Change the way you look at your potential for becoming a lucky person.
Rather than telling yourself: With my luck, things aren’t going to work out for me, affirm: I am open to allowing what needs to happen. I trust luck to guide me. This change in your thinking will serve you by 55th Verse guiding you to live in the flow with the Tao. Peace will replace stress, harmony will replace effort, acceptance will replace interference and force, and good luck will replace fear. You’ll become what you think about, so even things that you previously believed were evidence of bad luck will now be viewed as what helps you move toward greater harmony.
Living by letting go will allow you to appreciate Lin Yutang’s wry observation in The Importance of Living: “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.”
Do the Tao Now
Dedicate a week to charting incidents of “things working out” without your having to control or “make” them happen. This will mean consciously choosing situations where you curb your automatic impulse to control the outcome. Relax when you want to tense up, and trust in as many situations as you can. At the end of the week, notice how changing the way you think has changed your life.
56th Verse
Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know.
Block all the passages!
Close your mouth,
cordon off your senses,
blunt your sharpness,
untie your knots,
soften your glare,
settle your dust.
This is primal union or the secret embrace.
One who knows this secret
is not moved by attachment or aversion,
swayed by profit or loss,
nor touched by honor or disgrace.
He is far beyond the cares of men
yet comes to hold the dearest place in their hearts.
This, therefore, is the highest state of man.
Living by
Silent Knowing
This is probably the best-known verse of the Tao Te Ching. In fact, the opening two lines (“Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know”) are so popular that they’ve almost become a cliché. Nevertheless, the passage’s essential message is little understood and rarely practiced.
Lao-tzu is calling you to live in the highest state of silent knowing, that place deep within you that can’t be communicated to any other. Consequently, you might want to change your thinking about whom you consider to be wise or learned. Persuasive speakers with a good command of the language, who are forceful in their pronouncements and confident in their point of view, are generally considered to have superior knowledge . . . but Lao-tzu suggests that precisely the opposite is true. Those who talk, he says, aren’t living from the place of silent knowing, so they do not know.
As you modify the way you look at this presumption, you’ll see several differences in the way your world appears. First, you’ll note that those who are compelled to pontificate and persuade are almost always tied to an attachment of some kind—perhaps it’s to a point of view, to being right, to winning, or to profiting in some way. And the more talking they do, the more they appear to be swayed by such attachments.
The second thing you’ll notice takes place within you: You begin to see your inclination and desire to persuade and convince others. Then you begin to listen more attentively, finding yourself in “the secret embrace” of the “primal union” that Lao-tzu describes. Your need to be knowledgeable or dominant is replaced by the deep realization that it’s all irrelevant, and you lose interest in seeking approval. Living in silent knowing becomes the process that casts your existence in a different light—you have less of an edge and feel settled, softer, and more centered.
As you change how you think about what it means to be intelligent and wise, you’ll come into contact with the irony that sums up this wonderfully paradoxical section of the Tao Te Ching. Lao-tzu says that the sage who lives by the Tao is “far beyond the cares of men,” yet holds “the dearest place” in his heart. I’d sum it up this way: Those who care the least about approval seem to receive it the most. Since such individuals aren’t concerned with how they’re perceived, either honorably or in disgrace, they don’t seek praise or run from it. While their calm wisdom may make them appear to be aloof, they actually end up gaining the respect of everyone.
You have this place of silent knowing within you right now. And the following is what Lao-tzu suggests for adapting the paradoxical language of this verse of the Tao Te Ching to your world:
Block all the passages!
Get honest with yourself about wanting to win the favor of others. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, and you’ll never succeed by droning on and on. Remember that “those who talk do not know,” or as one translation of this verse simply states, “Shut your mouth.” Silence is your evidence of inner knowing. Talking to convince others actually says more about your need to be right than their need to hear what you have to say! So rather than trying to persuade others, keep quiet . . . just enjoy that deeply satisfying inner awareness.
Use the acronym BUSS to remember
the four directives of this verse.
—Blunt your sharpness. Do this by listening to yourself
