Hold on to the truest tranquility
The myriad things are all active
I therefore watch their return
Everything flourishes; each returns to its root
Returning to the root is called tranquility
Tranquility is called returning to one's nature
Returning to one's nature is called constancy
Knowing constancy is called clarity
Not knowing constancy, one recklessly causes trouble
Knowing constancy is acceptance
Acceptance is impartiality
Impartiality is sovereign
Sovereign is Heaven
Heaven is Tao
Tao is eternal
The self is no more, without danger
What does this mean?
The ultimate emptiness and the truest tranquility is embracing the natural laws of entropy, and in a way, death. Everything in life breaks down and comes to rest at some point. The emptiness before conception and after death is the root one returns to. It is as much of the Tao as the moving parts in between. It's another way of saying that nothing lasts forever.
As human beings, we have a bias in thinking the opposite. We only experience the point between our first memory and our last, so its hard to grasp that there is anything else. All we know is being alive. That 'existance bias' is built into our very being. Part of our biological drive over eons of evolution that we want to live as long as possible, if only to pass along our genetics to the next generation. In a way, even that idea is a way for life to keep going past an individual's demise.
Death is that scary unescapable mystery, and as such, we try to deny or ignore death.
On a personal level, a lot of us pursue health not to be better, but to prevent ourselves from dying. We invest heavily in self-defense in both our homes and ourselves to prevent our lives being taken. We spend a lot of money for the illusion of youth in the form of "beauty" products.
By not acknowledging your own death, you remove any sense of urgency in your life. People are procrastinating their dreams away due to relatively minor obsticles. People spend the little time they have left on the easy, unfufilling things. People simply do not take care of their bodies just because they do not think they will die from no excerise and bad food. Think about those in your life you take for granted simply because you expect them to be in your life forever.
In our families, we stick grief and loss under a bad emotion to avoid. We don't talk about recently dead or dying family members. Elders are usually put into their own 'assisted living' away from everyone else during their last days. We shield our kids from death at all levels, and there is no one around to show the children how grieving and dying should be done because we are too busy trying not to.
In popular culture, we become desensitized to death through meaningless violence and murder on our entertainment. The national news ramps up a few criminal deaths for ratings but quickly loses interest in important events like war or preventable disease are taking thousands lives every day. We rarely see in the mainstream news that honors someone that is gravely ill, but only after they die like it was a big surprise it happened at all. Nowhere is mentioned the entire ecosystems we plunder and destroy to uphold the Western culture.
One day, the Bhudda asked one of his disciples how much he thinks about death. The disciple answered that he thinks about death a lot. The Bhudda replied that he was not thinking about death nearly enough. He said the disciple must think about it with every breath.
It is obvious that culturally that we also do not think about death enough. Just like the rule of opposites, you cannot have a circle of life without knowing death.
The Tao knows and accepts death, entropy and the eventual stillness of all things. There can be no true tranquility in movement. The sage expects and understands the temporary nature of reality and watches as all things return to this peaceful state. Through this, the sage can embrace and appreciate the gratefulness and beauty of everything in every moment.
How do we use it?
Live and deal with anticipatory grief for everyone. Everything is temporary in life. No one lives forever. Everyone in your life is on hospice whether they know it or not and no matter how healthy they are. I believe that we should treat everyone as such.
In much the same way, managing your grief is the same as making the kinds of emotional decisions in line with the Tao. Honesty, gratefulness, acceptance, humility and urgency are all things that are recommended for us to use when dealing with dying patients in hospice. These same things also bring us closer to the Tao and should be doing anyway with everyone.
In a way, you can compare the coping with this grief to eating like you had diabetes before you get the disease. Come to find out, people who eat like diabetics have dramatically improved health anyway. The diet itself is very much like the paleo and low-carb diets out there.
One must think if our culture is wrong about food, it could be wrong in how we think about others.
Perform this breathing exercise. Get comfortable, close your eyes and focus on your breathing. However, instead of thinking of your breath starting on the inhale, think of each breath starting at the exhale. Normally our focused breathing patterns are "inhale, pause, exhale". Instead, when starting with the pause, it should go "pause, exhale, inhale".
Keep in mind that the emptiness of your lungs is the start of the breath. It feels completely different than breathing unconciously. The pause is kind of a fragment of the Tao: the point between breathing in and breathing out is the state from which all breath begins.
The song does not end when the last note is played. The song ends when the silence is broken after the last note.
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