Chapter 40

Chapter 40

All movement returns to the Tao.
Weakness is how the Tao works.

All of creation is born from substance.
Substance is born of nothing-ness.

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I remember an interesting discussion in “Less than Nothing” written by Slavoj Zizek. What he asked was, should we conclude based on fossils of dinosaurs that they really existed billions of years ago? The archaeological records of dinosaurs couldn’t have possibly been consciously thought of by any creature other than humans ourselves. However, even if we hadn’t unearthed their fossil records, it is obvious that it still remains true that dinosaurs did exist. Our not knowing it cannot mean that there were no dinosaurs. Meanwhile, it is also true that as of now the only significant point regarding the dinosaurs is that we know that they once existed. In other words, they have meaning only in so far as we discuss their previous existence in “our” world.

However, it is not difficult to conclude that the dinosaurs as the most dominant species had their own “world” before the advent of homo sapiens. Let us direct this viewpoint to ourselves by positing our current time within a small fixed time interval bracketed within a vast horizontal time axis representing both the past and present and the future. If we see our current time interval from the view point of a future time interval, the current state of affairs would look like some old relic of the “past.” Therefore, one may argue that the current human beings are, in a sense, living the “past.”

When Laozi says “all movement returns to the Tao,” it makes me think that we “return” to nothingness by dying. We were nothing before we were born. I have no memory of who I was before I was born.

Because all of us will eventually die at some point, we will have become relics of the past. Essentially, we are living history right now.

I can safely argue that every one of us living now will have died within the next 150 years.

In the future, every one of us will be none of us.

I know this is hard, but memento mori.