Chapter 14
“Look, and it can’t be seen.
Listen, and it can’t be heard.
Reach, and it can’t be grasped.”
~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.
As the saying goes, we do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
Our seeing is always from an angle, refracted through our perspective. All seeing is seeing as. Our perspective binds us to reality, but also blinds us from it. That doesn’t mean our perspective should—or could!—be abandoned; as C.S. Lewis put it, “to see through everything is the same as not to see.” That way madness lies. What it means is that our perspective is not fixed, but fluid. And a facility to “take subject as object,” in the words of psychologist Robert Kegan, is the royal road to reality and the guarantor of growth.
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”