The
Middle Way
“All the
laws are the same—inner laws and outer laws. The same principles
drive everything in the world. If you pull a pendulum out one way, it
will swing back just as far in the other direction...The Tao is in
the middle.”
Michael A.
Singer (The Untethered Soul, p.167)
Everyone who studies the
Tao de Ching struggles with its meaning. Sometimes, we want to put
the words into some context. Doing without doing. Doing nothing and
accomplishing everything. Huh? To our Western minds, it makes no
sense. Michael Singer's metaphorical use of the pendulum helps to
clarify. He explains the action of a pendulum—it swings one way and
then the other. The distance it swings in one direction determines
the distance it swings in the other. It will continue to swing one
way and then the other, unless it is left alone; then gradually, the
swings will cover less distance and eventually, it will come to
center and stay there.
Singer maintains that we,
too, live within the laws that govern the universe. As long as the
poles of human emotion and human behavior pull us from one end to the
other, we will continue living at the extremes. He uses eating as an
example: If we go completely without food, we will die from
starvation. If we eat continuously, we will die from obesity. If we
are starving and someone puts a plate of food before us, we are
likely to gobble it up as fast as we can, thus making ourselves sick.
The Way of the Tao is the middle way. It is not swinging from one
extreme to the other, but finding the middle ground.
From an energetic
standpoint, a great deal of energy is expended swinging from one pole
to the other, whether it is emotional or behavioral—joy to
depression, distance in a relationship to constant connection, and so
on. The swinging from one pole to the other is, therefore,
inefficient—it wastes energy. Anyone whose ever been involved in an
on again/off again relationship knows the truth of this. Anyone whose
emotions swing from extreme anger to extreme joy knows that both ends
of that spectrum require a lot of energy. We exhaust ourselves with
either one. Staying centered is an efficient use of energy. Staying
centered means being present, and not pulled in either direction.
When we are able to allow the events of our lives to happen, without
engaging in extreme emotion or extreme behavior, we will have more
energy for simply living. Things will settle more quickly because we
will not be giving them momentum. That is doing without doing. That
is doing nothing and accomplishing everything.
I don't pretend to live
in the Tao—I'm still swinging a good bit. But I can at least
imagine the center, and sometimes even refrain from jumping on the
pendulum. “Baby steps, Grasshopper.” It's all practice.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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