Verse 53 - Living Honorably

Contemplation/Meditation Verse

If I have even a little sense;
          I should walk in the Great Way
and my only fear would be straying.

I live honorably;
          I see myself in all others.


Do The Tao Now

Make a daily practice of opening your heart in compassion when you see someone less fortunate than yourself.  Give him or her a silent blessing rather than a thought of scorn, ridicule, blame, or indifference.  Do the same when you learn how many of “them” were killed in any skirmish - rather than rejoicing about the dead enemies, say a silent prayer of love and compassion.

Live honorably; it “just [takes] a little sense”

Source -
Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life (Living the Wisdom of the Tao)
by Dr Wayne W Dyer

Re: Verse 53 - Advice from Dr Dyer

(deb’s note - Usually Dr Dyer has 2 of these for every verse but there is only one for this verse.)
 
 

Make compassion the essential foundation
of your personal philosophy.
 
 

Feeling guilty about what you’ve amassed or wallowing in sadness over the flight of the starving won’t change things, but making compassion the essential foundation of your philosophy will.  This is one of the most significant ways of initiating the growth of a critical mass.  As that mass grows, kind hearts and actions will realign our planet:  Like-minded leaders will emerge, and gross inconsistencies will be reduced and eventually eliminated.  Mother Teresa was an outstanding example of how one person’s way of seeing the world can change the world itself:  “[I]n each [person I see],” she said, “I see the face of Christ in one of his more distressing disguises.”

“Walk in the Great Way” by doing charity work or supporting candidates for public office who embody compassionate action.  And vow to make a difference on a daily basis throughout your life, which might be as simple as refusing to join in denouncing others or categorizing them as “evil” or “defective”.  After all, so many of the wars that curently rage on our planet are rooted in religious hatred that perpetuates the imbalances pointed out in this verse of the Tao Te Ching.

In the following excerpt from the Koran, the great prophet Mohammed tells the followers of Islam to practice compassionate action.  You can use his teaching to make a daily difference during your own life:

Behave beneficently toward the neighbor
that is a kinsman and the neighbor that is
a stranger and the companion by your side.

He who behaves ill toward his neighbor is not
a believer, nor can ever be one.

One who eats his fill while his neighbor
is hungry by his side is not a believer.

Re: Verse 53 - The Tao of Emerson

From The Tao of Emerson by Richard Grossman
 
 
 
From The Texts of Taoism, 1891, by James Legge
 
 
 
If I were suddenly to become known,
 
And put in a position to conduct
 
          a government according to the great Tao,
 
What I should be most afraid of would be a boastful display.
 
 
 
The great Tao is very level and easy;
 
          But people love the byways.
 
 
 
Their courtyards and buildings shall be well kept,
 
But their fields shall be ill cultivated,
 
          and their granaries very empty.
 
They shall wear elegant and ornamented robes,
 
          carry a sharp sword at their girdle,
 
          pamper themselves in eating and drinking,
 
          and have a superabundance of property and wealth -
 
Such princes may be called robbers and boasters.
 
This is contrary to the Tao surely !
 
 
 
From the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson - ”Spiritual Laws”
 
 
 
What a man does, that he has.
 
Let him regard no good as solid,
 
          but that which is in his nature.
 
The goods of fortune may come and go
 
          like summer leaves;
 
Let him scatter them on every wind
 
          as momentary signs.
 
 
 
Virtue is the adherence in action
 
          to the nature of things,
 
And the nature of things makes it prevalent.
 
It consists in a perpetual substitution
 
          of being for seeming.
 
 
 
Why need you choose so painfully your place,
 
          and occupation, and association and modes of action?
 
For you, there is a reality, a fit place
 
          and congenial duties.

Re: Verse 53 - Jonathan Star

From Jonathan Star - Tao Te Ching - The Definitive Edition
 
 
 
If I had the least bit of wisdom
 
          I could follow the path of Tao quite well
 
My only fear would be trying to go my own way
 
The Great Path is simple and direct
 
          yet people love to take the side-routes
 
 
 
See how magnificent the courts have become
 
The women dress in colorful gowns
 
The men carry well-crafted swords
 
Food and drink overflow
 
Wealth and finery abound
 
Yet in the shadow of all this splendor
 
          the fields grow barren
 
          the granaries are all but empty
 
 
 
I say this pomp at the expense of others
 
         is like the boasting of thieves after a looting
 
Surely it is contrary to Tao
 
Surely it cuts against the grain of the whole empire

Re: Verse 53 - Stephen Mitchell & Byron Katie

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



The great Way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
Be aware when things are out of balance.
Stay centered within the Tao.



