New Spiritual Musing: "An Old Chinese Proverb"

An Old Chinese Proverb

There`s an old Chinese proverb, which is attributed to the Taoist Master Lao Tzu (author of the Tao Te Ching), that goes like this: “Those who know, do not speak; those who speak, do not know.” Tao means the way, and the way is what C. G. Jung called the secret way of life in his commentary to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the ancient Taoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower, and reflecting upon this proverb, which has taken me years to resolve, one can see that Lao Tzu was referring to a knowledge of the Tao, or way.

Given this, this cryptic proverb can be broken down into the following less enigmatic saying: Those who know the way do not speak about the way, and those who do not know the way speak about as it as if they know the way. Still, the unyielding mystery of this wisdom saying is the way; and this is the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

Ideas for my spiritual musings can come to me from anywhere, and today’s idea came from something I read in my weekend paper, Saturday’s (July 15, 2017) Toronto Star’s Book section, in James Grainger’s review of Fiona Barton’s new novel The Child. The first paragraph arrested my attention, and one sentence kept buzzing around in my head and would not go away, and this morning I felt compelled to abandon to my creative unconscious and explore this thought in a musing. I will quote the paragraph and highlight the sentence:

“In a culture where peace, political stability and relative prosperity have been the norm for over 50 years, the aspiring suspense or horror author may well ask: what is there left for readers to fear? Not only are people living longer, healthier lives, they’ve stopped believing in an all-seeing God who punishes their transgressions. The resounding answer, if the bestseller lists (and the plot lines of binge-worthy TV series) are anything to go by, is the fear of losing a loved one, especially a child.”

This is where we are today, then; locked into an existential matrix where human life is characterized by the mortal limits of our biology and not by an expansive spiritual paradigm that embraces the concept of an immortal soul that animates the body and continues to exist after the body has expired, as ancient wisdom teachings would have us believe, like the Tao Te Ching for example. It’s no wonder that fear of death has such power over us!

It was because of this paralyzing fear that I was called to write Death, the Final Frontier, which was immediately followed by my twin soul book The Merciful Law of Divine Synchronicity, to relieve the insufferable pressure upon social consciousness exerted by the existential dread of our mortality; but—and this is the BUT that gave me the impetus to take on the challenge of today’s spiritual musing—it has become painfully clear to me that man today does not want to know if there is more to life than our five senses, because the answer is more frightening than the fear of death, as difficult as this may be to imagine.

Happily, there is much more to life than what we experience with our five senses, which the more intuitive among us can discern, as Psychologist Teresa DeCicco points to in her timely book Living Beyond the Five Senses: The Emergence of a Spiritual Being (which, as coincidence would have it, was the inspiring factor that called me to write Death, the Final Frontier), and the creative impulse of today’s spiritual musing beckons me to spell out why man fears to expand the parameters of our existential paradigm of personal meaning.

It happened innocently enough, as these kinds of insights usually do. I was having a chat with my retired neighbor, who was out walking his two little terriers and saw me reading on my front deck and stopped by to say hello, and he was telling me about his wife’s early retirement and all the time she would have on her hands, and by happy coincidence I had just read a review in The Walrus magazine of a book called The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life that Matters, by Emily Esfahani Smith, and I tore the page out of the magazine for his wife to check out; but before long Lenny, my neighbor with his feisty little terriers  and forlorn look of repressed sadness in his pale blue eyes, revealed (whether it was a defensive response to the book I suggested his wife look into, or from a deep feeling of emptiness that he hoped would be filled by the good life he and his second wife were embarking upon in her early retirement, I don’t know) that he didn’t think there was an answer to life’s big question. “This is all we got,” he said, reigning tight his aggressive little terriers.

“Not so!” I reacted, with the instincts of a mongoose. “There is an answer, Lenny. I know there is, because I found it. But no one wants to know what it is because with the answer comes the responsibility of living it, and that scares the hell out of people…”

I startled myself with my instinctive response, and Lenny was taken aback also; but this has happened before, many times in fact; as though I’m instinctively reacting to the pernicious archetypal shadow of the soul-crushing spirit of man’s nothingness, which was best expressed by Shakespeare’s famous, albeit lugubrious soliloquy:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

          But if William Shakespeare, whose perspective on life the eminent scholar Professor Harold Bloom called a “breathtaking kind of nihilism more uncanny than anything that Nietzsche apprehended,” could not expand the existential paradigm of life beyond the values “that we create or imbue events, people, things with,” then what hope was there for the average person to see the light at the end of the tunnel? No wonder people are crushed by the weight of existential dread. But I could never imagine Sisyphus happy, as the philosopher of the absurd Albert Camus did, because there is meaning and purpose to our existence.

That’s the irony. But when one finds the way, one refuses to speak about it. For two reasons: 1, for fear of scaring people; and 2, out of the knowledge that one will find the way eventually when life has made them ready, because that’s the way life works.

That’s what Lao Tzu meant by his puzzling saying, and why I said to my friendly neighbor with his much too feisty little terriers that people don’t want to know the answer to life’s big question because the responsibility would be too great to bear. I could have told him that one would find the answer eventually, but I didn’t want to introduce the concept of reincarnation which would only have opened up a whole new conversation and scared him further. And yet, the mystic poet Rumi, who knew the way, shouted with clarion certainty: “Tell it unveiled, the naked truth! The declaration’s better than the secret.” Which put me into a terribly quandary, because I didn’t know whether to speak or keep silent…

My neighbor plucked up his courage, as his two littler terriers circled around his legs anxious to walk some more, and asked me the dreaded question: “What’s the answer?”

“Consciousness,” I replied. “The purpose of life is to grow in the consciousness of what we are, and what we are is more than our mortal body; but to grow in the consciousness of our spiritual nature demands more than we’re willing to pay. That’s the premise of a book I wrote called The Pearl of Great Price that was inspired by one of Christ’s most misunderstood parables. But we’re getting into deep waters here, Lenny. Just rest assured that there is an answer, and one day, believe it or not, it will all make sense to you.”

Again, he looked at me quizzically. “Well, I can’t see it.”

“Few people can. But it’s there, I assure you.”

“Would you stake your life on it?” he said, with a grin.

“I did already. That’s the price one has to pay to find it,” I replied, and broke into an ironic laughter that puzzled my neighbor even further…

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