Verse 5 - Living Impartially

[Eva Libre]

5th Verse

 

Heaven and earth are impartial;

they see the 10,000 things as straw dogs.

The sage is not sentimental;

he treats all his people as straw dogs.

 

The sage is like heaven and earth:

To him none are especially dear,

nor is there anyone he disfavors.

He gives and gives, without condition,

offering his treasures to everyone.

 

Between heaven and earth

is a space like a bellows;

empty and inexhaustible,

the more it is used, the more it produces.

 

Hold on to the center.

Man was made to sit quietly and find

the truth within.

 

Contemplation/Meditation Verse

I will work at eliminating

     all of my judgments of others.


Do The Tao Now

 

As many times as possible today, decide to approach interactions or situations involving other people with a completely fair mind-set, which you allow and trust to guide your responses.  Do this as often as you can for an entire day with individuals, groups, friends, family members, or strangers.  Create a short sentence that you silently repeat to continually remind yourself that you're approaching this situation with an unbiased attitude, such as Guide me right now, Tao; Holy Spirit, guide me  now; or Holy Spirit, help us now.  Keeping this brief sentence on a loop in your mind will prevent judgment from habitually surfacing - but even more appealing is the feeling of relaxation and openness to whatever wants to happen in those moments of impartiality.

 

Source - Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life (Living the Wisdom of the Tao)

by Dr Wayne W Dyer

[Eva Libre]

Advice from Dr Dyer -

 

Stay in harmony with the impartial essence of the Tao

in all of your thoughts and all of your behaviors.

 

When you have a thought that excludes others, you've elected to see yourself as "special" and therefore deserving of exceptional favor from your Source of being.  The moment you've promoted yourself to this category, you've elevated your self-importance above those whom you've decided are less deserving.  Thinking this way will cause you to lose the all-encompassing power of the Tao.  Organizations - including religious groups - that designate some members as "favored" aren't centered in the Tao.  No matter how much they attempt to convince themselves and others of their spiritual connection, the act of exclusion and partiality eliminates their functioning from their true self.  In other words, if a thought or behavior divides us, it is not of God; if it unites us, it is of God.  Stay centered on this Tao that resides within you, Lao-tzu advises, and you'll never have a thought that isn't in harmony with spirit.

[Eva Libre]

Advice from Dr Dyer -

 

Offer your treasures to everyone.

 

This is what the Tao is doing at every moment - offering to all, the entire spectrum of creation.  Think of this as a simple three-step process:

 

[1]  Eliminate as many judgments of others in your thoughts as possible.  The simplest, most natural way to accomplish this is to see yourself in everyone.  Remember that you and those you judge share one thing in common - the Tao !  So rather than viewing appearances, which are really nothing more than straw dogs, see the unfolding of the Tao in those you encounter, and your criticisms and labels will dissolve.

 

[2]  Remove the word special from your vocabulary when you refer to yourself or others.  If anyone is special, then we all are.  And if we're all exceptional, then we don't need a word like that to define us, since it clearly implies that some are more favored than others !

 

[3]  Finally, implement the third step of this process by extending generosity through living the Tao impartially and connecting with the inner space of being the Tao.  In this space you'll be able to be unbiased about your possessions, recognizing that they're not exclusively yours but are rather a part of the entirety.  By unconditionally sharing and giving, you'll thrill at the experience of living the Tao and being unprejudiced.  The Tao is your truth; it resides within you.  Quietly be in the peace and joy of connecting with the inexhaustible Tao.

[Eva Libre]

From Vimala McClure - The Tao of Motherhood

5

RESPECT

 

Raise up your children with great

reverence for the Consciousness

that moves in them.  Treat them

with respect, even in their infancy,

for they are not yours.

 

Reverence and respect are not the

same as worship; children thrive

on benevolent neglect.

 

The child who feels your respect

during silences is nourished more

than the child who is constantly

fussed and chattered over.

