"The value of philosophy is… to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find…that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect." Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy, p. 157

 

What is a philosopher?  A ‘true’ philosopher is not a seeker of wisdom, is not a thinker about wisdom, is not an expert in wisdom, is not a writer about the subject of wisdom, is not one who analyzes data – a true philosopher may be involved in all of these tasks but that is not her true essence.  To understand what it means to truly be a philosopher we must consider the words origin.

The word itself is of Greek origin: φιλοσοφία (philosophía), a compound of φίλος (phílos: friend, or lover) and σοφία (sophía: wisdom).  The term has been considered to be one coined by the ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras.  Although Socrates did not coin the term he is who I associate with as embodying the meaning of the word – he is and was a lover of wisdom.

A philosopher is first and foremost a lover.  A lover is someone who is passionate about her beloved, and in this case the beloved is wisdom.  Wisdom is imagined as and is personified in human form as: Sophia.  The word philosopher metaphorically ascribes the relationship of love between two human beings to that of the relationship of a person with wisdom.

A true philosopher is one who loves with both the mind and a body consumed with the passion and desire to be with, understand, share, know, touch, taste, join with and be consumed by her beloved.  For Socrates, as Plato presents his thoughts, love, the Greek word he uses is Eros, is a continuum of emotions and responses.  According to Socrates one could be passionately in love with someone and yet not desire to physically / sexually consummate that relationship, a love of a friend or comrade could be a non-physical / non sexual but passionate loving relationship.  For Plato’s Socrates Eros is in its underlying essence the attraction of and the desire for Beauty.  Through the pursuit of and the finding of Beauty one discovers also the True and the Good.  The passionate and physical consummation of that Eros can give birth to the beautiful in the form of a child, and that passion can also give birth to a metaphoric child in the form of the artful expression and manifestation of beauty.

To know if you are in the presence of a true philosopher listen to her metaphors – do you hear therein the metaphors of love – sexual and the non-sexual language of love?  Another way to know if you are in the presence of a true philosopher is to inquire into her sex and love life.  Does she even have a lover?  How does she treat him/her?  A true lover, honors, cherishes, respects, cares for, shares with, longs for, desires, etc., their beloved.  A true lover listens to their beloved and learns to see the world through their eyes, and very soul.  A true lover is a unity of two people in the most intimate and most profound manner possible between human beings, although as Plato/Socrates noted, this Eros need not be physically consummated, but it will be physically expressed.

A thinker, whose metaphors are those of the mind alone, detached from and devoid of references to the body can not be a lover.  One can not truly love another without a body.  A lover is one who joyfully and fully embraces their body and the feelings and emotions it stirs.  Lovers connect through their bodies with their beloved – that contact is a continuum from the chaste touch, holding, embrace and kiss, to the more ardent touching, holding embracing, kissing, suckle, caress, fondle, gaze upon, and ultimate joining with the other in that bliss of full intimate physical union.

One can be a lover and be celibate.  For example, there are nuns and monks who have been labeled mystics – their love and passion posses them – but they do not and have not consummated that love and passion.  Their words speak out with the metaphors of love and passion – they feel it to the depths of their soul – these are rare individuals who manage to be lovers without the physical consummation of that love.

But, there have been many who claimed to be, or are said to be philosophers – but these are passionless and disembodied beings, men and women cut off from their bodies, their feelings and emotions - those who are mere pretenders.  They are thus not truly capable of being passionate lovers and thus are not truly philosophers.  Be wary of the words and teachings of passionless thinkers.

Hans Jonas wrote: ‘the common secular culture was increasingly affected by a mental polarization in religious terms, leading finally to a breaking up of the former unity into exclusive camps.’ Do his words strike a chord? Do they seem to be describing the times that we are currently living in?

Actually he was writing not about our time but about conditions in Western Civilization that lasted throughout that period of time that saw the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It all started with the conquest of Alexander the Great, when the culture of Greece was exported to the entire Western world. One culture became the dominant worldview; Greek cultural influences were all-pervasive. This was a time of large urbanization and pouring into those urban settings were the displaced millions, due to war and conquest. So many people were uprooted from their place of birth, physically and spiritually. The old ways were failing or so it seemed, since old nations and old religions failed to protect. People felt a need for a new sense of meaning to fill the void that once was filled by their prior lives that had been shattered.

