Use the acronym BUSS to remember
the four directives of this verse.
—Blunt your sharpness. Do this by listening to yourself before you let your judgments attack someone else. A better course of action 56th Verse is to just listen, and then silently offer loving compassion to both yourself and the other person.
—Untie your knots. Detach from what keeps you tied to worldly patterns. Untie the knots that bind you to a life that’s dedicated to showing profit and demonstrating victory, and replace them with silently contemplating the Tao in “the secret embrace.”
—Soften your glare. Notice when your need to be right is glaringly obvious, and let the soft underside of your being replace your rigid stance. Your impulse to glower at external events is alerting you that you’re out of touch with your inner silent knowing.
—Settle your dust. Don’t kick it up in the first place! Realize your inclination to stir up dust when you feel a diatribe about to erupt on how others ought to be behaving. Stop in the middle of pounding the table or angrily screaming and just observe yourself. Since your emotions are like waves on the ocean, learn to watch them return to the vast, calm, all-knowing Source.
Do the Tao Now
Spend an hour, a day, a week, or a month practicing not giving unsolicited advice. Stop yourself for an instant and call upon your silent knowing. Ask a question, rather than giving advice or citing an example from your life, and then just listen to yourself and the other person. As Lao-tzu would like you to know, that’s “the highest state of man.”
57th Verse
If you want to be a great leader,
you must learn to follow the Tao.
Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
and the world will govern itself.
How do I know this is so?
Because in this world,
the greater the restrictions and prohibitions,
the more people are impoverished;
the more advanced the weapons of state,
the darker the nation;
the more artful and crafty the plan,
the stranger the outcome;
the more laws are posted,
the more thieves appear.
Therefore the sage says:
I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and people become rich.
If I keep from imposing on people,
they become themselves.
Living Without
Authoritarianism
In this and some of the following chapters of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu counsels the rulers of 2,500 years ago on how and why to pursue a high quality of leadership. His advice is pertinent today, in the 21st century, to all forms of leadership, including government, business, and, in particular, parenting.
The essential message in this 57th verse is to allow rather than interfere. Now I don’t interpret this to mean letting an infant crawl into traffic or leaving a child alone near a swimming pool—obviously, you must be sensible when supervising those who could harm themselves or others. What I believe Lao-tzu is conveying here is that allowing is quite often the highest form of leadership. He states that “more people are impoverished” in societies with excessive restrictions and prohibitions; the same can be true in families with commandments that must be obeyed without question. The more authoritarian any system is, the more outlaws will appear.
On the other hand, when children are encouraged to explore and exercise their inquisitiveness, they’re inspired to be their best with little need for regulation. So when you change the way you view the need for rules, family members will tend to make decisions based on what’s best for everyone rather than themselves. See what happens, for instance, if you drop an absolute curfew time for your teenagers, asking them to just be sensible about when they come home and to notify you if they’re going to be later than normal. You may find that because you didn’t impose yourself on them, they end up coming home even earlier than when they had a strict curfew governing their conduct.
Examine the restrictions that you enforce in your family. Remember that effective parents don’t want to be leaned on; they want to make leaning unnecessary. After all, you want your children to be responsible, healthy, successful, and honest—not simply because you’re there to monitor them, but because it is within their nature to do so. So set an example and let them see that it’s possible to be self-sufficient and enormously successful. Allow them to learn to trust in their highest nature, rather than having to thumb through a rule book to decide what’s right.
Change the way you look at the need for edicts, laws, and prohibitions, and see yourself as someone who doesn’t need to rule with an iron fist. Then enjoy taking this revised view of your leadership abilities into every area of your life where you’re considered to be “the boss.”
What follows is some 21st-century advice based on this verse that was written 2,500 years ago:
Practice the art of allowing yourself.
Begin by letting yourself be more spontaneous and less regimented in your daily life: Take a trip without first planning it. Go where you’re instinctively guided to go. Tell the authoritarian part of you to take a break. Introduce a different side to yourself and the world by affirming: I am free to be myself. I do not have to live by anyone else’s rules, and I release the need for laws to regulate my behavior.
Practice the art of allowing others.
Catch yourself when you’re about to cite a rule as a reason for saying no to a child or someone you supervise, and instead consider the ramifications of saying nothing and just observing. When you change the way you look at your role as a leader, you’ll find that very few edicts are necessary for people to conduct the business of their lives. Everyone has a strong sense of what they want to do, 57th Verse what limits they have, and how to actualize their dreams. Be like the Tao—allow others, and enjoy how your nonauthoritarian leadership inspires them to be themselves.
