Or, don’t worry about those who know too much; they just get tenure.

Bestow no honors,
and reduce contentiousness.

Cling to no treasures,
and create no thieves.

Make no seductive displays,
and hearts and minds remain settled.

The sage governs
by emptying minds and hearts
and filling bellies;
by weakening wishes and strengthening bones;
by leading away from pointless learning
and the labyrinths of desire;
by inhibiting the actions of those who know
too much.

Practicing not-acting (wei wu wei)
allows natural order to be restored. (trans. Hamill)

I’ve been wrestling with this one a little bit. The uncompromising tone of the verse’s rejection startles me. But you have to like that about the Tao Te Ching; as Le Guin points out, Lao Tzu is not “softheaded”.

The America I live in today has two main narratives it offers to its members. Obviously if you don’t like these you can pick another on offer, but a lot of the more divisive ones lead to some very dark places. The two that I am thinking of are these:

1. Feed the mind and heart with the ambition for success
2. Feed the belly with luxuries bought with the coin of success

They connect nicely to one another, and they also connect people very nicely together. This is the amazing thing about capitalism; it’s very orderly, and yet to most people it involves it feels like a very light touch.

I have to admit that I like these narratives sometimes. They beat alternatives like “Fear the other above all”, although admittedly they sometimes use that narrative for convenient gain. But they are terribly, terribly difficult to escape when you have lived inside them for too long. And sometimes they can make a very simple joy very difficult to find.

I was walking down Park Street in Portland today, a part of the peninsula I don’t usually find myself in. The trees were turning, and the wind was blowing, and it was a particularly cold day. I was thinking about the idea of emptying your mind. Whenever I begin to think about this, I tend to visualize a bunch of doors closing on my skull. However silly this sounds, thinking of this makes me feel… congested. This time, I thought of the narrative of the day spinning around in my head, and the other narratives I was either trying to avoid or using to avoid. I thought of my mind just sort of slipping away from this narrative and letting it flow on above me. When I did this I suddenly realized I was happy. Not that the act had made me happy, but that letting go of everything in front of me and everything behind me let me understand that in that moment, watching the yellow leaves blow, I was just happy.