What happened back then was called the Hellenization of the Western World. What has been happening in our times is a comparable set of circumstances. We are experiencing the ‘conquest’ of our planet by one culture and this is resulting in a Corporate-Market-Driven-Americanization of the world. The response to this cultural conquest in our times is similar to the response people had in their time to the conquest of Alexander the Great.

Jonas states in his book that the turmoil caused by the Hellenistic conquest gave rise to the Gnostic answer: the Gnostic religions that were prevalent across the Western Hellenized World.

The word Gnostic is from the Greek word for knowledge. In this context it is being used to describe a special kind of knowledge concerning a view of the world. This special knowledge is of a secretive revelation that brings salvation. The gnostic map described the world as one filled with chaos, confusion, uncertainty, despair, pain and unrelenting suffering in large and small ways; a world that did not feel right, a world in which those values and beliefs of childhood that once made sense and felt right, no longer did. A world without the feeling of certainty and the comfort of one’s childhood beliefs and values was a world without meaning. The Gnostic view of life described the world as being a place of Hell, a place of entrapment that one has been thrown into.

The Gnostics believed they saw ‘life as it is’ and called it a Hell that they were trapped in. They did not believe that one could conceive of a ‘life as it should be’ – there was no hope for the ‘reality’ of life as they believe it to be. They could only imagine one alternative to the life they envisioned. They wished for release from this life through abandonment and escape from this Earthly and material coil.

I wish to offer an alternative to these ideas of withdrawal, escape and abandonment.

To see life as it is.

In the play Man of La Mancha by Dale Wasserman, Wasserman recounts the life of Miguel De Cervantes who created and wrote Don Quixote.  There is a moment when Cervantes, who is imprisoned and awaiting trial by the Spanish Inquisition, recounts his earlier life.  He recounts that he has seen it all: pain, suffering, cruelty and hardship.  He was a soldier and one who with his comrades had been captured by the soldiers of Islam.  He describes his comrades as being those who have seen ‘life as it is’ – who have witness first hand the harshness, chaos, brutality, cruelty, pain and suffering of the world as real as it gets.  He says of them when they were dying that they seemed to be asking: Why?

‘I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived.  When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?  Perhaps to be too practical is madness.  To surrender dreams – this may be madness.  To seek treasure where there is only trash.  Too much sanity may be madness.  And maddest of all, to see life as it is, and not as it should be.’

Life can be a living Hell; a place of despair, confusion, anxiety, fear, and turmoil.  It is most certainly this way for those caught in the midst of war - be they soldiers or civilians.  But even so called ‘ordinary’ circumstances and places can seem hellish.  On the streets of your neighborhood, in your classrooms, almost anywhere, it is quite possible, and it happens all too frequently, that someone comes along with a gun and starts shooting – at that moment you have encountered a harbinger of hell.  People die in those moments ‘senselessly’ – before their expected time.

Or consider the daily and ordinary death administered in small doses of alcohol or drugs – taken to dull the pain of daily life without meaning.  How many of us indulge in television, movies, sports, video games, music, dance, chat rooms, the list is endless, for those things we take up, if we are being honest with ourselves, not merely for fun and pleasure but to dull the pain of truly facing the reality of the meaningless monotony of our life.

So many of us are lost but we won’t or can’t admit it.  For to admit it, to see life as it is, would mean to awaken to the truth: I am in Hell.

Viktor Frankl lived through Hell and survived to write about it.  He was one of the many who were taken into the concentration camps, the Hell on Earth, the empire of Hell created by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning chronicles his life at Auschwitz and other camps.  He has seen life as it is at its worst.  He and the other prisoners of those camps have lived in Hell.

 Living in that Hell was a daily struggle to survive, survive the arbitrary brutality, the starvation, the cold, the utter despair and senselessness.

Frankl wrote: ‘Does not man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?...The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action.  There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability, suppressed.  Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stresses.’

‘Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it became clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.  Fundamentally…any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.  He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.  Dostoevsky said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

‘We who have lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

Frankl was a psychiatrist before he entered the camps and when he was liberated from that Hell he returned to that profession.  His writings chronicle his understanding of human suffering and survival, not merely the physical survival but as he notes the more important psychological and spiritual survival of individuals.  Frankl concludes that those who found their way in and out of that Hellish life were those who had within them a reason to live.  Those individuals searched within for meaning and they found it.  The key to their survival was grasping onto a belief that their life even in Hell had meaning and purpose – hence the name of Frankl’s book: Man’s search for meaning.   Finding a way is a search for finding and seeing life not as it is but as it should be.

