[Tao] Knots, Knives, Jedi Knights, and Riverbeds

“[The Way] blunts the sharpness
Unravels the knots
Dims the glare
Mixes the dusts.”
— Tao te Ching, Chapter 4

Today’s chapter reveals the nature of the Tao (or the Way).

The Way is too large and deep to be filled up. As a resource, it can never be exhausted. The Tao existed before the first god. It will persist long after human “knives, knots, and lights” have crumbled into dust. It produces and suffuses the 10,000 things, but it is also greater than any of them.

The Way wears many masks. In the Christian tradition, the Tao is God’s Will — creating and guiding by being present. In New Age traditions, the Way is the Universal Spirit, or the Goddess, or the Secret — allies with a thousand names who nudge the universe toward goodness. Ernest Holmes (father of the Spiritual Living Centers) called it the Universal Creative Mind that “receives our thoughts and acts upon them.”

Or, as Reverend Obi Wan Kenobi would say, “It’s the Force: it surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

I think of the Tao as less as of a consciousness and more of a pattern: like a riverbed, supporting and containing the flow of a river. When the water’s deep, you can’t see the riverbed. But it’s still there, its stones and chasms carving 10,000 ripples on the surface of the water.

Can you fight the river and swim upstream? Of course. (If you do, expect a struggle.)

How much better to go with the flow: a leaf on the river, traveling without effort, supported by the unseen currents at work in the depths below.