Do the Tao Now
Make time to do something you’ve never done before—it could be walking barefoot in the rain, taking a yoga class, speaking before a group at a Toastmasters Club, playing a game of touch football, jumping out of an airplane in a parachute, or anything else you’ve always wanted to do. Recognize that you’ve created restrictions for yourself that keep you from new and expanding experiences, and find the time now to close your personal rule book and plunge in where you’ve never before wandered. Also, make time to give those in your charge an opportunity to do the same, enjoying how much they accomplish with minimal or no action on your part.
58th Verse
When the ruler knows his own heart,
the people are simple and pure.
When he meddles with their lives,
they become restless and disturbed.
Bad fortune is what good fortune leans on;
good fortune is what bad fortune hides in.
Who knows the ultimate end of this process?
Is there no norm of right?
Yet what is normal soon becomes abnormal;
peoples’s confusion is indeed long-standing.
Thus the master is content to serve as an example
and not to impose his will.
He is pointed but does not pierce;
he straightens but does not disrupt;
he illuminates but does not dazzle.
Living Untroubled by
Good or Bad Fortune
The world of the 10,000 things is also called “the world of the changing.” You see it in your ever-altering life, even as you want everything to be stable and predictable. However, all things on our planet are in constant motion. As Albert Einstein once observed, “Nothing happens until something moves.” This 58th verse of the Tao Te Ching stresses that there’s another way to see the world, one that virtually guarantees that you’ll be untroubled by good or bad fortune. Instead of only noticing the constantly
shifting energy pattern of the material world, this verse invites you to let yourself focus on the unchanging Tao.
Like most humans, you probably want your surroundings to be permanent, steady, reliable, secure, and predictable. However, your reality unequivocally insists that you take into account the opposite and unpredictable that are present in every experience you have. After all, even the landscape that surrounds you is far from orderly: Mountain ranges go up and then down into valleys. Trees tower over shrubs, and cloud formations are ominously black at times and fluffy white at others. In every perfectly sunny day, there’s a storm hiding, and in every rainstorm lies a drought waiting its turn. Up and down and the unexpected are the norm of nature; hills and dales are the way of the 10,000 things.
Change your view of the peaks and valleys of all of life to an attitude that allows you to discover what’s hidden in both of those experiences. Begin to see wholeness rather than good or bad fortune. See opposites as parts of oneness, rather than disrupting surprises. In a world of pure Taoist unity, there’s no good or bad luck; it’s indivisible. What you’re calling “bad” fortune has “good” just waiting to emerge because it’s the other half.
Lao-tzu’s advice for applying the 58th verse to today’s world would probably include the following:
See wholeness in place of good or bad fortune.
When anyone is in the midst of an experience you believe is fortunate, such as a blissful relationship, financial success, excellent health, a great job with a new promotion, or children excelling in school, know that all is subject to change. Accumulated wealth has poverty hidden in it; popularity has nonrecognition camouflaged in it, too. And, of course, the same is true during the periods that are generally thought of as unfortunate.
Your life itself is the perfect place to personalize your ability to live untroubled by good or bad fortune, for you have the opportunity at every stage to see wholeness. So rather than calling youth an aspect of “good fortune” and old age a mark of “bad fortune,” know that the youth you were is part of the wholeness of your old age. The elderly individual you may become is part of the wholeness of your development through the levels of change that are your physical existence. Life has death concealed in it. So know your own heart and let your conduct be consistent with the Tao by not imposing your will—be pointed, straight, and illuminating without piercing, disrupting, or dazzling.
When bad fortune feels so troublesome that you can’t get unstuck, see good fortune leaning on it.
When you feel overpoweringly discouraged during a trip through the valley of despair, it can feel as if that’s all there is. If you’re unable to see a circumstance or situation as part of a larger picture, remind yourself that good fortune is leaning on this bad one, just as morning follows the darkest night. With wholeness as a backdrop, rely on your knowledge of day following night at these times. Keep 58th Verse in mind that when you’ve reached the valley floor, the only direction you can go is upward. Things definitely will get better; your luck must change; scarcity has to turn into abundance. This is because good fortune is invisibly there in all moments of despair, and you want to learn to live untroubled by them both.
Do the Tao Now
Spend a day noticing what aspects of life fall into the categories of “fortunate” or “unfortunate.” List them under their titles at the end of the day, and then explore each of them when you won’t be interrupted. Allow yourself to either feel each one physically in your body or see it as an image that presents itself to you. Without trying to change it in any way, allow yourself to observe the subject with your eyes closed. Just as if it were a kaleidoscope (or life itself), watch it and permit it to flow through you—the way the clouds drift in the sky, night turns into day, rain evaporates . . . and how confusion comes and goes when you’re living untroubled by good or bad fortune.