Our lives may not be the extreme Hellish existence that Frankl faced, though it can be one of pain and suffering.  Or as I said before it can be also simply be one that seems to suck away our vitality through monotony in a job which you can not associate value or purpose.  Such a life bleeds us slowly.  Like the torture of dripping water, drip, drip, drip, it strikes us on the head, each single drop not enough to harm us at all, but the relentless and continues dripping can wear the body, the mind and the spirit down into distraction and despair.

Daily we can read and hear through the news media about poverty here and abroad, about war, murder, robbery, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, sexism, racism, religious intolerance, sectarian violence, the predications of how humanities technology is changing our planets physical environment for the worst – global warming, climate change, oil spills, poisons and toxins in our water and air. 

This is life as it is.  Is it any wonder that so many of us choose to drown ourselves, to turn to so many things, so many sources of distractions, to flee from facing this glimpse of life as it is?

Is it not madness to see our life as it is and not as it should be?

Perhaps your just overwhelmed by the claims of ‘experts’: politicians, scientists, theologians, or neighbors, friends, family or ones own spouse/lover/partner.  They all seem to be saying things that make sense but you don’t know what path to choose, what or how to decide.  Or you try to do what you think is ‘right’ but can’t seem to actually get there and you don’t know why.  You try to listen, understand and explain yourself but they and you don’t seem to hear each other – at least judging by the outcomes.

I generally will not offer much in the way of guidance in to what to specifically think and believe but this book will be a guide offering you new ways to think and to choose.  I will help you to ‘Know Thyself’ and thus to gain insight into knowing others.  Offer you ways to perceive the maps you have been given and thus using so far in life’s journeys.  Knowing that you have been given a map and you have been following its marked out routes of provided by Nature, Nurture and Culture – will make explicit what has probably been implicit and hidden from you conscious awareness – you have been living in a Matrix all along.  This book offers guidance to avoid the traps and pitfalls – how to spot and avoid those bogs, those patches of quagmire, quicksand, thickets of weeds and entanglements.

  I hope to help you way your way in your wanderings.

So do not despair of forever feeling lost and unsure of where you are headed in life no longer.  There are those who have found their way.  They only outwardly seem to wander through the meaninglessness of life that we see around us but they are not lost.  You too may become one of them.  You too can find your way.

Find Your Way

By
Gary M. Jaron
June 10, 2007
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‘Not all those who wander are lost’
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, p. 230, Unwin Paperback, 1982 edition.

‘Know Thyself.’
Inscribed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece.

[A note on the use of the third person pronoun in this book: I will use the words ‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to a generic human being.  Those who have trouble with this will have to adjust their thinking.]
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My Journey

At age eight, or nine, I had an experience similar to a mystic vision.  It came to me in a sudden insight and I was illuminated.  I felt at that moment that time ceased to move.  That I was at the center of everything and all the veils had dropped.  I felt connected to everything.  I felt at peace.  I felt complete.  I could see into the heart of human reality.  I felt the essences of Truth and it was a gift from the Divine.

It all started with a recognition that I desired more than anything to understand the nature of things – how and why things were the way there were.  But to truly and completely understand the workings of the world was a monumental task.  I realized that I could never read enough and learn enough to fully understand the nature of reality. 

Then it came to me, what I needed to do.  To be able to describe how things in the physical universe worked was beyond the ability of any one single mind to encompass in all its detail and richness.  No single mind can do it – the Territory is so vast that it requires a multitude.  But there was a task that was within the grasp of a singular mind.  The knowledge and wisdom I sought was to understand people: the hows and whys of their thinking.  This was a singular goal and a singular task that one person could accomplish.  And there was a singular key to this task.  I did not need to understand the workings of the universe.  My life’s journey was about understanding how it was that people came to believe the things that they believe.  By understanding how people were shaped I would understand human reality.  This task I could undertake.  I knew in this visionary eternal moment that the key to humanly conceived reality was simple and elegant.

I have spent my life following this grail.  This book is the culmination of that quest.  In this book for the most part you will not find proof.  In this book you will find inspiration and maps to use on your own journey, exploration and quest.  If you wish to find proof then go to the pages of my bibliography and begin your own journey through the maps that have guided me.

My vision will not provide you with answers.  My vision will provide you with a set of tools for you to explore the Territory of life.  I realized that before you go off and explore the unknown you need to orient yourself, you need to know where you are starting from.  If you venture off without knowing where you are to begin with you will get lost.  If you venture off without a compass you will get lost. 

