And its use is inexhaustible!
Fathomless!
Like the fountainhead of all things —
Yet crystal clear like water it seems to remain.
I do not know whose Son it is.
An image of what existed before God.
– Continuously, continuously it seems to remain. Draw upon it and it serves you with ease — Looked at but cannot be seen — listened to but cannot be heard — grasped at but cannot be touched — these three elude all our inquiries and hence blend and become one.
Not by its rising is there light,
Not by its sinking is there darkness
Unceasing, continuous
It cannot be defined
And reverts again into the realm of nothingness
That is why it is called the form of the formless
The image of nothingness
That is why it is called elusive
Meet it and you do not see its face
Follow it and you do not see its back
He who holds fast to the quality of old
Is able to know the primeval beginnings
Which are the continuity of quality.
Ph?drus read on through line after line, verse after verse of this, watched them match, fit, slip into place. Exactly. This was what he meant. This was what he’d been saying all along, only poorly, mechanistically. There was nothing vague or inexact about this book. It was as precise and definite as it could be. It was what he had been saying, only in a different language with different roots and origins. He was from another valley seeing what was in this valley, not now as a story told by strangers but as a part of the valley he was from. He was seeing it all.
He had broken the code.
He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.
Then his mind’s eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and — I don’t know what really happened — but now the slippage that Ph?drus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into in avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader, until there was nothing left to stand.
No more anything.
It all gave way from under him.
21
“You’re not very brave, are you?” Chris says.
“No”, I answer, and pull the rind of a slice of salami between my teeth to remove the meat. “But you’d be astonished at how smart I am.”
We’re down quite a way from the summit now, and the mixed pines and leafy underbrush are much higher here and more closed in than they were at this altitude on the other side of the canyon. Evidently more rain gets into this canyon. I gulp down a large quantity of water from a pot Chris has filled at the stream here, then look at him. I can see by his expression that he’s resigned himself to going down and there’s no need to lecture him or argue. We finish the lunch off with a part of a bag of candy, wash it down with another pot of water and lay back on the ground for a rest. Mountain springwater has the best taste in the world.
After a while Chris says, “I can carry a heavier load now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure”, he says, a little haughtily.
Gratefully I transfer some of the heavier stuff to his pack and we put the packs on, wriggling through the shoulder straps on the ground and then standing up. I can feel the difference in weight. He can be considerate when he’s in the mood.
From here on it looks like a slow descent. This slope has evidently been logged and there’s a lot of underbrush higher than our heads that makes it slow going. We’ll have to work our way around it.
What I want to do now in the Chautauqua is get away from intellectual abstractions of an extremely general nature and into some solid, practical, day-to-day information, and I’m not quite sure how to go about this.
One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess- makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them. Someone else gets to clean that up and it’s not a very glamorous or interesting job. You have to depress for a while before you can get down to doing it. Then, once you have depressed into a really low- key mood, it isn’t so bad.
To discover a metaphysical relationship of Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What’s important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them.
Sylvia knew what she was talking about the first day when she noticed all those people coming the other way. What did she call it? A “funeral procession.” The task now is to get back down to that procession with a wider kind of understanding than exists there now.
First of all I should say that I don’t know whether Ph?drus’ claim that Quality is the Tao is true. I don’t know of any way of testing it for truth, since all he did was simply compare his understanding of one mystic entity with another. He certainly thought they were the same, but he may not have completely understood what Quality was. Or, more likely, he may not have understood the Tao. He certainly was no sage. And there’s plenty of advice for sages in that book he would have done well to heed.
I think, furthermore, that all his metaphysical mountain climbing did absolutely nothing to further either our understanding of what Quality is or of what the Tao is. Not a thing.
That sounds like an overwhelming rejection of what he thought and said, but it isn’t. I think it’s a statement he would have agreed with himself, since any description of Quality is a kind of definition and must therefore fall short of its mark. I think he might even have said that statements of the kind he had made, which fall short of their mark, are even worse than no statement at all, since they can be easily mistaken for truth and thus retard an understanding of Quality.
No, he did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason. He showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have previously been unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I think it’s the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad quality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit of the twentieth century. I want to go at these now in as orderly a manner as possible.
We’re on steep mucky soil now that’s hard to keep a footing in. We grab branches and shrubs to steady ourselves. I take a step, then figure where my next step will be, then take this step, then look again. Soon the brush becomes so thick I see we will have to hack through it. I sit down while Chris gets the machete from the pack on
