When I was nineteen years old I bought myself a copy of the Tao Te Ching. I carried it with me in my backpack, hitch-hiking around the country. I read in it but little. Over the years, moving here and there — Washington DC, Austin, DC, Flagstaff, DC, Boulder, Dallas, San Francisco, DC, Southern Oregon — I shed my library like flakes of skin, but I always held on to my copy of the Tao Te Ching, even though I read in it but little. For twenty years, starting just before the turn of the new millennium, I began contemplating and writing about qualia, and in 2016 I opened my Tao Te Ching again. To my surprise, it was saying what I was saying. I felt incredibly validated!
Although the poems have a fixed order, to many scholars their material often seems shuffled together, as if some of these lines belong here, and those lines fit better there. This seems true to me, but it was the order of the Tao’s poems themselves, which struck me as shuffled together. To me there is a pattern to the overall message of the Tao Te Ching, which is not reflected in the traditional order of the poems.
The pattern reflects the sage’s life. First, he or she becomes adept at the rituals of the group. Then, he or she is exiled from the group. Finally, he or she is begged by the group to return and to solve their problems. This simple pattern, of belonging, exile, and return (or not) informs the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, and I believe that this is the reality to be faced by those who choose to move beyond landscapes into ecosystems, who choose to be less materialistic and more qualiadelic. My interpretive posts, drawing from both whole poems and individual lines, to be published under the name Tao Te Qualia, will be pointed clearly toward the underlying pattern of the sage’s challenge.