Number Forty Five The Wheel
45
relentless lava
crawling towards the stillness
that comes in the sea
Lesson # 45
Can you hold praise and criticism
with complete emotional neutrality?
Can you embrace
your own stupidity?
Can you let go of sounding
so smart?
Do you laugh at
your imperfections, regularly?
If so, there might be
some hope for you.
From: 81 Lessons from the Tao Te Ching
Number 45 The wheel
From our limited perspective
we cannot know in advance
what is going to work out well
We discover that only after years of experience
As we begin to walk the path
we cannot know what is important
That only comes after years of letting things go
In the beginning we look Through a Glass Darkly
After a while what we thought was twisted or confusing or awkward
straightens out
It becomes clear and sounds eloquent
But that only lasts for a little while
Everything appears to be swirling in transition
Motion becoming motionless and then starts moving again
Cold warms to hot and then cools again
The journey moves left then right, then left again
Gain gives way to loss giving way to gain again
Only when we find inner quiet and deep stillness
Can we get off this wheel
NUMBER FORTY FIVE
Esteem lightly your greatest accomplishment, your patience will not fail.
Reckon your great fulness to be emptiness,
your strength will not become exhausted.
Count your rectitude as foolishness,
Know your cleverness to be stupidity,
Recognize your eloquence to be stammering words,
And you will find that
As movement overcomes cold, and as stillness overcomes heat,
even so, he who knows the true secret of tranquility
Will become a pattern for all mankind.
Isabella Mears, The Tao Teh King, A Tentative Translation from the Chinese, William McLellan, Glascow, 1916.
Number 45 (commentary) How do we get off the karmic merry-go-round?
Buddha reminds us that impermanence rules, that everything changes and that nothing lasts forever. He named the three poisons that keep us scurrying around to be greed, hatred and delusion.
Lao Tsu adds that we cannot perceive the truth of things, because we are trapped in our conditional judgement and are too busy in the naming of everything.
We can’t seem to stop ourselves from chasing after illusions we hope will be permanent. We keep in frantic motion, because we fear the stillness of death.
We can’t slow down long enough to see how our preconceptions prevent us from seeing what is truly in front of us.
Our old, grasping, hurrying self must die and sometimes painfully, before we can simply be.
Tangent and Tool #45, Greed, Hatred, Delusion: (Reflective exercises) One way to understand greed is to look beyond our image of billionaires owning everything. Look at your own greed, that itch you have to just possess a little more: a little more wealth, a few more possessions, a tastier drink, a slightly better love life. Greed is unending.
One way to look at hatred is not to imagine it in extreme forms of violence and rage. Look instead at your own annoyance or hurt when you feel unseen or unappreciated. The hatred we most often experience on a daily basis comes from the imagined wounds we feel when that narcissistic splendid self-image of ourselves gets punctured by someone else’s less than positive reaction to us. How dare they!?
We find delusion in ourselves when we turn away from the unpleasant, or try to cling on to pleasant moments, instead of just letting go to the unfolding and the impermanence of our experience. It is also called ignorance, but a willful ignorance, a refusal to just see things as they are.
We do all three on a daily basis. Waking up is hard.