Excerpt from "Tao Te Ching / Daodejing : A Fresh Look at the Way and its Virtues"

Hello again everyone! I hope you enjoy the following excerpt from the introduction to my new book, Tao Te Ching / Daodejing: A Fresh Look at the Way and its Virtues.

The Tao Te Ching is a unique and enduring aspect of world culture. Translated almost as frequently as the Bible, the terse poetry of Lao Tsu’s classic has proven to be a literary, philosophical, and religious touchstone for generation after generation. The intensity of the writing is heightened by its brevity (just over 5,000 characters), and its sketchy, provisional tone, which can seem at odds with the complexities of the truths being addressed. In reality however, the resulting ambiguity masterfully disarms our defenses, freeing the content to work its magic on the periphery of the language mind, much like an incantation or a barely remembered dream. Like all good poetry, the Tao is not so much a finished product as an opportunity for encounter. In effect, we bring our existential concerns to the table, and the book reflects them back to us through the prism of universal experience.

This is not the place for a comprehensive overview of the themes in this terse yet remarkably rich book – a quick trip to the library will uncover an extensive literature of commentary stretching back literally thousands of years. Suffice it to say that both Taoism and Confucianism arose as very different responses to the same sociopolitical challenges. When tensions run high, there is a very natural (we might say left-hemisphere) inclination to rush in and impose order on chaos; against this, the Tao counsels the (right-hemisphere) wisdom of harmonization, grounded on holistic appraisal of the overall situation. The incredible endurance of Taoist and Confucian principles in China is testament to how accurately they reflect the two sides of human nature. Also telling is that fact that the singular pursuit of power that has marked so much of western culture over the last few centuries is now in the process of being tempered by a commensurate interest in Taoism and other esoteric teachings. In all things, including spirituality, nature abhors a vacuum. Or as the Tao Te Ching teaches, “heaviness is the root of lightness.”