52.

The world has a source.

Let’s call it the mother of everything.

Once we recognize the mother,

we then, in turn, understand her children.

Once you understand this,

you can keep close to the mother’s ways,

and your life will no longer be endangered.

Hold your tongue,

maintain healthy boundaries

and you’ll live a peaceful life.

Run your mouth,

always stay busy

and you’ll never find peace.

Written Reflection

In these hardened times, the idea of a “soft touch” in this chapter seems counter-intuitive. But at least it’s what we seem to need at the moment. Yin medicine. Fighting hatred and aggression with love and tenderness. And yet there is also a fear that we could get too cozy in the embrace of Mother Earth without wondering who’s going to push back the monsters that might consume us.

When faced with a seemingly unstoppable opponent, or seemingly hopeless cycles of life, we seem to have three basic choices to cope: ideology, inebriation, and mindfulness.

Ideology invites us to join our oppressive system by getting us to think that we are an intrinsic part of it, it is inevitable, and it is right. To think differently is treated as immoral. The blessing of ideology is that it takes away anxiety about the oppression one is under and turns it into gratitude and pride.

Inebriation is for folks who at least subconsciously recognize the injustice and oppression of the system but can’t imagine any way around it. The pain of reality then becomes numbed with actual substances like booze, or with activities in life—bread and circuses—to distract from the sorrows of the status quo.

Mindfulness is the only remedy for those who aren’t yet consigned to despair. Mindfulness is about staying awake spiritually so as to neither be tricked into the thinking of the oppressors who wish to extract our energy and leave us cast aside like husks. Mindfulness is the only way to daily confront the ways in which we get lured back into unhealthy conversations, relationships, and addictions. Mindfulness is not anxiety or paranoia about the man always trying to keep us down. Mindfulness watches the man keeping us down calmly and waits for the right moment for emancipation. Mindfulness learns what makes the man tick, what he’s after, and how we might one day file for spiritual, political, or literal divorce. Mindfulness is the context of personal liberation. It is not some superstitious pantomime nor is it a bougie commodity for sale at high end salons.

So we use here the word awareness. That’s the key to outfoxing religious wolves and anyone else who’s not after your best interest. Mindfulness is the only way to keep from falling back to spiritual sleep and thus finding ourselves falling back into unhealthy patterns of life.

For a related poem written in light of this chapter of the Tao Te Ching, click here.

The Soft Touch of Awareness (Tao Te Ching 52)