[Eva Libre]

From Tao Te Ching - The Definitive Edition by Jonathan Star

 

Heaven and Earth have no preference

 

A man may choose one over another

          but to Heaven and Earth all are the same

The high, the low, the great, the small -

          all are given light

          all get a place to rest

 

The Sage is like Heaven and Earth

To him none are especially dear

          nor is there anyone he disfavors

He gives and gives without condition

          offering his treasure to everyone

 

 

The universe is like a bellows

          It stays empty yet is never exhausted

          It gives out yet always brings forth more

 

Man is not like this

When he blows out air like a bellows

          he becomes exhausted

Man was not made to blow out air

He was made to sit quietly and find the truth within

[Eva Libre]

From Richard Grossman - The Tao of Emerson

From James Legge - The Texts of Taoism, 1891

 

Heaven and earth do not act from any wish

          to be benevolent.

They deal with all things as the dogs of grass

          are dealt with.

 

May not the space between heaven and earth

          be compared to a bellows ?

'Tis emptied, yet it loses not its power;

'Tis moved again, and sends forth air the more.

Much speech to swift exhaustion lead we see;

Your inner being guard, and keep it free.

 

From the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Nature" and "Circles"

 

We find nature to be the circumstance

          which dwarfs every other circumstance,

And judges like a god

          all men who come to her.

 

There is no end in nature,

But every end is a beginning;

There is always another dawn risen on mid-noon,

And under every deep a lower deep opens.

 

Good as is discourse,

Silence is better, and shames it.

[Eva Libre]

Tao Te Ching - The Classic Book of Integrity and The Way by Lao-Tzu

A New Translation by Victor H Mair
based on the recently discovered Ma-Wang-Tui Manuscripts

5
(49)

 

Heaven and earth are inhumane;

          they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs.

The sage is inhumane;

          he views the common people as straw dogs.

 

The space between heaven and earth,

          how like a bellows it is !

Empty but never exhausted,

The more it pumps, the more comes out.

 

Hearing too much leads to utter exhaustion;

Better to remain in the center.

 

[Eva Libre]

Lynn's - Daode jing of Laozi

 

Heaven and Earth are not benevolent and treat the myriad things as straw dogs.

 

Heaven and Earth allow things to follow their natural bent and neither engage in conscious effort nor start anything, leaving the myriad things to manage themselves.  Thus they "are not benevolent".  The benevolent [ren] have to establish institutions and influence behavior, for they are prone to use kindness and make conscious effort.  But when institutions are established and behavior influenced, people lose their authenticity, and when subject to kindness and conscious effort, they no longer preserve their integrity.  If people do not preserve their integrity, they no longer have the capacity to uphold the full weight of their existence.  Heaven and Earth do not make the grass grow for the sake of beasts, yet beasts eat grass.  They do not produce dogs for the sake of men, yet men eat dogs.  Heaven and Earth take no conscious effort with respect to the myriad things, yet because each of the myriad things has what is appropriate for its use, not one thing is denied support.  As long as you use kindness derived from a personal perspective, it indicates a lack of capacity to leaves things to themselves.

 

The sage is not benevolent and treats the common folk as straw dogs.

 

Because the sage makes his virtue conform to that of Heaven and Earth, (1) he likens the common folk to straw dogs (2).

 

The space between Heaven and Earth, is it not just like a bellows or a mouth organ !  Empty, it can never be used up.  Active, it produces all the more.

 

Tuo [open-ended sack] here means a  paituo [bellows], and yue [pipe] means a yueyue[mouth organ]. (3)  The interior of a bellows or a mouth organ is completely empty and free of both innate tendencies [qing] and deliberate action [wei].  Thus, though empty, it can never be used up, and, when it is in action, it is impossible to exhaust its strength.  The space between Heaven and Earth just lets things follow their natural bents without the least stricture, thus it can never be used up, just as with the bellows or the mouth organ.

 

Many words lead to quick exhaustion; better to maintain emptiness within.

