Tao Te Ching, Verse 1, Part III

“The Ineffable, about which is spoken, is not the eternal Ineffable
A name for the Unnameable, is but a name
The Unnameable is what makes everything what it is
By naming things you divide the Indivisible
Only one who gives up all his desires can experience the Indivisible
One who still cherishes desires, will experience only dissension
Both will see the same reality, but experience it differently
One who goes from the false reality into the other,
Will pass through the narrow gate and receive the secret of true life”
(Tao Te Ching, Verse 1, Anonymous Translation)

This is essentially an experiment and I’m not entirely sure how I want to go about it. One of the difficulties I’ve had with blogging in the past is the struggle with the desire to present a well-reasoned finished product. I simply do not have time for that and it is precisely that sort of desire that has inhibited my previous attempts to write about the tao. So I’m going to have to try a different approach. My thought is that I will approach each verse from a bunch of different directions until I feel like I’ve dealt with it adequately. I’m going to deal with one verse a month and I’m going to try to write for at least ten minutes a day until I feel like I’ve dealt with it adequately. If I can do that in one post, so be it; if it takes thirty-one, that’s just the way it goes. School’s about to start up again and once again I will be very busy, so most of these posts will be extemporaneous. Many of them will not be very good and I suspect that it’s going to take me a while to figure out what I’m doing. That’s ten minutes, so if nothing else, these posts will be short.