18 the secret of the middle way

No discussion of living life as a spiritual path is complete without addressing one of the deepest of all spiritual teachings, the Tao te Ching. It discusses that which is very difficult to discuss, that which Lao-tzu called “the Tao” (pronounced: dow). Literally translated, this means “the Way. ” The Tao is so subtle that one can only talk around its edges, but never actually touch it. In that treatise, the very basis for the principles of all of life is laid down. It is a treatise on the balance of the yin and the yang, the feminine and the masculine, the dark and the light. You could easily read the Tao te Ching and never understand a single word, or you could read it and tears could pour from your eyes with every word you read. The question is, do you bring to it the knowledge, the understanding, and the basis for comprehending what it is attempting to express?

Unfortunately, spiritual teachings often mask the essence of truth with mystical words. But this balance, this Tao, is actually very simple. Those who have truly learned the secrets of life recognize these truths without having read anything. If you want to understand the Tao, you must take it very slowly and keep it very simple. Otherwise, you may miss it, though it is right in front of you.

It is best to approach the Tao through some very simple, almost rhetorical questions. For example, is it good for a person to eat sometimes? Yes, obviously it is. Is it good for a person to eat all the time? No, of course not. Somewhere in between, you passed over the Tao. Is it good to fast periodically? Yes. Is it good to never eat? No. The pendulum can swing all the way from gorging yourself to death, to starving yourself to death. Those are the two extremes of the pendulum: the yin and the yang, expansion and contraction, nondoing and doing. Everything has two extremes. Everything has gradations of this pendulum swing. If you go to the extremes, you cannot survive. That’s how extreme the extremes are. For example, do you like hot weather? How about 6, 000°F? You’d be instantly vaporized. Do you like cold weather? How about absolute zero? The molecules of your body would never move again.

Let’s use an example that is a little less extreme. Do you like being close to another person? How about being so close that you’re never apart? You eat every meal together, you go everywhere together, and you do everything together. When you talk on the phone, you always use a speakerphone so that both of you can partake in every conversation. You want to be so close that you’re the same person. How long do you think that could last?

That’s one extreme in human relationships. The other extreme is that you want your own space. You do your own thing. You’re independent. You like being separate so that you always have something to share with each other when you’re together. How independent are you? Well, you travel separately, you eat separately, and you live in separate houses. At what point are you so separate that no one can figure out if you’re having a relationship? You haven’t seen each other for years! Both of these extremes will end up the same. Too close, too far away—in either case, you won’t be talking to each other before long. Everything has its extremes, its yin and its yang.

Now let’s get a little subtler. The 6, 000-degree temperature doesn’t sound so good, and absolute zero doesn’t sound so interesting either. Neither does starving to death, nor eating until you’re sick. But that part about being so close to somebody that you’re always together may sound pretty nice. You may at least like to give it a shot. If so, it’s because your pendulum has been swung in the opposite direction for too long. You’ve had too much time alone—too many dinners alone, too many movies alone, and too much traveling alone. In other words, your pendulum has swung off-center.

From science we know that if you pull a pendulum thirty degrees to the right, it will swing back until it’s thirty degrees to the left. You don’t need Lao-tzu to tell you this. All the laws are the same—inner laws and outer laws. The same principles drive everything in this world. If you pull a pendulum out one way, it will swing back just that far the other way. If you’ve been starving for days, and somebody puts food in front of you, you won’t be polite while you’re eating. You will shove the food into your mouth like an animal. The degree to which you will act like an animal is the exact degree to which you were starved enough to bring up your animal instincts.

So where is the Tao? The Tao is in the middle. It’s the place where there is no energy pushing in either direction. The pendulum has been permitted to come to balance concerning food, relationships, sex, money, doing, not-doing, and everything else. Everything has its yin and yang. The Way is the place in which these forces balance quietly. And indeed, unless you go out of the Way, they will tend to stay in peaceful harmony. If you want to understand the Tao, you must take a closer look at what lies between the two extremes. This is because neither extreme can last. How long can a pendulum stay at one of its outermost positions? It can only remain there for a moment. How long can a pendulum stay at rest? It can remain there forever because there are no forces moving it out of balance. That is the Tao. It is the center. But that does not mean that it stays static and fixed. We’re about to see that it’s much more dynamic than that.