59th Verse
In governing people and serving nature,
nothing surpasses thrift and moderation.
Restraint begins with giving up one’s own ideas.
This depends on virtue gathered in the past.
If there is a good store of virtue, then nothing is impossible.
If nothing is impossible, then there are no limits.
If a man knows no limits, he is fit to lead.
This is the way to be deeply rooted and firmly planted in the Tao, the secret of long life and lasting vision.
Living by Thrift
and Moderation
There are four words that crop up repeatedly in many of the translations of this passage of the Tao Te Ching: restraint, frugality, moderation, and thrift. Here, Lao-tzu is advising you to examine the way you look at these qualities in relation to your supervisory and parenting roles—he doesn’t say that you should sit on the sidelines and do nothing, but he does counsel you to practice self-control. When you cultivate a style of leadership that creates “a good store of virtue, then nothing is impossible,” for there are no limits.
Living in thrift and moderation means being in harmony with the world through your generous nature. Rather than continually prodding, directing, giving orders, setting down rules, and demanding obedience, it’s important to be a leader who accumulates a warehouse full of virtue by living in accordance with the Tao. When that’s what you have to give away, you’ll naturally interfere less. Feel joyful knowing that the example you’re modeling is helping others make the right choices, as this is the essence of Tao leadership. As Lao-tzu specifically states, “If a man knows no limits, he is fit to lead.”
People whose lives are run by rules, dogma, and fear can only do what they’ve been told to do . . . nothing more. The options for self-direction are nonexistent for the blindly obedient, so practice restraint, moderation, frugality, and thrift when making pronouncements about how others must behave. Children raised in families where that blind obedience is demanded have the highest levels of prejudice when they become adults. Why? Because they’ve been taught to “prejudge” what’s acceptable, according to someone in a position to lead them. That’s why it’s so vital to give your kids an example of leadership that encourages them to make choices based on higher standards.
I have a gift from my daughter Saje that I’ve placed on my desk, which I’ve titled Nothing Is Impossible. It’s a green plant growing out of a rock—there’s no dirt or earth, only hard rock, yet it thrives, despite what all of us have been taught to believe. When Saje gave this to me, she remarked that it reminded her of me because I’ve always said that I refuse to believe in anything being impossible. My plant helps me remember that nature knows no limits, and that I am as much a part of nature as both the rock and the greenery growing within that hard stone.
Lao-tzu reminds you that “if nothing is impossible, then there are no limits.” So practice living without limits by gathering virtue and modeling it. When you do, you’ll see the “lasting vision” in those you’ve been selected to lead in one way or another, and they’ll see it in you, too. And put the wisdom of this 59th verse to work for you by taking these suggestions:
Gather as much virtue as you possibly can.
For years I practiced gathering virtue without realizing it. I sent hundreds of thousands of books to individuals and organizations at my own expense, getting into the habit of beginning each day with this act of love. I spent a great deal of time giving away much of what I earned, almost all of it anonymously. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was doing was accumulating virtue, or what I facetiously called “God points.”
I then found that not all of my life was to be peaks and mountaintops. Yet when I succeeded in getting out from under what felt like a mountain, I was virtually unscathed. This is because I was so deeply rooted and firmly planted in the Tao that my original vision was to be a lasting one, impervious to external circumstances.
Practice moderating your ego.
Change the way you look at your life by moderating your ego. See yourself as a being who gives rather than collects, and liv
e on what you need rather than practicing conspicuous consumption. You’ll begin to see that your purpose has more to do with Tao consciousness than ego directives. When you moderate your demands and use only what you and your family require, you’ll gather virtue points by serving rather than accumulating. Lao-tzu reminds you that this is “the secret of long life and lasting vision.”
William Shakespeare described this more than 2,000 years after Lao-tzu’s passing in his play The Third Part of Henry the Sixth:
My crown is in my heart, not on my head;
Not deck’d with diamonds and Indian stones,
Nor to be seen. My crown is call’d content;
A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.
Do the Tao Now
Make a commitment to gather five God points today. Imagine how the Divine Source of all 10,000 things must be operating in order to maintain the creation cycles of life, and do five things that match up to it. Pick up a piece of someone else’s trash, which is an example of excess; anonymously give a gift to someone in need; or perform any other actions that help you accumulate virtue and remain deeply rooted in the Tao.
60th Verse
Governing a large county
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.
Approach the universe with the Tao
and evil will have no power.
Change Your Thoughts—Change Your Life Page 22