See paradise all around you.
Change your belief that you must travel, be worldly, and experience distant lands and people in order to have a fulfilling life. In fact, you could reside on the same street for a lifetime without ever leaving and know the bliss of the Tao. Keep in mind the thought offered by Voltaire: “Paradise is where I am.” If where you are is at home, with the same people, the same photographs, and the same furniture, make it your paradise. Find joy and solace in the simple. Change your view to see the pleasure in what you have, where you’re located, and who you are. Cultivate your utopia by feeling the Tao in every cubic inch of space.
Do the Tao Now
Devote a day to food! Appreciate the mysterious intelligence that created food for your health and pleasure, and say a prayer with every connection to it. Going grocery shopping, cooking, planning a dinner party, being a dinner-party guest, eating at a restaurant, grabbing a snack, or having some popcorn at the movies are just some of the opportunities to consciously explore that connection. See these food connections as a part of the endless Tao cycle, and being in your own utopia.
81st Verse
True words are not beautiful;
beautiful words are not true.
Good men do not argue;
those who argue are not good.
Those who have virtue do not look for faults;
those who look for faults have no virtue.
Sages do not accumulate anything
but give everything to others;
having more, the more they give.
Heaven does good to all,
doing no evil to anyone.
The sage imitates it, acting
for the good of all,
and opposing himself to no one.
Living Without
Accumulating
This final verse of the Tao Te Ching provides the closing message of this entire collection of ideas: You came from no-thing-ness. The place of your origination had no things; the place of your return is one of no things. Therefore, Lao-tzu is inviting you to replace the accumulation of more stuff with the celebration of your true essence. Just as nothing is pure Tao in its formlessness, the real you is that same formlessness . . . for you are the Tao.
The Tao Te Ching attempts to attract you to a way of being that recognizes nothingness as the Tao—you could call it a God-realized way of being. In this final essay, I’ve chosen to propose that you access your nonbeing, Tao self by living without accumulating. This means giving more, arguing less, and releasing your attachment to everything in the world of the 10,000 things. Ultimately, living this way even means letting go of your attachment to your life and your body. But you can practice this right now, while you’re still living in the world.
Saint John of the Cross speaks to this way of seeing your life:
To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing.
To come to possess all
desire the possession of nothing.
To arrive at being all
desire to be nothing.
To come to the knowledge of all
desire the knowledge of nothing.
All of this wisdom of nothingness comes out of the offerings of Lao-tzu, the ancient spiritual sage who wants us to experience the bliss of being all by knowing a nonaccumulating place of nothing ness.
It is difficult to imagine a world without things, yet in this final verse of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu takes you through what such a world would look like. You don’t need beautiful words, since there is no-thing for you to describe. There is no-thing to argue about, as there are no possessions to fight over. There’s no faultfinding or blaming, for all that exists is the hidden virtue of the Tao. And finally, there is no-thing to collect, amass, or accumulate, which leaves you in a state of creative giving and supporting. “Heaven does good,” says Lao-tzu, and good is a synonym for God, which is truly the same as the Tao.
Meister Eckhart illustrates the interchangeability of the words God and Tao in this piece:
God is a being beyond being
and a nothingness beyond being.
God is nothing. No thing.
God is nothingness.
And yet God is something.
You’re encouraged in this final verse of the enduring and amazing Tao Te Ching to do all that you can to imitate heaven while you’re here in form.
Try out these suggestions from Lao-tzu as you change your thoughts, and ultimately your life, forever:
Quit accumulating points for being right!
Let go of your propensity for argument and replace it with the willingness to allow anyone with whom you have a disagreement to be right. End your quarreling ways by simply telling the other 81st Verse person something like this: “You’re right about that, and I appreciate hearing your point of view.” This ends the argument and eliminates blame and faultfinding at the same time. Change ego’s need to be right by using the Tao-based statement, “You’re right about that.” It will make your life so much more peaceful.
Reduce yourself down to zero or
Observe your body and all of your belongings, and then put them into the changing-world context. Keep this statement from Mahatma Gandhi in mind: “If you would swim on the bosom of the ocean of Truth, you must reduce yourself to zero.” So from a place of no-thing-ness or zero, become the observer, seeing what you accumulate in the world of things. From this perspective, you’ll find that nothing can ever truly be real in such a world. Practice this exercise whenever you’re feeling attached to your possessions or your point of view.
D. H. Lawrence dramatically captures this idea:
Are you willing to be sponged out,
erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?
If not, you will never really change.
Now glance again at
