The Tao is both light and dark, evil and good, positive and negative, north and south, life and death, female and male, being and non-being. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.
I always figured that the Tao was all of those things because they were two sides of the same coin, and the Tao was the coin–the unifying principle–in the center. To name it, I’d always thought, was to reduce it to that one aspect and therefore rob it of its duality, and hence omnipotence.
I realized as I walked tonight that there’s something more important going on here. All of these things are names we give to our imperfect understanding and conception of the things we think they represent. To name something is to build a bridge between what you understand and what you do not. To name something is to define it, to extend a metaphor of the known to the unknown. These metaphors are imperfect by nature; since the unknown, by definition, encompasses more than merely the sum of the known, these bridges we build cannot help but be rickety.
Still, these bridges are built from one to the next and on top of the previous generations’ bridges, extending shell-like back to a center at the beginning of the human mind. Perhaps it extends even further than that, twisting through dimensions in a hyper-conch that encompasses the sum of all imperfect understanding of the universe. Or, maybe not. All I know about what lies past the center is that I cannot see it, and never will.
If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.–Isaac Newton
I do know that I have a better view of this ramshackle spiral bridge coiling back through time than any who have come before me, and that our children will stand upon the bridges that we build and see even farther. They, like us, will stand at the forefront of human knowledge and, looking ahead, see the same gaping void we see before us today, though the gap we despair at today will be full of bridges by then.
So build your bridges as best you can.
Anyway, that’s enough pompous posturing for tonight. I’m going to sleep.
Oh baby know what you’re like?
You’re like my favorite underwear
It just feels right, you know it
Oh baby know how you feel?
You feel like my favorite underwear
And I’m slipping you on again tonightLeave you lyin’ on the bedroom floor
I leave you hangin’ on the bathroom door
Take you for granted, but I’ll always know exactly where you areLost you once you were hard to find
Got you back you didn’t look like mine
Thought we were falling apart but you make me feel so pretty
Don’t get your meat where you get your bread –Subliminal Criminal
