Chapter 14: Prehistoric Origins
The Tao Te Ching: Warnings and Invitations
Looked at, but cannot be seen -
That is called the Invisible (yi).
Listened to, but cannot be heard -
That is called the Inaudible (hsi).
Grasped at, but cannot be touched -
That is called the Intangible (wei).
These three elude our inquiries
And hence blend and become One.Not by its rising, is there light,
Nor by its sinking, is there darkness.
Unceasing, continuous,
It cannot be defined,
And reverts again to the realm of nothingness.That is why it is called the Form of the Formless,
The Image of Nothingness.
That is why it is called the Elusive:
Meet it and you do not see its face;
Follow it and you do not see its back.
Laotse returns here to what he opened the book with. The source cannot be named. We give it a name anyway, Tao, or God, or the force beneath everything, and the name holds for a moment and then the thing itself slips past it. So the yearning moves deeper. Past words, into the body, into the senses, into the Shen, the spirit that lives in the heart and perceives what the thinking mind cannot reach. Here Laotse shows what happens when we send those instruments too.
Most people have already felt what the reaching finds. Some would describe it as being brushed by the hand of God. The stranger on the train who hands you the exact piece you have been missing. The phone call that arrives the morning you had decided to give up. The feeling that the universe just leaned in, that something behind the ordinary surface of things briefly showed its face and then was gone, leaving only the certainty that it was real and that you were seen. The Shen recognized it before the mind could. And then ordinary life closed back over it. Every attempt to recover that moment produces nothing. It returns only when the reaching stops.
