Meditation and the Tao Te Ching

The big event for me this week has been my decision to relinquish the moral high ground I’ve been adopting with regard to my conflict with my employing organisation. Not sure what allowed me to arrive at a resolution. It may have been reading the Tao Te Ching or it may have been a result of meditating on my manager as ‘my enemy’.

I can’t remember what that great Taoist book of wisdom was saying exactly. It was something about how knowing good creates bad, how one extreme is simply a function of, or is always seen in the context of the other extreme. Adopting the high ground creates the low ground. The advice was along the lines of finding the peace to let it go- and not to let it go with a vengeance so everyone gets hurt by the sudden change in direction, but to let it go gently.

Meditating on my manager as a source of evil has been helpful too because it enables me to see how ridiculous it is to attempt to locate evil intent in any individual. The evil I locate in others tends to be discovered by me and as I’m becoming increasingly aware may well have been planted there by me.

The self-righteous, blinkered ego is the enemy of peace. I am finding that, if I can cultivate the humility to recognise that I am an injured soul searching for salvation but reluctant to accept the nature and extent of my shortcomings, then I can stop griping about the splinters of wood in others’ eyes and attend to the plank of wood in mine!

I have developed a mantra for myself when meditating and reflecting on ‘myself’- that is when I am reflecting on the mental image I have when the psychological construct of ‘me’ is brought to mind.

The mantra is:  ‘I’m wrong, I’m bad, I’m sorry and I forgive myself’

This allows me to acknowledge and face up to shortcomings but not to wallow in them or wait for forgiveness from someone else. It helps me to equalise the feeling-tone I experience when reflecting on myself compared with when I reflect on my friend, my enemy, or someone I’ve just had a chance meeting with recently.

I try to read a page from the Tao Te Ching every day at work. It often surprises me and helps me with n issue I’m grappling with at the time. A reading which surprised me this week concerned leadership and the dangers of praising others. Praise of others creates competition. The danger of valuing treasure is that it creates in others a desire to steal them. The final phrase was an encouragement to ‘do the non-doing’ which is the typically paradoxical advice akin to ‘don’t just do something-sit there’ as opposed to ‘don’t just sit there- do something’. It’s a reminder that the ego has a terrible habit of trying to impose itself on how things are. Things are the way they are regardless and the imposition of ego won’t make things better of worse though the ego may be the source of the way things are.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of the ego as being the source of the universe as perceived by ourselves. The idea is that we make our beds, which we are then forced to lie in. Maybe our relationships with ourselves and others are borne from our essence and we can choose who we are as a way of determining the pleasures and pains we encounter.

My advice for today is just take a few moments out of today when you’re alone and check out what you feel when you think of yourself.

Now what do you feel when you think of your worst enemy.

Then what do you feel when you think of  a good friend.

Finally think of someone you had a fleeting contact with.

If you feel similarly across the range then you’re in the zone.

If you feel differently then you’ve got some work to do!