The Tao on good and bad

Filed under Notes on 21. January 2007 »

In addition to the longer articles published once or twice a week here on Everyday Wonderland, I’m going to start writing smaller posts that will be filed under a new section called ‘Notes.’ I plan on doing a few of these a week, mostly focusing on discussion about quotations and passages from books I'm particularly fond of, or just something I happen to come across online.

In this first note, I want to discuss a verse from the second chapter of Tao Te Ching that talks about the polarity of judgment; a fundamental aspect of the ego that is very easy to overlook.

“When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.”

The power of these words from Lao-tzu, as in so many other cases when dealing with spiritual texts, can easily be missed when they are not allowed past the analysis of rational thinking. He’s not telling us that we shouldn’t appreciate beauty, or that we should renounce all our preferences, but rather that it is important to see the polarity of good and bad only as relatively important. To see that while we may feel that roses are more beautiful than weeds, the true beauty of both goes beyond our judgment of good and bad.

The key is to honor our preferences, while appreciating that true beauty and true goodness, otherwise referred to as ‘the absolute’, are much deeper than our mental judgment of good/bad, beautiful/ugly. And the amazing thing is that, when we see that our judgment is only ever relatively true, everything becomes more beautiful to us as a result.