(I took the above picture after spending the night at the top of Huashan Mountain in 2018 on my birthday. The sun was just coming up over the mountains in the horizon).
This is the final entry of the Introduction to My travels with Lieh Tzu we’ve been following the last week or so. This continuing commentary is following the entry I wrote in January 1995, a year after I began writing. Everything to date at that time had been like both a transition from the trajectory of who I thought I was, to a transformation to one following those I would call the dragons, Lieh, Chuang, and Lieh Tzu. We would be moving to Florida for the job in Boynton Beach in May and going to China for the first time two years later in May 1997 to adopt our daughter Katie.
My writing always seemed to take me to places that I would not otherwise go. Now thirty years later trying to make sense of the journey that I have been on it has always been about two words “endeavor and destiny”. Living as though on the threshold to someplace that both my memories and the present were to merge into something always moving me beyond what I thought I knew. To live beyond the horizon. There was something out there that I needed to recall and follow. Lieh Tzu was like the messenger I needed to follow in learning the Way… learning about the meaning of Taoism that was to envelop my being here now.
Going forward it was never a matter of rather to follow or believe where I was going was real, only what was the next step I was here to follow. It was as though the door was opening a little every day. Following what might be considered as the unknown and defining it as I went with my memories coming to the forefront. As I was to write over the years and make over forty trips and living in Qufu in China, it was never a question of rather to follow my innate instincts that would take me beyond what I think I know.
It has always been to learn about who I have been in the past, to let my memories take the lead, and add to them eternal traits I had previously chosen not to follow due only to a lack of disciple. Letting go of “the self” or ego found in the present, as well as bad habits from the past, as the reason I am here. That the only path to follow is the way of virtue that I have always known and forgotten or more likely chosen not to follow.
My Travels with Lieh Tzu / Interpolations along the Way
Introduction – Your Writing becomes You
9. Passing the Test
Sharing the process of discovery. Putting your hand out and asking others to come on the journey with you. Allowing others to cross over the line and come into what you are writing.
Making what you write more available, so that others may follow. Sharing your vision and letting another’s eyes see it. Giving the reader space to see themselves, thereby creating their own.
Becoming universal and making others say: “Yes ‑ me too!” 1/7/95
10. Preface to Master Lieh
Cease to judge between alternatives and delight in the spontaneity of all that unites heaven and earth. Come travel the way others have followed over the centuries. Knowing yin and yang as all throughout the cosmos.
As others have followed various methods of ritual, magic, alchemy, and sexual pleasure; only the one of meditation to discover and know your inner self or chi will bring you before the dragons and immortality.
Stay simply within the oneness of Tao as we have said. As Chuang, Lieh, and Lao, we give you the path that must be adhered to and followed. Come to understand the transformation that nature brings in being born, dying, and being born again and again.
Each lifetime is simply an opportunity to go back to the darkness from where we came, to stay transfixed where you are now, or come to live with dragons as the ultimate that can be.
Coming to know that the central element of wuwei, “doing nothing”, Wuwei (无为 ), or non-doing, literally means ‘doing nothing’ in Chinese and is simply finding the grace within yourself that must be found, followed, and accounted for in the end. Coming to find the spontaneity and the path that must be followed as the way each life must be lived.
Following Lieh Tzu is simply coming forward to know and understand the central tenants and underpinnings as one who knows the Tao. Knowing that nothing is limitless and as something it becomes inexhaustible. Simply repeating the role given that must be played out to the end.
The ultimate paradox to be learned and sought out teaches us that what we think we come to know and understand is to be challenged as the only rules must constantly change making end results never and always the same. Never competing with the reality that must come. Accepting change and continuing our way. 1/10/95
Number nine of one hundred fifty-eight entries.
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