 

The more you apply conscious effort to something, the more you will fail.  If you set up a policy of kindness toward your people and establish words for dealing with matters, without kindness you will have no way to provide relief [ji] and without words you will have no way to establish order.  All of which is sure to result in quick exhaustion.  As with the mouth organ, maintain emptiness within, and exhaustion will never happen; take yourself out of it and leave things to themselves, and nothing will ever lack order.  If the mouth organ itself intentionally tried to make sounds, it would no longer have th capacity to provide the player with what he needs.

 

Text, in Italics above, is Wang Bi's commentary.

The notes below, are from the translator, Richard John Lynn -

(deb's note - "section" is used for verse in these notes.)

 

(1)  "Conform" translates he.  Qian Zhongshu glosses yu tiandihe qi de (makes his virtue conform to that of Heaven and Earth) as shifa tiandi (emulates Heaven and Earth).  See Qian, Guanzhui bian (The pipe-awl collection), 3:420.  Cf. Wang's commentary to section 16, eleventh passage; and section 77, first passage.

 

(2)  The prominent historian and geographer Wei Yuan (1794-1856) also did a commentary to the Laozi, in which he addresses the significance of "straw dogs" (chugou ): "People bound grass together to make dogs and used them as sacrificial offerings, but when they had concluded the ritual, they cast them aside and trampled on them" (Wei, Laozi benyi [Original meaning of the Laozi], A:6).

 

(3)  Although most commentators interpret tuoyue as a compound word, "bellows", Wang reads it as two words.  "Bellows" is clear enough, but it is uncertain what he meant byyueyue, obviously some kind of wind instrument.  A yue is the short reed pipe, and paituo, probably a variant of painang (bellows), coupled with yue (pipe[s]), gives us [pai] tuo yue, a "bellows (sack) reed pipes", a name unknown in the sources but that seems to describe the well-known classical Chinese musical instrument the sheng (reed mouth organ; Japanesesho).  The sheng resembles another instrument, the paixiao (panpipes) but has an additional sacklike resonance box (wood or metal) at the bottom or is enclosed in a pao (bottle gourd), which also serves as a resonance box, into which the player blows.  Both the bellows and the mouth organ are empty inside, but when this emptiness is activated, the apparatus or instrument starts t function.  Modern physics explains that this is all due to the action of air pressure, but the ancients thought it was the functioning of nothingness (wu).

[Eva Libre]

From Stephen Mitchell - tao te ching - A New English Version

 

The Tao doesn't take sides;

it gives birth to both good and evil.

The Master doesn't take sides;

she welcomes both saints and sinners.

 

The Tao is like a bellows:

it is empty yet infinitely capable.

The more you use it, the more it produces;

the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

 

Hold on to the center.

 

From Byron Katie - A Thousand Names For Joy 

- Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are

 

 

The Tao doesn't takes sides;

it gives birth to both good and evil.

 

The darkness, the void, the space that the mind is terrified to enter, is the beginning of all life.  It's the womb of being.  Fall in love with it, and when you do, it will immediately be taken from you, as you witness the birth of light.  The Tao doesn't take sides.  It embraces both the darkness and the light.  They're equal.

 

The Master can't take sides.  She's in love with reality, and reality includes everything - both sides of everything.  Her arms are open to it all.  She finds everything in herself: all crimes, all holiness.  She doesn't see saints as saints or sinners as sinners; they're just people who are suffering or not, believing their thoughts or not.  She doesn't see any difference between states of consciousness.  What's called bliss and what's called ordinary mind are equal; one is not a higher state than the other.  There's nothing to strive for, nothing to leave behind.  There's only one, and not even that.  It doesn't matter how you attempt to be disconnected, that's not a possibility.  Believing a stressful thought is an attempt to break the connection.  That's why it feels so uncomfortable.

 

All suffering is mental.  It has nothing to do with the body or with a person's circumstances.  You can be in great pain without any suffering at all.  How do you know you're supposed to be in pain ?  Because that's what's happening.  To live without a stressful story, to be a lover of what is, even in pain - that's heaven.  To be in pain and believe that you shouldn't be in pain - that's hell.  Pain is actually a friend.  It's nothing I want to get rid of, if I can't.  It's a sweet visitor; it can stay as long as it wants to.  (And that doesn't mean I won't take a Tylenol.)

