Chapter 6
“The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.
It is always within you.
You can use it in any way you want.”
Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom.” Sartre claimed that we are “condemned to be free.” This is blasphemy to American ears! Freedom is our transcendent value, and we shalt not take its name in vein.
It is easy to read the final line of the chapter as saying the Dao is like a genie who can grant all of your wishes. This reflects the bastardization of Eastern religions common in New Age thinking. The disturbingly but revealingly popular The Secret is the perfect example: if you just want it hard enough, the power of your intention will bend the cosmos, quantum foam and all, to align with your will!
But the message here is the opposite. The intent is not to help you get what you want, but to help you let go of what you want. True freedom is not the power to do or get what we want; it is realizing we already have everything we need. Put another way, once you realize that the pearl of great price is “always within you,” then you can play, free from the fear that you will lose it or the desire to gain it.
If we fail to make that distinction, the Great Mother transforms into Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. If life is a slow-moving conveyor belt, Kali is the black monster eyeing us the whole time, always hungry, ravenous, gobbling us each all as we plummet like lemmings to our demise. The Big Bloom becomes the Big Bang, an aimless, entropic universe whose direction and default is death. Our reactions to the face of freedom are familiar: fight, flight, fawn, freeze. Death provokes defiance, distraction, delusion, and depression.
But according to the Daodejing, the angst and ennui of the European existentialists—and the pep pathological positivity of the American New Agers—are misguided. If we do not rage against the dying of the light, but rest in the “darkness within darkness,” we will give birth to something new. If we embrace Kali, she will embrace us back. And then, we are free to play again. What Zen calls the “Great Death” and what the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross described as the “dark night of the soul” is the portal through which we must pass to enter what Jesus called “the kingdom of heaven”—and to do so, we must become “childlike.”
But the kingdom of heaven is not some place or plane beyond earth or after death. Jesus tells us that, like the Dao, it is “within you.” (Luke 17:21)
~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.
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