65 - ONE POWER

Once upon a time

those who ruled according to the Way

didn’t use it to make people knowing

but to keep them unknowing.

People get hard to manage

when they know too much.

Whoever rules by intellect

is a curse upon the land.

Whoever rules by ignorance

is a blessing on it.

To understand these things

is to have a pattern and a model,

and to understand the pattern and the model

is mysterious power.

Mysterious power

goes deep.

It reaches far.

It follows things back,

clear back to the great oneness.

UKLG: Where shall we find a ruler wise enough to know what to teach and what to withhold? “Once upon a time,” maybe, in the days of myth and legend, as a pattern, a model, an ideal?

The knowledge and the ignorance or unknowing Lao Tzu speaks of may or may not refer to what we think of as education. In the last stanza, by power he evidently does not mean political power at all, but something vastly different, a unity with the power of the Tao itself.

This is a mystical statement about government -- and in our minds those two realms are worlds apart. I cannot make the leap between them. I can only ponder it