If you venture off without a set of maps you will get lost.  Conscious awareness of your point of origin, compass and maps: these are the things I can give you.  Where you end up I can not say, but those will help you from getting lost.

Jan 30 2007
Gary Jaron

Let me begin with the premise that Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason is basically right, the maps he in detailed described are correct.  What does this mean?

First off Kant posited a ‘Copernican Revolution’ which is the following.  Before Kant’s Critique philosophers, scientists and all the rest of us believed that we could know the external world of the things around us.  Those things of the external universe were the center of our perspective and focus.  Kant said ‘No, this is not correct.’  Kant’s revolutionary idea is that we are the center of our experienced universe.  We know our own experience of the universe and the things in it.  All we can know is the ‘Phenomenon’, the appearances, and that is it.  We can never know anything, directly or indirectly of the ‘Things-In-Themselves’, the ‘Noumenon’, the stuff that makes up the universe.  Period.

Next Kant goes on to explain that there are certain ideas that we know, and additionally that we can not and did not deduce them from experience.  These ideas we have to have in order to have any sense of the universe and to in any way comprehend the incoming sense data that we are experiencing.  These ideas he called ‘A-Priori’, these include Space, Time and Causality.

Now what?  Where are these ‘A-Priori’ ideas, are they in some Platonic realm of ideas existing in the ‘ether’?  Kant never says.

But I will.

First off I will acknowledge an important point overlooked by Kant.  That point is the central key to unlocking knowledge.  This point is that we have an intimate connection with a very specific ‘Thing-In-Itself’ which we call our human body.  Our human body is made up of the same stuff as the rest of the Universe.  We are a ‘Thing-In-Itself’ that is trying to understand ourselves and the rest of those ‘Things-In-Themselves’.  The A-Priori ideas are inherent in the very structure of our human body.  It is because we are so intimately aware of our bodies that we build the ideas of Space, Time and Causality out of the experience that we have of having a body.  Kant acts like he is a disembodied mind.  Hence his failure to be able to say where and why the A-Priori ideas are real.  Once we acknowledge that we are an embodied mind then the A-Priori ideas become the metaphoric results of our experience of having a mind within a body.

To further understand the significance of this embodied perspective let me use a metaphor of maps and territory.  The Territory is Alfred Korzybski’s label for Kant’s ‘Things-In-Themselves’.  The Map is Korzybski’s label for our creative efforts to understand and explain our experience of and our exploration of those ‘Things-In-Themselves’.  The Territory is Kant’s Noumenon.  The Map is Kant’s Phenomenon.  We, humans are map makers and map users.

Now, we can not have direct knowledge of the Territory but we can have indirect knowledge.  This is where Kant got it wrong.  It is because we have a body, we are a mind inside of a Thing-In-Itself’ that we can know the A-Priori ideas.  We know that the Territory is mapable!  We can make reliable maps!  Hence we know indirectly that the Territory is ordered and has structure.  Our knowledge of the A-Priori ideas is indirect knowledge of and stems out of this order and structure that all ‘Things-In-Themselves’ possess.

Korzybski also noted that the word is never the thing, but it can be a useful tool to map out and point towards those ‘Thing-In-Itself’ when we communicate with ourselves or others.  Words and things, maps and territories, these are two sets of relations that Korzybski uses to explore and understand what Kant calls the Noumenon, to indirectly learn something about that pre-verbal and beyond verbal existence of the ‘Thing-In-Itself’.

Lao Tzu also said it well when he began The Tao Te Ching:

“The Tao [Map/Phenomenon] that can be spoken is not the True Tao [Territory/Noumenon/Thing-In-Itself].

The name [Word/Appearance/Phenomenon] that can be named is not the True Name [Noumenon/Thing-It-Self].”

Bibliography
1) Sebastian Gardner, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, 1999
2) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, 1999
3) Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933, 1957.
4) Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Translators: Jonathan Star, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English, Lok Sang Ho, Wing-Tsit Chan, R.L. Wing, and Red Pine.

Source: The Essential Writngs of Christian Mysticism edited by Bernard Mc Ginn, 2006.

From “The Life of Moses” by Gregory of Nyssa (circa 335 – 395) Christian Mystic. 

From Chapter II The Second theophany: the ascent of Mount Sinai (EX 20: 18-21)

[Note: The emphasis added to a passage was not denoted in the original text.]

