Send us a text

Tao Te Ching Verse 12 (James Legge):

Colour's five hues from th' eyes their sight will take;

Music's five notes the ears as deaf can make;

The flavours five deprive the mouth of taste;

The chariot course, and the wild hunting waste

Make mad the mind; and objects rare and strange,

Sought for, men's conduct will to evil change.

Therefore the sage seeks to satisfy (the craving of) the belly, and not the (insatiable longing of the) eyes. He puts from him the latter, and prefers to seek the former.

Photo by Prince Akachi on Unsplash

The illusion of fulfillment through the external senses

This verse talks about 3 senses - sight, sound, and taste.  We can expand this to all five and include smell and touch, of course.  Let’s consider for a moment, how, when we see things, we are actually assigning meaning to them.  We use physical objects to help us attach meaning to whatever they represent.  A tree - what does that represent?  A table?  Maybe eating, fellowship, or even work?  And songs - there’s usually any number of songs that mean something to us.  They remind us of our relationships, trying times in our lives, or really great times in our lives.  And what does good food remind us of?  We could go real deep into that one - does emotional eating ring a bell?  Well it does for me, anyway.  So we can see that while our senses give us information about the world around us, it’s our minds that actually attach meaning to what we’re experiencing, isn’t it?

Lao Tzu references sight, sound, and taste.  But then he talks about the thrill of the hunt with horse racing, hunting, and chasing - and the accumulation of wealth - rare valuable goods, in his words, which we can attribute any number of forms of wealth today.  Cars, houses, stocks, positions, assets, and the list goes on for a long time.  So what are these senses?  I would argue they’re senses of pride and accomplishment, and just as with sight, sound, and taste - they mean things.   

Going back to touch - touch can sometimes represent validation of my worthiness to be loved.  

 There are symbols of material success - the car, the house, the significant other, the awards, the influence, the power.  These things are only symbols of material achievement - they’re objects.  And what we do is place meaning and importance on things that have literally come out of the ground.  Yes, they’ve been formed, refined, polished, and nicely painted.  And to be sure, there’s nothing like sitting in a well crafted driving machine.  The smell, the feel, the sound - sound familiar hehe?  But lemme ask you: are these things, while they occupy your senses - are these things the things that give you a sense of purpose, or are they signs that you’re doing the right things?  Of course, they're just signs.  They’re not actual fulfillment.  

Fulfillment seems to me to be a sense of doing what I’m supposed to do at the moment - and at the same time - being aware of it in the moment.  Yes, sitting in that awesome car in the showroom is cool and all, but it really pales in comparison to the other.   

But in the moment of fulfillment, I am free of my wants and needs because I have exactly what I’m searching for right there, in that moment.