identities. It is tied to them. When we love or hate, our identity is re-created. We do it for our own self-amusement. It keeps us going. We impress others with our loves and hates. Even if I say I love everything, we show the world how evolved we are. If I rejoice in my hating, we show the world our impressive dark passions.

Look at ME. Look at my loving/hating self. It is, ultimately, simplistic and returns us to ego. We could do it for the fun, but when identity comes then (expressed as needing to impress ourselves or others) it has turned into something else entirely.

But when we stop at with, there is depth, there is connection, there is no line separating you from me. We are one.

We also discover that we cannot do away with with. That is what endures. It is truth. It is reality.

This openness – our primal being. Ultimately, this is the source of love that is always there, but hidden behind the wall of the fear-based self. See through the parade of identities and that great well of endless light is revealed.

How much energy do we invest in seeking to control our world? How tirelessly we work to create, somehow, the world we project as right, as well as good for what we assert are our own interests. From the point of view of the Dao, this is a vast and painful waste of energy.

This Verse is the first in a series of verses that address the issue of using force in the world. Verse 29 deals with how our efforts must result in failure and suffering.

Verse 29 begins (in the Addiss/Lombardo translation):

Trying to control the world?
I see you won’t succeed.

We could almost stop here and take a very deep breath and just let is all go. The war for control is over and the inevitable winner is the Dao. The key to winning the battle (which really doesn’t even exist – for there is no battle) is simply to join the Dao, become the Dao. Be this very moment. We will see that this is the only authentic spiritual path, as it says,

The world is a spiritual vessel
And cannot be controlled.

Those who control, fail.
Those who grasp, lose.

Even is we stumble about in life and “grasp” for this and that, then too we lose. Continue reading

Reading the many verses of the Dao De Jing, it becomes increasingly clear that the deepest message of this remarkable document is one of abiding trust. All things are forged and nurtured by the Dao. The sage sees and experiences all things as right within the greater context of their appearance (see the last stanza commentary). The Dao is both creator and destroyer and to resist it marks the absence of trust. But even that is of the Dao, for we likely need to live a life of distrust if we are ever to discover the deeper trust that is expressed as accord with all that is – and how it is.

The instruction of deep trust is expressed in Verse 28 in several ways. Using the translation of David Hinton, it is to nurture the feminine, it is to return to infancy, the time of not knowing, it is to cultivate the black (to be a ground for the light), and it is to be the uncarved wood, available to be anything. This is the language of creation, of boundless flexibility, of seeing everything just as it presents itself, and it is to flow with change, like the shadow of change itself.

Verse 28 is organized in a series of pairs. Each pair espouses a positionality with respect to experience and being. The first stanza presents the qualities of gender, flow, and not-knowing.

Knowing the masculine
and nurturing the feminine
you become the river of all beneath heaven.
River of all beneath heaven
you abide by perennial integrity (Te/De)
and so return to infancy.

Thus regarding the inner quality of gender, we are asked to “know” the masculine – the ying of existence – objects, states, thoughts, feelings, but be the yin of being – that which is feminine – that creates, nurtures, accepts, provides a space for all to be as it is. In this way we become the river of all beneath heaven. Continue reading

What matters to us? What sustains our psychological being?

Often what matters is the attainment of our goals. We assert goals about what we want to happen for us in life. In the field of spiritual exploration, one of the most persistent goals is the elimination of personal suffering and the attainment of enlightenment.

That is a goal. Specifically, it is a psychological goal.

If our child is ill and we want her to get better, that is not a psychological goal. Rather it is an expression of goodness and caring. But the desire to get these painful thought patterns out of our head, to defeat anxiety, to get enlightened so that we don’t have to be weighed down by life anymore, these are all psychological goals.

The very force that gives these painful states such control over the quality of our immediate experience is the goal to get rid of them. It is an intriguing irony.

Anxiety, simply seen from the light of effortless being without the slightest trace of having a personal goal to destroy it, ceases to be a problem. It’s just another object happening in the space of being. The same principle applies to the goal of becoming enlightened. When we use psychological force to arouse a projected outcome, we create the very suffering that we so desperately want to extinguish in our lives.

Ultimately, the goal setting and the personal suffering are one. We discover that the anxiety, the psychological suffering is not ours’ to control. It’s not “my anxiety”, “my psychological suffering”; it’s just something that is noticed.

It is the goal setting that is our pain construct.

See the goal and get free from the pain.

Verse 27 of the Dao De Jing focuses on actions that leave no trace – unseen – unnoticed – seamless. That is the theme of its first stanza. But the second stanza takes us in a very different direction. These stanzas appear so unrelated that I am simply unable to discover a common element that unites this Verse. As has been noted elsewhere in this series, the original Dao De Jing had no chapter divisions. It is possible that this division is arbitrary.

The theme of leaving no trace is linked to the philosophy of wu wei – no action, yet nothing is left undone. This is the Way itself. Looking out onto the world itself, the natural world, unaffected by the actions of human beings, there is no doer, yet nothing is left undone. For much of the Dao, this perfect, but ever-changing natural world is the model on which the Dao De Jing is constructed.

The first stanza again describes one’s passage through life as a traveller. Addis and Lombardo translates Verse 27 as:

Good travellers leave no tracks.
Good words leave no trace.
Good counting needs no markers.

Good doors have no bolts
Yet cannot be forced.
Good knots have no rope
But cannot be untied.

Thus the door to the Way (Tao/Dao) is never locked. Continue reading