Number Twenty Five Mother of Everything
25
old black dog
asleep, twitching
I write haiku
Lesson # 25
There are three great truths:
1-Everything originates,
even before the Big Bang,
from the Mother of Everything.
2- There are four great patterns in Creation:
1) space/time, 2) energy,
3) matter, and 4) consciousness.
3- We serve the Tao, and the Tao
just wants to know itself.
From: 81 Lessons from the Tao Te Ching
Number 25 Mother of everything
Before Creation
before the Big Bang
there was potential
Vast beyond space, older than time
Filled with nothing but possibility
This is the Mother of Everything
It is so hard to name and describe
I will call it the Tao and know that is more than everything
ever expanding creating space and time as it swells
There are four great patterns in Creation
space/time
energy
matter
and consciousness
Homo Sapiens are born of matter
expend energy
move through space/time
and are conscious and curious
We serve the Tao and the Tao just wants to know itself
NUMBER TWENTY FIVE
There was a Being already perfect before the existence of Heaven and Earth.
It is calm! It is formless!
It stands alone and changes not!
Reaching everywhere and inexhaustible,
It may be regarded as Mother of the Universe.
I do not know its name.
For a title we call it the Tao.
If forced to give it a name we call it the Great.
Great, we call it the Flowing,
Flowing we call it distant,
Distant, we call it Coming again.
Therefore the Tao is Great, Heaven is Great,
The Earth is Great, the Ruler is also Great.
In the Universe four are Great,
And the Ruler is one of them.
Man finds his law in the Earth.
The Earth finds its law in Heaven,
Heaven finds its law in the Tao,
The Tao finds its law in the affirmation of Self.
Isabella Mears, The Tao Teh King, A Tentative Translation from the Chinese, William McLellan, Glascow, 1916.
Number 25 (commentary) Why did the Big Bang happen?
13.7 Billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang, all matter that was to become the many universes we can see was super-compressed into a ball the size of an orange.
Today it continually expands, a sphere 46.5 billion light years in all directions.
Matter and energy exist in the space/time of this creation.
Why is it here?
Lao Tsu thought Man was one of the four great powers of the universe because we can perceive its wonder.
We are organs of consciousness.
And in this way, through us, Creation can know itself.
Tangent and Tool #25, Why was I born? A question and a reflection: “What am I doing here?” In the middle of one of my existential crises (Hey, if you can’t have a few existential crises every so often what is the point of being here?) I needed an answer to the question, “Why was I born?” Neither nihilism not romantic idealism was working for me. I was not just here as an unimportant coincidence of a vast uncaring universe. And I was not here to do great deeds. I had experienced enough to know that there were mysteries in the universe that I had witnessed or been a part of. They were mysteries that I would never be able to explain from the limited perspective on the life that I had lived. And I knew that any contributions I made to the human experience would be long forgotten in 100 years. So, why was I born? After some painful reflection, I came up with an answer I could live with. I am an organ of perception for a body that I can never know. The eye does not know about the whole complex existence of a consciousness that resides in the human body. It only knows how to be an eye. It loyally passes on whatever information it gathers to the next level to use as it will. I am an eye for whatever force animates this universe. My job this lifetime is just to see, hear, taste, touch smell, think and feel as much as I can. And to leave the campground a little better than when I found it. All that I have experienced will get passed upstairs to be processed for some use I will never understand. I can live with that.