First you have to realize that since everything has its yin and yang, everything has its own balance point. It is the harmony of all these balance points, woven together, that forms the Tao. This overall balance maintains its equilibrium as it moves through time and space. Its power is phenomenal. If you want to imagine the power of the Tao, examine how much energy is wasted swinging sideways. Suppose you want to go from point A to point B, but instead of walking there directly, you move from side to side like a sine wave. That would take a long time, and you would waste a lot of energy. In other words, it’s not efficient to oscillate around the path. To be efficient, you must center all of your energies on the path. If you do this, the energies that used to be wasted swinging sideways will get pulled into the center. This concentration of energies is used to accomplish the given task much more efficiently. This is the power of the Tao. When you stop swinging between the opposites you’ll find that you have far more energy than you ever imagined. That which takes somebody else hours will take you minutes. That which wears out other people will draw very little of your energy. That’s the difference between struggling with the opposites versus staying centered in order to get something done.

This principle holds true in every aspect of life. If you are in balance, you eat when it is time to eat, in a way that maintains the health of your body. To do otherwise is to waste energy dealing with the effects of eating too little, eating too much, or eating the wrong foods. It is much more efficient to deal with the body in a balanced manner than to be burdened with the effects of the extremes.

Basically, you waste tremendous energy at the extremes. The more extreme it is, the more it becomes a full-time project. For example, the relationship in which you insist upon being together all the time would be a full-time job. The only way you could have another job is if you both did the same work at the same desk. At the other extreme, if you had no relationship and you were lonely and depressed all the time, you couldn’t accomplish much. So again, it takes all your energy to do the extremes. The inefficiency of your actions is determined by how many degrees off-center you are. You will be that much less able to use your energy for living life because you are using it to adjust for the pendulum swings. Extremes are good teachers. When you examine the extremes, it’s easy to see the effects of imbalanced behavior patterns.

Let’s take the example of a chain-smoker. He always has a cigarette in his mouth, and he’s constantly lighting up another. A meaningful percentage of his life is involved in smoking. He’s buying cigarettes, lighting cigarettes, and smoking cigarettes. He’s also very busy trying to find places where he’s allowed to smoke. And since he doesn’t like having to go outside to light up, he’s joining the committees in favor of allowing smoking in public places. Notice how much of his energy is going into smoking. Now imagine that he decides to quit—not a single cigarette anymore. If a year later you ask him what he did last year, he will tell you that he quit smoking. That was his life for the past year. First he tried the chewing gum, but that didn’t really help. Then he tried the patch. When that didn’t work, he moved on to hypnotherapy. Because the pendulum was so far to one extreme with his smoking, it had to swing to the opposite extreme in order for him to stop smoking. Both extremes were a tremendous waste of time, energy, and effort that could have gone into more productive aspects of his life.

When you spend your energy trying to maintain the extremes, nothing goes forward. You get stuck in a rut. The more extreme you are, the less forward movement there is. You carve a groove and you get stuck in it. Then there’s no energy moving you in the Tao; it’s all being spent serving the extremes.

The Way is in the middle because that’s the place where the energies are balanced. But how do you stop the pendulum from swinging to the outer edges? Amazingly enough, you do this by leaving it alone. It won’t keep swinging to the extremes unless you feed the extremes with energy. Just let the extremes go. Don’t participate in them, and the pendulum will naturally come toward the center. As it comes to the center, you will get filled with energy. This is because all the energy that had been wasted is now available to you.

If you choose to center and not participate in the extremes, you will come to know the Tao. You don’t grab it; you don’t even touch it. It’s just what the energy does when it’s not being used to swing toward the extremes. It finds its own way to the center of each event that takes place in life and remains quietly in the middle. The Tao is hollow, empty. Like the eye of a hurricane, its power is its emptiness. All things swirl around it, but it is unmoved. The swirl of life draws its energy from the center and the center draws its energy from the swirl of life. All these laws are the same—in weather, in nature, and in every aspect of your life.

