Thoughts on the Tao Te Ching 57

Poem 57

If you want to be a great leader,

you must learn to follow the Tao.

Stop trying to control.

Let go of fixed plans and concepts,

and the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have,

the less virtuous people will be.

The more weapons you have,

the less secure people will be.

The more subsidies you have,

the less self-reliant people will be.

Therefore the Master says:

I let go of the law,

and people become honest.

I let go of economics,

and people become prosperous.

I let go of religion,

and people become serene.

I let go of all desire for the common good,

and the good becomes common as grass.

Commentary

The wonderful worker bee: Summer 2012

Control is an interesting desire. In one sense we all desire control of our own lives, and that is essentially a good desire. However, there are many who seek also to control others as if these others are actually part of their own reality. (A good philosophical sense helps in no little way here.  After all, I can ask the seminal questions: what is my reality? What is his/her reality? What is our shared reality as partners in a relationship or as workers in a company? In short, these are very important questions.  The root question, of course, that underlies them all is simply put: what is the nature of reality anyway? Putting these seminal questions will, to sustain the metaphor in our adjective, promote the growth of harmony and good leadership anyway.  So, a good sharp sense of philosophy is a good tool for any leader). I remember attending a talk years ago on teaching and management where the psychologist Dr Tony Humphreys emphasised over and over again that "all control is self-control."  How right the good Doctor is!  If I can control my own "self," then everything else falls into place, and I actually don't have to control others then at all.  In fact, the base desire to control others vanishes.  One might, of course, still legitimately desire to lead others and that is a very good thing.  However, all good Human Resource Personnel know that good leadership is not about controlling others at all.  A desire to control others results in what's termed "micro-management" which has a negative affect on all the staff including the so-called controller or "control freak."

Mallard, Phoenix Park, 2012

Flexibility, or the ability to bend with the circumstances, is an approach with works. The opposite, namely rigidity, or the inability to bend with the situation, is a method that leads to fracture of all harmony in the workplace.  Something has got to give and people do actually crack. It's the same with ideas, concepts and preconceptions.  That's what our ancient writer (some 2,500 years ago) means when he says that we must "let go of fixed plans and concepts," because that is the path of wisdom.  A leader who comes into any organisation or business with his or her ideas, plans and concepts set in stone will meet with much opposition and will eventually break or at least cause much upset amongst the staff.  Most leaders know that when all the staff have a "buy in" to whatever the plans are for the particular company or organisation that much more progress is made.  More progress is made in a harmonious atmosphere than in a disharmonious one.  Having recently completed the Ken Blanchard et al  Leader Behaviour Analysis II, the whole guiding principle is that of flexibility and awareness of the four leadership styles and the positive and negative aspects of each, and through growing awareness to be able to avoid the negative aspects and highlight the positive ones, and moreover, to be able to flexibly change one's style of leadership through awareness and practice.  Like the Myers Briggs or MBTI inventory of personality types (16 in total) once one knows one's natural type one can change this by awareness.  Of course, one will have a style or a type more natural to you, but with awareness and practice one can alter one's style or type from time to time as appropriate and then obviously return to that which is a more natural tendency for you.  In short, awareness or consciousness is all.  In fact, awareness in any mental, and indeed physical illness, is most important.  Much relief and release, if not a certain amount of healing, comes with this knowledge.

Another few lines that jump out at this commentator here are "The more subsidies you have, //the less self-reliant people will be."  As a Resource Teacher, I have found that those parents who put too much help and assistance in place for their children foster a attitude of over-dependence in their offspring, while those that allow their children more responsibility and have less fears about their future foster an attitude of independence and self-reliance in their offspring.  

Sundown, Phoenix Park, Winter 2015

However, realistically, too, there is a growing minority in all societies who need to be watched over and controlled because of the nature of their great disabilities or by virtue of their inability to conform to societies' rules, that is, through criminality and so on. However, our Taoist poet is not talking about these exceptions, but rather about the most of us who are law-abiding and responsible members of society.  It is in this context alone that the final stanza makes any sense at all.  Also, we must remember that we are dealing with poetry which is replete with simile and metaphor that abhors a literalistic or a fundamentalist interpretation.  Needless to say, the same can be said of all the religious and spiritual texts from any religious tradition.  It is only in this sense that we can read any meaning in these words of the final stanza:

Therefore the Master says:

I let go of the law,

and people become honest.