When rich speculators propser
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while to poor have nowhere to turn -
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.



From Byron Katie - A Thousand Names for Joy - Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are



                                                           The great Way is easy,
                                                           yet people prefer the side paths.



The great Way is easy.  It’s what reveals itself right here, right now.  “Do the dishes.”  “Answer the e-mail.”  “Don’t answer the e-mail.”  It’s the great Way because it’s the only way.  Whatever you do or don’t do is your contribution to reality.  Nothing could be easier.  Nothing else is required; you can’t do it wrong.



The side paths are your judgments about what you’re doing or not doing.  It makes life extremely difficult when you call what you’re doing wrong.  It makes life extremely difficult when you call what you’re doing “wrong”, “stupid”, or “unnecessary” - when you belittle it after it has been done.  To compare what you’ve done to what you should have done, to think that you need to measure up to some external standard, is a difficult path.  What is is always the way it’s supposed to be right now, and it’s always the story of a past.  You can argue with the past all you want, and after you’ve come up with the best, most persuasive, most humane reasons in the world that it should have been different, the past is what it is.  Learn from the past, by all means, but if you feel any guilt or shame about it, you are just inflicting violence on yourself, and violence doesn’t work.  The clear way, the great Way, is to begin now.



You can’t change the projected world, but you can change mind, the projector.  Just notice when things are out of balance.  You don’t have to figure it out.  There’s a built-in signal that will always let you know:  it’s called stress.  Your unquestioned thoughts about life lead you to believe that there’s something out of order, and that can never be true.  Stress allows you to know when to inquire.  Judge your neighbor, write it down, ask four questions, turn it around.  In itself, life is effortless.  If you think there’s a problem, inquire, until you can see how perfect the way of it is.

Re: Verse 53 - The Tao of Motherhood

From The Tao of Motherhood by Vimala McClure



53
 
CONSUMPTION



A wise mother keeps her child’s
life simple.  She gives away ten
thousand toys and keeps only that
which is useful.



She lets her baby gaze into her
face and at the wonderous colors
of nature.



She gives her child household
things and tells stories the same
way over and over.



Feeling that you must have
every toy, every device, every
piece of equipment merely places
objects between you and your
child.  You have to work that
much harder to provide them;
work which robs your child of his
most important stimulation -
your company.



Those who become trapped in
the cycle of getting and having
spend their children’s lives in a
kind of fog.  The best moments
are lost forever.



Ask the question:  Who really
benefits from all this
consumption?  

Re: Verse 53 - Living Honorably

“Do not handicap your children by making their lives too easy.”

“Touch is the most fundamental sense. A baby experiences
it, all over, before he is born and long before he learns to use sight,
hearing, or taste, and no human being ever ceases to need it. Keep your
children short on pocket money – but long on hugs.”

-R. A. Heinlein

Re: Verse 53 - Children's Lives

Kyle,
 
This Tao of Motherhood version of Verse 53 also caught my attention.  I am embarrassed to admit that my children have toys from the blow-out of too much in 2007 that they have yet to play with.  We are often seeking to give the older things away but the children protest they are still loved and cherished.  In all honesty, my older son is moving into a new developmental stage during the Christmas of 2007 and my husband got involved in picking out gifts.  Most are good educational projects, many science oriented, or creative building projects, but are really not age appropriate without parental invovlvement.
 
We have ever been hands on parents.  Our children have never been in a stroller.  They were ever in arms or in a back or front pack close to us and within line of sight.  A stroller always seeemed so far removed to our way of perceiving interaction with our children.  
 
We are fortunate to have the luxury of having our children around us 24/7 as we work and they play.  We can drop what we are doing fairly quickly to administer to their needs and often, simply desires for our attention.
 
It is wise advice not to let one’s child’s life pass by in a parental fog.  They grow up all too quickly.  I regretted not holding my grown daughter more when she was an infant because too quickly, she would not let me hold her, as she wanted to be up and about.  I shared that with my husband when our older son was born and he took it to heart, often holding our infant while he himself tended to his work on the computer.  When the younger son came, my husband kept his attention on the older one; as mom was in demand for baby care.  When the younger one became older, we began switching one-on-one a bit, giving of our attention to the other, to balance out our individual relationships with our children more equally.
 
