Chapter 16

Chapter 16

If you can empty your mind of all thoughts
your heart will embrace the tranquility of peace.
Watch the workings of all of creation,
but contemplate their return to the source.

All creatures in the universe
return to the point where they began.
Returning to the source is tranquility
because we submit to Heaven’s mandate.

Returning to Heaven’s mandate is called being constant.
Knowing the constant is called ‘enlightenment’.
Not knowing the constant is the source of evil deeds
because we have no roots.
By knowing the constant we can accept things as they are.
By accepting things as they are, we become impartial.
By being impartial, we become one with Heaven.
By being one with Heaven, we become one with Tao.
Being one with Tao, we are no longer concerned about
losing our life because we know the Tao is constant
and we are one with Tao.

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When people taste power and glory, they feel the huge boost to their ego and wish to hold on to that feeling of invincibility. Once you taste its intoxicating effects, it is hard to hold back or accept your downfall when you do experience such a setback. Nobody can accept his fallen grace readily. As for myself, I’m merely a minion and haven’t been close to such honors. But I can do imagine what it would feel like to be seated in a position of glory, for there were times that I thought (maybe very mistakenly) I was a better man than some of my friends in a small circle of my social relationships.

When I was young, my uncle used to tell me that at school it is usually the previously highest performing kid that kills himself and not a guy that cares whether he receives low marks on exams. A kid that is indifferent to his school performance could not care less about whether he does well or poorly on exams. On the other hand, another kid that his parents have high anticipation for lives under constant stress and pressure for having to not only satisfy himself and his parents but also to prove his uniqueness and talent to others. I do not think it is wrong to yearn for excellence. Nietzsche would precisely encourage you to cultivate yourself and strive for excellence. Nevertheless, it is better to become able to live as an ordinary man enjoying relationships with his  ompanions than to continue to despair upon having fallen from grace, should we choose between the two. Therefore, you do not have to kill yourself or become an alcoholic because of the failure that you define for yourself.

Let me try some “Laozian sidetracking” here. When I first got my job in Gangnam, Seoul, while I was still about to graduate college, I could not understand why my superiors worked so dearly to cling to their jobs. Why do not care and worry less for yourself, I thought. I could read from their faces that they were constantly worried about being fired and anxious to check whether everything was right. I will not explain in detail here why I had to leave my first workplace only after a year as a rookie. However, I will say that in hindsight I realized that they had a reason to feel nervous and even occasionally panicky and paranoid. It was precisely their anxiety that enabled them to stay in their position for over a decade. They knew that at their age they could not find a better job to replace the current one. They had kids and family to take care of, and so dreaded losing their jobs. Me, on the other hand, was relatively free from such concerns, so I acted however I wanted.(Not that I did not live under pressure because I also often felt like vomiting while having dinner alone alienated from those teammates.) I did not know I was being so naïve and even daring in that tense work environment. People also seemed to care about our boss’s approval. In fact, if they did not care as much about their employer’s view of them and how well they were doing at work, they would have already lost their lucrative job and been downgraded to some menial job elsewhere. The intense pressure that they put themselves under actually made them survive. The irony was that they so much hated having to spend long hours in the office and wanted to leave the workplace but did whatever it took – even including playing some dirty tricks on others (I was one victim) – to protect their place. I could smell in their stink their ugly desperation to drive out whomever they did not like as a new comer in the workplace; that made me feel like punching in their selfish dirty face. (For the record, I will say that now I thank them for teaching me a lesson and having considered me to be a target worthy of their political attack. I still consider those years spent in the business built and maintained through their tears and toils to be some of the prime moments of my life.)

A person that does not think he has anything to lose cannot accomplish anything. Here, I am not talking about a guy in a “deathground” mode. A person that cannot appreciate the value of something so much as to risk even his life and tranquility for it may never be able to attain it, unless by some tremendous luck he comes to have it. In some sense, you should be real desperate like you are about to fall in hell to achieve anything substantial. A guy that is idle and does not care hard enough is unlikely to spend much time for work and may make his family members or friends financially suffer for his idleness. Therefore, I am not recommending sloth as an alternative to our contemporary neurosis.

It sometimes happens that a person who feels he has nothing to lose if it is all for this particular goal actually achieves tremendous success and makes his achievement a lasting legacy in history. Look at Napoleon or Renan Cortez. (However, for another sidetracking, it should also be noted that they are two of the very few that turned out to be successful; the rest of the other guys that took the gambling were wiped out at an instant.)

So much for my Laozian sidetracking.

Let me mention Marcus Aurelius, who was a mighty emperor of the then superpower, the Roman Empire. As the stoic writer Ryan Holiday notes, he constantly reminded himself to be humble and even referred to the teachings of the stoic guru Epictetus, who was once previously a slave, for guidance on maintaining his stoicism.In fact, stoicists encourage us to have a flying bird’s view of the ordinary world affairs. For example, the usual objects of our anger appear to be so petty once looking upon them from a distance.

Let us say that the above chapter of the tao te ching encourages us to expand that bird’s view even further into the universe itself. I do not think Laozi would have known this scientific fact then, but even the earth and heaven are not eternal. In Chapter 7, Laozi notes that they are eternal because they do not live for themselves. However, everything in the universe, or even the universe itself, is in a “constant state of flux.”

Greene notes in the last chapter of the 50th law that as you consciously bring yourself closer to the realistic idea of the possibility of death, you would be able to focus your energy more on things that truly matter and less on other trivial things that do you no good in the end. He also tells us to realize the sense of the “oceanic.” We are essentially one and the same, if contemporary cosmology is telling me right – because everything in the universe exploded from a single big bang point. If a man achieves this tranquil “aloofness,” he will not probably be harmed even after falling from grace.