I let go of economics,

and people become prosperous.

I let go of religion,

and people become serene.

I let go of all desire for the common good,

and the good becomes common as grass.

Journal of a Soul 7

The universal call to be Mindful: The Bell

It is said well that the longest journey is from the Head to the Heart.  In making our slow way through life we have to engage both, otherwise we are in danger of doing damage to both the Self and to the Other.  The philosopher in me tells me that there is also the faculty of the Will to be engaged also.  Thinking and Feeling alone will not bring me safe and sustained along the road of being and becoming.  There is also the ethical drive in me to will to do the right thing.

When literature really speaks to me is when the author either consciously or unconsciously engages at least two of the three faculties of Head, Heart and Will.  I have just recently finished reading John McGahern’s wonderful book That They May Face The Rising Sun, and therein the author writes with a lightness of touch that can only come after much practice at his craft and after a deep melding of Head and Heart and Will.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said that the signs of a great style of writing in any author were simply the right words in the right places.

Now, to get the right words in the right places is no easy task orally, let alone in its written format.  How often do we “put out foot in it” with others by insensitively using the wrong words?  In short we often don’t engage heart and head in unison. 

Indeed, in the old days a lot of people who made it to the top were often what the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) called high Ts or high Thinkers.  Nowadays all Business and Administrative courses use many different indicators to train their students so that those who get into any position of power will know more about what makes us humans tick.  Heart and Head have to be deployed in unison for the better (I won’t say best) decisions to be made by any of us in any human encounter.

Then, there is the classic quotation from T.S.Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral which deals with the assassination of Saint Thomas a Becket which our author places in Thomas’s mouth: “It is far better to do the right thing for the right reason, than merely doing the right thing for the wrong reason.”  Now, the words I have quoted here are not verbatim, but they capture the essence of what Eliot had in mind.  It is easy, and indeed right to give money to charity.  It is perhaps easier to give it if you know that others will be impressed.  However, we all know that in this latter case the person’s motivation is selfish and ego-centric.  He or she is doing the right thing for the wrong reason.  There are, then, those who give to charity and they do so quietly – these are doing the right thing for the right reason.  Those who belong to the existentialist school speak of the second of these actions being authentic and the first inauthentic.

To travel the road to Selfhood is no easy task.  When one questions one’s motivation from time to time one often finds that we are a cauldron of contradictions.  We are a mix of motivations, and have not really sorted out what the Self is at all. 

Even the art of grafitti can call us to Meditation!

Meditation, I find, is a good tool to help the Self reach some sort of equilibrium, but it has its high points and its low points.  Let me explain.  There are some people who literally cannot sit still – they have to be up and doing all the time.  This is more than likely because sitting still will cause them to look inside to face the abyss within.  Slowing down, then, is a far too costly thing to do if it means facing what they cannot accept about themselves.  It is often crises in their lives like a heart attack, a bout of cancer, or the sickness or death of a loved one which makes them stop in no uncertain manner to face the real Self within.

Even for those of us who have looked inside and faced the abyss, all is not a garden of roses either.  Sometimes within I find a sense of a very fragile and brittle Self, a Self that can be buffeted way too much and way too easily by the winds of change.  Now, indeed, at other times I find a stronger and more solid sense of Self, too.  But, I can never guarantee which Self I shall encounter.  As I say, even though I have been meditating for years, and possibly not as often and as regularly as I should over those years is no guarantee that I still don’t have to wrestle with “my inner demons.”  That’s why meditation is no panacea, no quick cure for a troubled soul. Meditation brings us down into the abyss of the Self and we will find many frightening things below in the unconscious level of the Self.

However, that’s where the practice of literally concentrating on one thing only, say the breath can bring a stillness or, in the title of a previous blog I wrote, a Still Point – the method of concentration or still-pointedness, if you like. The other main method of meditation – that of awareness – can lead, I find to a dissipation or separation or scattering of the Self as there may be too much going on to be aware of.  Hence, to return to the method of concentration can draw the dissipated, separated and scattered parts of the Self somewhat together.

There is nothing as bad as when I am scattered or “all over the place” or confused or pulled in many directions at any one time.  It is at these times that meditation can help.  It is also at these times that I attempt to engage the Heart as well as the Head, and, indeed the Will.