Without stepping out the door, you can know the whole cosmos.
Without looking out the window, you can see Heaven’s course.
The further one strays, the less one knows.
Tao Te Ching, 47
The history of Western civilization is largely a story that has imagined progress to be a linear, “ever onward and upward” journey. This is certainly true of technological advancement, politics, and economics. Political power looks perpetually outward for an ever increasing persuasion of the masses to particular points of view in order to expand the borders of its economy and ideology. One finds little evidence that politics spends time looking inward, that is, giving as much thought to self-correction, or re-evaluating its own validity as the world evolves.
Economics is another other force in the world reaching ever outward for more and more resources to exploit and convert to material wealth, too often treating other humans as exploitable resources. Presumably, it is not the job of politics, economics, or technology to look inward. Wisdom, on the other hand is inward, valuing self-correction, reevaluation, and reflection. In the west such practices are relegated to the domains of psychology, spirituality, or religion, and are considered private matters with no sure application in the larger public scale. Thus, the present situations in our economies, politics, compromised health, and global environmental devastation demonstrate the problems that arise when
purely outward-looking “progress” and technology are unmoderated by wisdom. Also, these problems are but the symptoms of a faulty world-view.
That technology could be “inward looking” is not as nonsensical as it might at first seem. It simply means, for example, that in developing the technological ability to genetically modify people or make nuclear weapons, we might also develop of a degree of wisdom commensurate with such potentials, and question whether the human race really should go that route, or whether it will be possible to keep such technologies away from the ambitions of fools.
If politics looked inward, it might ask how it wants to relate to the rest of the world. Must political interactions imply competition and conflict, or can they express an honest interest in mutual benefit? Lacking any return to the inward aspect, a political world will seek to move “ever onward and upward” for some end regardless of how harmful the means. We watch honesty give way to political expediency while public information is replaced by “spin,” a euphemism for cultural deceit and propaganda. Careful thought loses its position, and we have actually come to accept that politicians do whatever is best for their own careers, regardless of whether it is best for the citizens. Consequently, there is now a chasm between how we may feel about life in our inward or personal selves and the view of life we are supposed to accept as necessary according to our ever outward looking, non-contemplative institutions.
So, we have to wonder: Can the Laozi book be at all relevant today, apart from private spirituality? People longing for naturalness and reconnection tend to find in the Tao Te Ching one of the wisest treatises ever written. Surprisingly, it presents no rules or lists of things one must do. It presents no plan for a utopian dream or even personal goals. Rather, it presents a view of life – of the Universe and the world and humanity’s place in it – as one unified field in which striving and struggling make no sense and are even counterproductive. Here is a wisdom that comes from observing both the natural world and our constructed societies, and suggests that the human propensity for controlling things leads ultimately to an unsustainable or unhealthy result. It relieves us of the burdensome illusion that only perpetual increase is good, and it allows us to be at peace with the ebb as well as the flow of life. It shows how the uses of force, dominion and control lead to an ever anxious view of the world, and reflect our ignorance of Nature’s processes.
-ANDREW BEAULAC, Author of Sitting with Lao-Tzu
Sitting with Lao-Tzu
Discovering the Power of the Timeless, the Silent, and the Invisible in a Clamorous Modern World
God as Nature Sees God
God as Nature Sees God reveals how the Tao Te Ching (also known as the Laozi) closely parallels the teachings of Jesus and illuminates core elements of the Christian faith that we often overlook or ignore.
Tao Te Ching
The most profound work of spiritual wisdom ever written. This is an original translation from the ancient Chinese text specifically intended to accurately reflect the original text while at the same time being easy to read and understand in English.