Die while you’re alive!
In your imagination, contemplate the death of your physical shell: Visualize it lying there lifeless, and observe how you, the witness, aren’t identified with this corpse. Now bring that same attention to your body as it gets up and goes about its daily tasks. Nothing could harm your human form when it was dead, and nothing can harm you now because you are not that body—you’re the invisible witnessing essence. Remain in this realization, knowing that you’ve experienced the death of your earthly container as your primary source of identification. In this new awareness, you’re impenetrable and free. Here’s how Leonardo da Vinci expressed the message of this verse of the Tao Te Ching: “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” Do this now, while you’re still alive.
Do the Tao Now
This Tao exercise is an inner-vision quest in which you picture yourself as immune to harm. Create your own imagined picture of danger, or draw on the 50th verse of the Tao Te Ching for threats to your life. Tigers jump at you and miss, swords are thrust at you but do no damage, bombs explode but you’re unscathed. . . . Keep this image of yourself as incapable of being harmed regardless of what goes on in your body. Then use this “witness to your immortality” vision to help you activate dormant protective forces that will accommodate you in fulfilling what you’ve imagined.
51st Verse
The Way connects all living beings to their Source.
It springs into existence,
unconscious, perfect, free;
takes on a physical body;
lets circumstances complete it.
Therefore all beings honor the Way
and value its virtue.
They have not been commanded to worship the Tao and do homage to virtue,
but they always do so spontaneously.
The Tao gives them life.
Virtue nourishes and nurtures them,
rears and shelters and protects them.
The Tao produces but does not possess;
the Tao gives without expecting;
the Tao fosters growth without ruling.
This is called hidden virtue.
Living by
Hidden Virtue
This passage encourages you to discover that quality within you that protects, nurtures, and shelters automatically, “without ruling.” Consciously living by hidden virtue probably means changing many of the ways in which you see your role in the grand scheme of things. And a natural starting point would be the way you explain the mystery of how life begins.
If you had to describe your creation, you’d most likely say that you originated through an act of commingling between your biological parents. If that’s the only explanation for your existence, then it excludes the spontaneity and mystery that living by hidden virtue offers you. Operating in this new way expands and redefines your conception and birth, and the world changes as a result of your modified viewpoint.
Living by hidden virtue allows you to get the most out of life because it means seeing that it’s your choice and responsibility to decide how you’re going to spend it. Not living by hidden virtue, on the other hand, ensures that your role in a family or culture is assigned at birth (or even conception), with predetermined expectations about how you should and will function. Your days become filled with stressful attempts to please those to whom you’re biologcally related. You experience the nagging self-criticism that you’re disappointing a parent or grandparent, along with unsettling desires to be free of the pressure of your gender or placement in a designated family. Trying to operate within this belief system can consequently keep you trapped in an unpleasant and intolerable role of servitude and obsequiousness.
In the 51st verse of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu asks you to expand your vision and begin to see yourself as a creation of the Tao. Imagine that the tiny seedling that was you didn’t come from another particle, but rather from an invisible Source. And this Source that sprung you into existence, herein called “the Way,” has no preconceived doctrine dictating what you should do, whom you should listen to, where you should live, or how you should worship. The Source, your great Mother, has no investment in the choices you make during your individual journey—it knows that the seedling that was you is perfect and free to complete itself in whatever way it chooses. This Mother, which is the Tao, has no expectations for you . . . no demands, no battles or wars for you to fight, no history to live up to.
The Chinese refer to this hidden entity that brought you into existence as Te. I’m referring to Te here as “virtue” or “character.” And Jonathan Star’s translation of the Tao Te Ching interprets it in this verse as follows:
Though Tao gives life to all things,
Te is what cultivates them.
Te is that magic power which
raises and rears them,
completes and prepares them,
comforts and protects them.
Te, then, is the virtue that’s deep within you and all of creation. This isn’t a force that guarantees the physical shell will never die; it’s more a characteristic that allows you to move through the material world in your body, perfectly aligned with the creative originating force. Read this verse as a reminder that you’re protected and completed by your ultimate originating Source, which isn’t the same as guaranteeing your security in this phenomenal world. Helen Keller 51st Verse was speaking of this very thing when she stated, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature . . .”
The 51st verse is about learning to trust by changing your view of life to include Te, or hidden virtue. It’s about seeing yourself as a member of
