Dao Du Jour II, Day 8: This is Ice

Chapter 8: Easy by Nature

“True goodness

is like water.

Water’s good

for everything.

It doesn’t compete.

It goes right

to the low loathsome places,

and so finds the way.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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I have at long last gotten around to reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the high-water (or perhaps low-water?) mark of medieval literature. In part one, Inferno, a central conceit of Dante’s cosmology is the “Harrowing of Hell,” an apocryphal anecdote in which Christ descended to Hell after dying on the cross and granted salvation to the deserving dead. It’s perhaps the most graphic depiction of the Jesus move: to embrace suffering rather than try to escape it.

One of the most surprising things about Dante’s Hell is that its floor is not fire, but ice. There is a “logical” reason for this in Dante’s cosmology: since the sun is the center of the universe and Hell is the center of the Earth, Hell is the farthest from the sun, with the sun, of course, representing God. Satan rests at the bottom of the world imprisoned in a block of ice, incessantly beating his wings and generating a fierce wind that keeps the ice frozen. Satan “competes” by trying to fly up to Heaven.

But ice, of course, is water in disguise. Stuck in the blackest pit of Hell, Satan is so surrounded by true goodness that he can’t see it. As Ken Wilber puts it, spirit is not hard to find, but impossible to avoid.

If you try to compete with water, you’ll always lose, because water is playing a different game than you are. Stop beating your wings.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”