Deb

Re: Verse 53 - Children's Lives

Re: Verse 53 - Dr Dyer's Essay

From Dr Dyer’s Essay on Verse 53 -
 
Imagine that you were able to view the world from a position of complete honor and oneness:  Everywhere you looked you saw the Great Way … and saw all of it as you.  From this perspective, every person who’s ever existed, or will ever exist, is a part of you, birthed by your Source.  All of life - the creatures, the land, the oceans, and the vegetation - are connected by the Tao.  From this perspective, your world would change dramatically.  If a critical mass of humanity had this same perspective, seeing the whole globe as part of ourselves would translate to the same respect for every form of life, that we have for our individual bodies.  And this unity would make the scene that Lao-tzu is describing in this passage impossible.
 
Despite all of our technological advances, the words that the great Chinese master wrote 2,500 years ago still apply.  Unfortunately, we’re far removed from walking the Great Way, for we continue to see great divisions rather than a sense of unifed oneness.  As Lao-tzu admonishes at the end of this verse, “This is not the Tao.”
 
One of my favorite translations of this 53rd verse of the Tao Te Ching was written in 1944 by Witter Bynner.  He expresses it perfectly:
 

See how fine the palaces

And see how poor the farms,

How bare the peasants’ granaries

While gentry wear embroideries

Hiding sharpened arms.

And the more they have the more they seize,

How can there be such men as these

Who never hunger, never thirst,

Yet eat and drink until they burst !
 

You can see that these conditions still exist today:  Whole continents of people experience starvation, while a few in positions of power live in opulence and grandeur.  Weapons of destruction receive funding, while millions live in poverty.  Leaders sit down to overflowing plenitude, while the masses scrounge around for ways to feed their families and heat their homes. We have a long way to go before traversing that smooth and straight Way of the Tao, for we still take “devious paths” and see the all-too-painful results of this choice every day.

But I’m not writing these words to try to change the world in one fell swoop; rather, I’m doing so to encourage you to change the way you see your world.  If you make that modification, others will gravitate toward living honorably as well.  When enough of us do this, we’ll reach a critical mass that will eliminate “the boasting of thieves after a looting”.

Begin by seeing yourself as the environment, rather than as an organism within it.  I’ve even coined a word to describe when life-forms are whole, rather than separate:  environorganisms.  Understand that you can’t survive apart from what it seems isn’t part of you - for you absolutely are the air, the water, the plants, the animals, and everyone else on the planet.  Change your worldview to one that completely understands that when anyone else is starving or living in poverty, so are you.  See yourself in all others and you’ll find the compassion, love, and willigness that replaces your belief in your uniqueness and differentness.

Lao-tzu was obviously distressed by the conditions of hard-heartedness and indifference that he observed in ancient China, so he appealed to all to live honorably through the emulation of the Tao rather than from the ego perspective of separateness.  And now he asks you to change the way you look at the blatant imbalances in your world, noting how your world changes to align with the Tao when you live honorably.

Re: Verse 53 - Thoughts on Dr Dyer's Essay

When one considers life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein or North Korea under Kim Jong II (and there are countless other examples - sadly), one sees how little our humanity has changed since Lao-tzu.  And yet it has changed never-the-less.  People are more informed and humanity is willing to act against such atrocities and imbalances in very real ways.  Of course, such actions are often messy and do not immediately alleviate the suffering they hoped to address but one must never give up that the long view will justify what is hard to understand in the short term.
 
Besides these desparate 3rd world situations, one doesn’t have to look too far to see the same behavior on another level in our modern society’s financial realm.  May the change in administration mark a change in people’s willingness to believe one can get something for nothing without cost.  Yes, there is a Santa Claus, in the activity of our inner spirit, and this activity works in gentle, natural ways that harm no one.
 
The change in perspective that Dr Dyer suggests is actually occuring within the more evolved and more willing individuals alive in the world today.  Let’s hope we reach critical mass before utter desolation reaps what’s left.
 
I myself remain hopeful; while facing potential realities that could unfold - otherwise.
 
Deb