However, the further the mind advances and the greater and more perfect its attention to, and knowledge of, the realm of reality becomes, the nearer, in fact, that it draws close to contemplation, so much the more is it aware of the unavailability of the divine nature to human knowledge.

The mind leaves behind all that appears, not only what the sense grasp, but also what the intelligence seems to behold and ever seeks to move further inward, until it penetrates by reason of the activity of the intelligence to what is unseen and incomprehensible and there sees God.  For it is precisely in this that true knowledge of what is sought consists, and precisely in this seeing consists, that is not seeing, because we seek what lies beyond knowledge, shrouded by incomprehensibility in all directions, as it were by some cloud.  Hence the mystical John, the same who penetrated into the shining cloud, says that ‘No one has ever seen God’ (John 1:18)  By this denial he insists that the knowledge of the divine nature is unavailable not only to men, but also to all rational creatures.

It is only when Moses has increased in knowledge confesses that he beholds God in the cloud, that is, that he knows that the divine is by nature something above all knowledge and comprehension.  For Scripture says, ‘Moses entered the darkness where God was’ (Ex 20:21).  Who is God? ‘He who,’ as David says, ‘made the darkness his hiding place’ (Ps 18:12.  for David also had been initiated into the secret mysteries in that very same shrine.

Once arrived there he is once again taught by reason what he had already learned through the cloud.  The reason for this is, I think, that our conviction on this matter might be more firmly grounded once it had been assured by the divine voice.  What the divine word above all inhibits is human assimilation of the divine to anything that we know.  Every thought and every defining conception which aims to encompass and grasp the divine nature is only forming an idol of God, without declaring him as he truly is.  Religious virtue may be distinguished in the following way.  Part deals with the divine, part deals with moral behavior, for part of religion is purity of life.  To begin with we must know how we are to think of God, that knowledge entails entertaining none of the ideas which are derived from human understanding.  The second part of virtue is taught by learning by what practices the life of virtue is realized.’

Source: The Essential Writngs of Christian Mysticism edited by Bernard Mc Ginn, 2006.

From “The Life of Moses” by Gregory of Nyssa (circa 335 – 395) Christian Mystic.

From The Third Theophany: Face to Face Vision (Ex 33:7-23)

For, he declares, ‘My face you shall not see, for no one shall see my face and live’ (Ex 33:20)

Scripture makes it plain that it is not the vision {of God} that is the cause of death.  For how should the face of life be the cause of death to those who draw near to it?  But since the Divine is naturally life giving and, further, that it is the special character of the divine nature to lie above all definitions, whoever supposes that God is one of the things he knows, is himself without life, having turned aside from The Really Real to what is supposed to be grasped by a concept.  For The Really Real is the true life and is inaccessible to our understanding.  If, then, the life giving lies beyond our knowledge, what we have grasped cannot be the life.  And what is itself not life is powerless of itself to communicate it.  Moses’ desire, therefore, is satisfied precisely in so far as his desire remains unsatisfied.

Moses is instructed through what has been said that the Divine is of itself infinite, circumscribed by no limit.  For if the Divine could be thought of as in some way limited, it would be absolutely necessary to consider what comes after it along with it.  Whatever has limit has a boundary…

Four: 1

Jonathan Star, 2000
Tao is empty
yet it fills every vessel with endless supply
Tao is hidden
yet is shines in every corner of the universe

D C Lao, 1963
The Way is empty, yet use will not drain it.
Deep, it is like the ancestor of the myriad creatures.

Lok Sang Ho, 2002
The Way (Dao) is like water that simmers slowly,
Perpetually emitting its energy without boiling over.
It is like a deep, deep pool in the mountains,
Unfathomable yet could well harbor the origin of all life forms.

Commentary
The first thing I notice is that Lok Sang Ho fleshes out the abstract metaphors of the Chinese Characters.  He gives a descriptive image; he makes concrete the abstract metaphors.  His water simmering metaphor is unique.  Most translators use the image of bowl or a well.

The metaphors all point to the idea that the Dao is an abundant source that one can draw from without depleting it.  When this image is combined with the second line you get a cosmological image of creation.  Using modern cosmology, the Dao would be the primal source out of which the Big Bang burst forth and thus filled the universe with existence.  The Dao would be the primal stuff of the universe – as Carl Sagan had said: we are all star stuff.   Lao Zi could be imagined as saying: we are all Dao Stuff.

