Talking about power

[Bob]

I have seldom come across such an insight with regard to the Tao te Ching that I felt it important to relate.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendering of the thirty-eighth chapter of Tao te Ching:

TALKING ABOUT POWER

Great power, not clinging to power,
has true power.
Lesser power, clinging to power,
lacks true power.
Great power, doing nothing,
has nothing to do.
Lesser power, doing nothing,
has an end in view.

The good the truly good do
has no end in view.
The right the very righteous do
has an end in view.

And those who act in true obedience to law
roll up their sleeves
and make the disobedient obey.

So: when we lose the Way we find power;
losing power we find goodness;
losing goodness we find righteousness;
losing righteousness we’re left with obedience.

Obedience to law is the dry husk
of loyalty and good faith.
Opinion is the barren flower of the Way,
the beginning of ignorance.

So great-minded people
abide in the kernel not the husk,
in the fruit not the flower,
letting the one go, keeping the other.

Le Guin distills the meaning:
A vast, dense argument in a minimum of words, this poem lays out the Taoist values in steeply descending order: the Way and its power; goodness (humane feeling); righteousness (morality); and — a very distant last — obedience (law and order). The word I render as “opinion” can be read as “knowing too soon”: the mind obeying orders, judging before the evidence is in, closed to fruitful perception and learning.

Taken from A Small Dark Light: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Legacy of the Tao Te Ching and What It Continues to Teach Us About Personal and Political Power 2,500 Years Later – The Marginalian

This may be the most insightful thing I have read with regard to the eternal struggle of wisdom with power, with its brevity and poetry, it encapsulates the conflict which, in my view, explains why we are still where we are.

We tend to descend upon the externals, such as language and superficialities, and fail to reach the core wisdom. Another example is the wisdom of Hildegard of Bingen, who died around 1174, and spoke of visions that gave her the inspiration for her work, which was the beginning of ecology, but was supressed until people started rediscovering it in the 18th Century. The suspicion that surrounded her ‘divine inspiration’ or enlightenment is surely the work of those in power (mostly men) who are those accused in the poem above.

[Dan1 (Dan~)]

I like this thread.
“Power”, to me, is a play-thing.
Nothing serious about it.

In reality, Power doesn’t exist.
Slightly powerful beings are the gods.
And no-power beings are humans.

“True power is safeguarding the soft”
I didn’t quote that perfect.
But I did read Tao te Ching, the whole thing,
years ago.