As you center by not participating in the swings, the energies will naturally find their balance. You will become much clearer because so much energy is flowing up in you. The experience of being present in each moment will become your natural state. You won’t be fixated on certain things or caught up in thoughts about the opposites. As you get clearer, life’s events will actually seem to unfold in slow motion. Once this happens, events will no longer seem confusing or overwhelming, no matter what they are.

This is quite different from how most people live. If they’re driving a car and somebody cuts them off, they get upset for the next hour, or maybe for the rest of the day. For the being who is in the Tao, events take place and last just as long as they are taking place. That’s it. If you’re driving and somebody cuts you off, you feel your energy start to pull off-center. You actually feel it in your heart. As you let go, it comes back to center. You don’t follow the extremes, so your energy comes back to the current moment. When the next event happens, you’re there. You’re always there, and that makes you much more capable than the person who is reacting to past imbalances. Almost everyone has a point at which they get out of balance. Once gone, who’s minding the store? Who takes care of the energies that unfold while you’re not there? Remember, whoever remains present with fixity of purpose comes out on top in the end.

When you move in the Tao, you are always present. Life becomes absolutely simple. In the Tao, it’s easy to see what’s happening in life—it’s unfolding right in front of you. But if you have all kinds of reactions going on inside because you’re involved in the extremes, life seems confusing. That’s because you’re confused, not because life’s confusing.

When you stop being confused, everything becomes simple. If you have no preference, if the only thing you want is to remain centered, then life unfolds while you simply feel for the center. There is an invisible thread that passes through everything. All things move quietly through that center balance. That is the Tao. It is really there. It is there in your relationships, in your diet, and in your business activities. It is there in everything. It is the eye of the storm. It is completely at peace.

To give you an idea of what it feels like to be in that center, let’s use the example of sailing. We’ll begin by going sailing when there’s no wind. That’s one extreme, and we’re not going anywhere. Now let’s go sailing when there’s tremendous wind but there’s no sail. That is the opposite extreme and, again, we’re not going anywhere. Sailing is such a good example because there are many forces interacting together. There’s the wind, the sail, the rudder, and the tension of the ropes on the sail. There is a tremendous interplay of forces. What happens if the wind is blowing and you hold the sail too loosely? It doesn’t work. What if you hold it too tightly? You tip over. To sail properly you must hold it just right. But where is just right? It is in the center point of tautness of the sail against the force of the wind—not too much, and not too little. It’s what we call the “sweet spot. ” Imagine that feeling when the wind hits the sail just right, and you’re holding the ropes just right. You take off with a perfect feeling of balance. Then the wind shifts and you adjust to it. You, the wind, the sail, and the water are one. All the forces are in harmony. Should one force shift, the others shift at the same instant. This is what it means to move in the Way.

In the Tao of sailing, the balance point is not static; it’s a dynamic equilibrium. You move from balance point to balance point, from center to center. You can’t have any concepts or preferences; you have to let the forces move you. In the Way, nothing is personal. You are merely an instrument in the hands of the forces, participating in the harmony of balance. You must reach the point where your whole interest lies in the balance and not in any personal preference for how things should be. It’s that way with all of life. The more you can work with the balance, the more you can just sail through life. Effortless action is what happens when you come into the Tao. Life happens, you’re there, but you don’t make it happen. There is no burden; there is no stress. The forces take care of themselves as you sit in the center. That is the Tao. It’s the most beautiful place in all of life. You can’t touch it, but you can be at one with it.

Eventually you will see that in the way of the Tao you’re not going to wake up, see what to do, and then go do it. In the Tao, you are blind, and you have to learn how to be blind. You can never see where the Tao is going; you can only be there with it. A blind person walks down a city street with the use of a cane. Let’s give that cane a name: it’s the seeker of the extremes, it’s the feeler of the edges, it’s the toucher of the yin and the yang. People who walk with the use of that cane often tap from side to side. They’re not trying to find where they should walk; they’re trying to find where they shouldn’t walk. They’re finding the extremes. If you cannot see your way, all you can do is feel for the edges. But if you feel the edges, and don’t go there, you will stay in the Way. That’s how you live in the Tao.

All the great teachings reveal the way of the center, the way of balance. Constantly look to see if that’s where you are living or if you are lost in the extremes. The extremes create their opposites; the wise avoid them. Find the balance in the center and you will live in harmony.

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