 

Even pain is projected: it's always on its way out.  Can your body hurt when you're not conscious ?  When you're in pain and the phone rings and it's the call you've been waiting for, you mentally focus on the phone call, and there's no pain.  If your thinking changes, the pain changes.

 

I have an Israeli friend who is paralyzed from his neck to his toes.  He used to see himself as a victim, and he had all the proof - the mind is good at that.  He was certain that life was unfair.  But after doing The Work for a while, he came to realize that reality is just the way it should be.  He doesn't have a problem now.  He's a happy man in a paralyzed body.  And he didn't do anything to change his mind.  He simply questioned his thinking, and mind changed.

 

The same kind of freedom can happen to people who have lost their husbands or wives or children.  An unquestioned mind is the only world of suffering.  I was once doing The Work with some maximum-security prisoners in San Quentin, men who had been given life sentences for murder, rape, and other violent crimes.  I asked them to begin by writing down their angry or resentful thoughts: "I am angry at __________ because __________."  And then I asked each of them in turn to read the first sentence he had written.  One man was shaking with rage so uncontrollably that he couldn't finish reading his sentence, which was "I am angry at my wife because she set fire to our apartment and my little girl was burned to death."  For years he had been living in the hell of his anger, loss, and despair.  But he was an unusual man, who really wanted to know the truth.  Later in the session, after he read another statement he had written - "I need my daughter to be alive" - I asked him The Work's second question: "Can you absolutely know that that's true ?"  He went inside himself for the answer, and it blew his mind.  He said, "No, I can't absolutely know that".  I said, "Are you breathing ?"  He said, "Yes", and his face lit up.  And eventually he discovered that he didn't need his daughter to be alive, that beneath all his rage and despair he was doing just fine, and that he couldn't even absolutely know what the best thing for his daughter was.  The tears and laughter that poured out of him were the most moving things in the world.  It was a great privilege to be sitting with this amazing man.  And all he had done was question his own beliefs. 

[Eva Libre]

Dr Dyer's Essay for Verse 5 -

 

The Tao does not discriminate - period !  Like heaven and earth, it is impartial.  The Tao is the Source of all, the great invisible provider.  It doesn't show preference by giving energy to some while depriving others; rather, the basic life-sustaining components of air, sunshine, atmosphere, and rain are provided for all on our planet.  By choosing to harmonize our inner and outer consciousness with this powerful feature of the Tao, we can realize the true self that we are.  The true self is our unsentimental sage aspect that lives harmoniously with the Tao.  This aspect doesn't view life in one form as more deserving than another, and it refuses to play favorites.  Or, as Lao-tzu states, "He treats all his people as straw dogs".

 

Lao-tzu uses this term to describe how the Tao (as well as the enlightened ones) treats the 10,000 things that comprise the world of the manifest.  In Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching, he explains that "straw dogs were ritual objects, venerated before the ceremony but afterward abandoned and trampled underfoot".  In other words, Taoism reveres and respects existence impartially, as an ebb and flow that is to be revered and then released.  With impartial awareness, the sage genuinely sees the sacredness within all the straw dogs in this ceremony we call life.

 

The 5th verse encourages us to be aware of this unbiased Source and, as a bonus, to enjoy the paradoxical nature of the Tao.  The more rapport we have with the energy of the Tao and the more we're living from its all-creating perspective, the more it is available to us.  It's impossible to use it up - if we consume more, we simply receive more.  But if we attempt to hoard it, we'll experience shortages ourselves, along with the failure of having even a wisp of understanding.  The Tao and its inexhaustible powers paradoxically disappear when we attempt to exclude anyone from its unprejudiced nature.

 

The varied forms of life are illusory as far as the Tao is concerned, so no one is special or better than anyone else.  This sentiment is echoed in the Christian scriptures: "[God] sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matt. 5:45).

 

Practicing impartiality is a way to incorporate the 5th verse of the Tao Te Chine into your life, and to practice its wisdom in today's world.