Forty - From Nothing
Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.
Halfway. At the midpoint of the Tao Te Ching, we come again to what I think of as the central mystery of Taoism. From nothing, everything. In the margin of my text, I wrote during my Zen class with Ben Wren a single word: “Femininity.” The ideas central to this chapter are often considered feminine qualities, returning and yielding. And most importantly, the pregnant void. The Void that is the mother of us all.
In Infinity and Mind, Rudy Rucker talks about the infinite “Mindscape” out of which the human mind creates the content of the conceptual world. In his sense of the term, humans participate in a special way in the unboundedness of the infinite. This concept and similar representations of it in Descartes’ Meditations and Noam Chomksy’s reinvisioning of Rationalistic theories of mind have contributed greatly to my own understanding of the ideas so central to Chapter Forty of Lao Tsu’s work and of Taoism in general. If we each and every human have a kind of mirror of this pregnant void somehow in ourselves, perhaps the idea of being from not being is not so outlandish. From the point of view of language, the subject matter of both Descartes and Chomsky’s discussion of these ideas, we all can see the truth of the fact that it is not so hard to formulate a meaningful sentence that no other human being has ever uttered. For Descartes and Chomsky, the native creative impulse within us made us very special beings indeed. By analogy, perhaps we can apply this feature of the human mind to a picture of Being as a whole. In this sense, is it so outlandish to believe that “Being is born of not being”?