Tao Never Ends, The Tao is Eternal

These are the last scrolls from the Tao. I have always believed that the last chapters of everything are always the best and the most important. This time I was wondering if it would end with a really big and clever thing to, or if it would just make emphasis in something that had been mentioned earlier. After reading it I realized that most of the things it said had been the ones that I had already read about in the last chapters, but it also had some others ideas that seems to be somewhat new. These are some of the teachings or things I liked the most.

“What is firmly established cannot be uprooted. What is firmly grasped cannot slip away. It will be honored from generation to generation.” (54) I think this mainly refers to habits. Many times doing something repetitively makes it become a habit, we grow used to it. There are good ones and bad ones too, and once they become a habit it´s harder to forget it or even stop doing it, and some of them can even go on forever, “from generation to generation.”

Sometimes we think that the best things always have to be the most expensive, most beautiful, the best and the biggest, but sometimes simple is best. “See simplicity in the complicated. Achieve greatness in little things… in the universe the difficult things are done as if they were easy. In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds.” (63) This I would have imagined is the easiest of all the teachings from the Tao, to try to find the simplicity of everything and not complicate ourselves, but sometimes it seems as if there is no other way than making it complicated. There really is a lot to do.

“Deal with it before it happens. Set things in order before there is confusion… People usually fail when they are in the verge of success. So give as much care to the end as to the beginning; the there will be no failure.” (64) I really like this because there have been many times where I wish I had been more careful and that I could actually go back in time and fix what I had done. It might sound impossible, but Tao does know the answer. “Deal with it before it happens.” We have to be careful with what we say and think, because they might become actions. Being sure of what is happening and not making things up can be helpful to not get confuse and end up making everything more complicated than it already is, but if we try hard from beginning to end, we shall succeed.

There have certainly been a lot I have been able to learn from the Tao. I even feel a better person just by having read it. Imagine how it would feel to actually follow it and know exactly what it´s like to follow those teachings. Like I had said before, I sometimes feels as if I was about to convert to Taoism because of the great impression it has made on me, but not for now. There are other things I already believe in.