Bringing these lines into more abstraction – the Dao is the source of creativity and creation.  The ancient Greeks imagined nine goddesses who were the Muses – those deities who assisted and helped artisans to create.  The Greeks conceived of inspiration and creativity in embodiment in the concrete imagery of divine feminine beings, where as Lao Zi’s conception was an abstract embodiment of fecundity.

Jonathan Star’s translation of the Dao as ‘hidden’ seems to spin out of the metaphors hinted at in the meanings of the Chinese character which could be and has been translated as the deep, bottomless, profound, and vastness.  And Jonathan Star is harkening back to the first chapter with the references of emptiness as being associated with the nature of the Dao.

Three: 4

Jonathan Star, 2001
When action is pure and selfless
Everything settles into its own perfect place.

D C Lau, 1963
Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

Lok Sang Ho, 2002,
Because the Sage does nothing but following
the law of nature
Nothing will deviate from their natural and orderly places.

Commentary
Jonathan Star’s adjectives of ‘pure and selfless’ have a semantic reaction differing from the others who have translated the text, his translation seems to me to moralize, something I’ve not read in the other translations of this and the previous verses.

The others who translate this verse translate the Chinese characters of Wu Wei in their familiar English form of ‘non-action’, ‘acting without doing’, ‘taking no action’, ‘not doing’, ‘not acting’, etc.  Lao Zi has presented these characters and this idea before.  Lok Sang Ho overlays this concept as being the ‘law of nature’ – the way the Dao manifests, is what I understand Lok Sang Ho to be saying.  The Dao acts without disruption, force or aggression – the Dao is like the flowing of water.

Order is thus seen as the way of the Dao – the process of how the Dao manifests itself.  The Sage teaches this way and those who learn it will live in harmony with that Order, in harmony with the Dao.  This is the action without coercive force, the action that does not disrupts, the action that is simplicity.  The way of the Dao is not the way of extremes.  There is no best in the Dao.  There are no finalities.  There are no preferences, one thing over another.  The Dao is a continuum that flows as an endless simple process.

Three: 3

Jonathan Star
With the people so pure
Who could trick them?
What clever ideas could lead them astray?

D C Lau, 1963
and ensures that the clever never dare to act.

Lok Sang Ho, 2002,
In so doing the clever people will learn
that their contrivance will not work.

Commentary
These lines present the idea of human creation as contrasted with natural creation.  And that those humans who have so created are the ‘Clever’ who are actively doing something to cloud the nature simplicity that exists for all to realize.  ‘Cleverness’ is an artificial and human construct and not existing in nature, and thus is not truly a part of the Dao.  The Dao is elegant simplicity, complexity without complications.  We humans create something artificial which we proudly offer as worthy of consideration, this is our cleverness but the Dao is natural simplicity.

Lao Zi, as the translator’s presented his words, frames the picture that the Clever are tricking, meddling and interfering.  This creation of cleverness is present as a form of deception.

But we can ask, are the Clever really deliberately trying to hide the simplicity of the Dao?  To do so means that they are aware of this true nature and are trying to keep others from recognizing it?  What if the Clever lack the conscious realization of the simplicity of the Dao?  What if they can not see and experience consciously the Dao’s true nature?  If this were so, then their action is not one of intended distortion, but the distortion of the Dao’s true nature is only the unforeseen results from their own misguided understanding.

What if all the Clever is deliberately doing is being egotistical and thrusting their own inventiveness onto others; acting as a child frantically wanting to get their parent’s attention and approval.  If the Clever do not consciously realize the Dao’s simplicity then they can not attempt to hide it from others.

What I am here suggesting is not what Lao Zi’s words are suggesting, but we are capable of our own independent thought on this and other matters.  We can be inspired to consider alternatives.  Lao Zi is not presenting dogmatic truth of an all or nothing nature.  We can ask and answer our own questions inspired by Lao Zi’s teachings.

What I am saying is that Lao Zi’s understanding of the Dao is filtered through his own preconceived perceptions and biases of humanity, society, and the natural world.  Lao Zi sees and experiences the Dao through the tinted glasses that he has been given and he has shaped himself consciously and unconsciously during the experience of his life up to the time that he put these words to paper.

I am not saying that Lao Zi is ‘wrong’ and that I am ‘right’, that would be very un-Daoist.  I am offering a yang to Lao Zi’s yin, to use that metaphor.  To understand the Dao is to realize that we humans can only get a fragmented, static understanding of a thing that is a vast dynamic interactive continuum.  The Dao that is spoken is never the complete Dao, as Lao Zi teaches us.  The Dao we speak of is only a partial vision of the Dao.