We will begin a month-long meditation on the Tao Te Ching (the longest blog series to date) that will only scratch the surface of the book and will also be filled with some of the life lessons that I have learned, i.e., to say be tainted by own personal biases that stand even apart from Dyer’s.  Before I begin, I would like to thank my good friend and colleague, St. Clair Newbern IV, who on our EO business retreat last month to Marble Falls, Texas, suggested that I read this book and investigate the truths found therein.  He professed that he was able to cull many valuable life lessons from this ancient tome, and I have similarly had the same good fortune.  Obviously, I shall not explore all 81 verses, just the ones that I have found to be the most cogent and that resonate personally with me.  I have focused on only 20 of the 81 verses that have been selected for minimal redundancy and maximal impact first for me and hopefully in turn for you.  I hope you find them to be as germane for your life as I have for my own.

Let’s begin with Verse 1:

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal name.

The Tao is both named and nameless.
As nameless it is the origin of all things;
as named it is the Mother of 10,000 things.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery;
ever desiring, one sees only the manifestations.
And the mystery itself is the doorway
to all understanding.

The ineffable quality of the Tao bespeaks the paradoxical nature of Chinese thought:  the yin and the yang, two contradictory notions that can be held as one.  Western thought abhors this illogical quality in Eastern tradition.  However, is there some useful truth in all of this?  Dyer talks about how we can separate trying and doing.  Sometimes trying is doing, and sometimes they are separate ideas.  Dyer talks about the difference between wanting to love and loving, wanting to go to sleep and sleeping, and wanting to diet and dieting.  The act of allowing rather than forcing something is where the Tao resides.  Further the “naming” he talks about here is the constant desire that we have to force a category or append a label onto something in front of us.

The thing that I have worked on this past year is not forcing things, forcing relationships, forcing or imposing but ALLOWING. Sometimes, we simply try to control too much around us and we fail.  Sometimes we are consumed too much with wanting and desiring rather than enjoying what is in front of us.  Those are my personal thoughts on the abstruse nature of this verse and how it applies to my life.  Today, try to just be an open vessel.  Don’t force too much around you.  Let things unfold in front of you without the need to apply direct force on everything around you.