Like voices resonate in harmony, akin energies seek mutual accord. In Dao De Jing terms, this mirrors Chapter 23’s teaching: “Those aligned with the Dao become one with the Dao”.
Chapter 41 explores the varied human responses to Dao. Since Dao operates through subtlety and defies conventional logic, only those superior scholars can understand and diligently practice it.
Bound by the confines of their perception, the Tao appears dubious, counterintuitive, even absurd to most ordinary minds.
Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Dao, earnestly carry it into practice. Scholars of the middle class, when they have heard about it, seem now to keep it and now to lose it. Scholars of the lowest class, when they have heard about it, laugh greatly at it. If it were not (thus) laughed at, it would not be fit to be the Dao.
Therefore the sentence-makers have thus expressed themselves:
‘The Dao, when brightest seen, seems light to lack;
Who progress in it makes, seems drawing back;
Its even way is like a rugged track.
Its highest virtue from the vale doth rise;
Its greatest beauty seems to offend the eyes;
And he has most whose lot the least supplies.
Its firmest virtue seems but poor and low;
Its solid truth seems change to undergo;
Its largest square doth yet no corner show
A vessel great, it is the slowest made;
Loud is its sound, but never word it said;
A semblance great, the shadow of a shade.’The Dao is hidden, and has no name; but it is the Dao which is skilful at imparting (to all things what they need) and making them complete.
The Dao is a metaphysical reality beyond subjective interpretation. Due to the inherent limitations of human cognition, partial or erroneous understandings of it are inevitable.
The categories of superior scholars, middling scholars, and inferior scholars or seekers in this context reflect gradations of spiritual receptivity – not scholarly status or intellectual prowess.
Humans perceive reality through sensory filters and subjective constructs, fabricating personalized worlds. What we recognize as “truth” is not reality itself, but fragmented projections shaped by our perceptual constraints (Chapter 41: “The Dao lies hidden, nameless and formless”).
Cognitive capacity varies across individuals, breeding divergent judgments. Yet all remain ensnared in self-spun cocoons of perception, prisoners of their mental fabrications. Many cling stubbornly to their biases, trapped in cycles of self-attachment and dogmatic fixation – a vicious spiral where shallow spiritual roots reinforce delusion. Paradoxically, this cognitive rigidity functions as a psychological defense mechanism: limited receptivity breeds selective belief systems that reduce existential anxiety, albeit at the cost of truth.
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