The Tao Te Ching for Astrologers – Verses 75 & 76

Hey, everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology. And today, we are going to continue our series on the Tao Te Ching for astrologers. And we're going to be looking at verses 75 and 76. We're coming down the homestretch of this series; we have just, I think it's three or four weeks left to go. After this, I think, three more episodes with a total of like five more verses.

So we are almost done with this series, which I believe we started almost a year ago. So it's been a really nice journey. And today, again, as always, we will be looking at two verses, and we'll be reading through them. And then, we'll be going through them a second time and offering some reflections in light of our study of astrology.

And the purpose of the series, which you don't have to have seen all of the previous episodes to get something out of any of them can act as standalone episodes, is to remind ourselves or kind of refocus ourselves on our intentions. Why are we here? Why are we studying astrology? What does it do for the life of the soul to study astrology? And we're taking this ancient wisdom text and the Tao Te Ching and looking at some of the wisdom of this text, kind of comparing it to what sages said about the reasons that we do ancient is the way that we do astrology that ancient astrologers said that there was a purpose for doing astrology and in terms of the life of the soul and the spiritual benefits. This is also one of the texts that I have used for a very long time to prepare my talks; I often read sacred texts before I write my talks for the day.

This is the Tao Te Ching translation by Jonathan Star from Tarcher Cornerstones additions. So if you want to get a copy and follow along, you can go back and get a lot out of the previous episodes as well. I'll have a presentation up on the screen that you can follow along with. So we are going to get into it.

But before we do that, don't forget to like and subscribe. Share your comments and reflections; it helps the channel to grow. You can find transcripts of any of my daily talks on the website, which is nightlight astrology.com. We have some classes that have just started Roots and Spheres, Readings and Passages. Check those classes out not too late to join. If you have any questions about those, you can email us at info@nightlightastrology.com. There on the Courses page, you can look at the Courses tab to see those individual programs. We also have the masterclass series starting in February. So check out the masterclass series on the website as well. Okay, let's go ahead and get into today's verses. All right.

Verse 75
Why are the people starving?
Because their grain is being eaten up by taxes
That's why they're starving
Why are the people rebellious? –
Because those above them meddle in their lives
That's why they're rebellious
Why do people regard death so lightly? –
Because they are so involved with their own living
That's why they regard death so lightly
In the end,
The treasure of life is missed by those who hold on and gained by those who let go.

Verse 76
When life begins, we are tender and weal
When life ends, we are stiff and rigid
All things, including the grass and trees, are soft and pliable in life dry and brittle in death
So the soft and supple are the companions of life
While the stiff and unyielding are the companions of death
An army that cannot yield will be defeated
A tree that cannot bend will crack in the wind
Thus by nature's own decree, the hard and strong are defeated, while the soft and gentle are triumphant

A couple of beautiful verses. Now, I want to say we're going to go back and read them again. Some of these verses involve something like political commentary in ancient times. I'm not here to make a case for one form of government or another or anything like that. So I'm going to be interpreting elements of the political elements of verses mostly in terms of our personal and individual lives.

And so, let's reread 75 and then talk about it in light of our study of astrology.

Why are the people starving?
Because their grain is being eaten up by taxes
That's why they're starving
Why are the people rebellious? –
Because those above them meddle in their lives
That's why they're rebellious
Why do people regard death so lightly? –
Because they are so involved with their own living
That's why they regard death so lightly
In the end,
The treasure of life is missed by those who hold on and gained by those who let go.

Beautiful verse, and again, like I'm not necessarily going to get into the political piece of this, you know, should we be should be, what should be taxed? How much should we be taxed? You know, all this kind of stuff.

What I like about this verse is that it is essentially saying Those who would seek to control or dominate, or that those people who are meddling in the lives of other people who are, let's call it attached, that the people who are attached that try to control other people or meddle in the lives of other people are missing the real treasure of life.

So, you know, even if, you know, by meddling and controlling other people, we get something that we want, or we get people to give us something that we want. In the end, we miss out on the real treasure of life. Because the more you try to control life, the more that you limit what it is and what it has to give, thinking, Well, I know what's best; we often limit the ability of the soul to experience the richness of life.

This is something that I've noticed is very common in, say, 12 Step programs; a number of family members who've been in 12 Step programs, although I haven't been in one myself; I struggled with addiction in my early 20s and went through about a decade of my life where I worked regularly with Ayahuasca, yoga, and other modalities that really gave me many of the exact same, I would say, practices and tools that 12 Step programs give to people. And one of the hallmarks of a lot of 12 Step programs is to stay in your own lane, that you can't control the lives of other people. You can only do your best to work on yourself. And while that can be a beat up, and sometimes misused, teaching, you know, sometimes that teaching will be used to suggest that you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, be self-reliant, never look for helping other people or, you know, be a fortress of, you know, solitude or whatever.

So it can certainly be a teaching that's taken somehow in the wrong direction. But generally speaking, what I hear in this verse is the instruction not to try to control other people and not to meddle in the lives of other people because in doing that, you miss something, you're going to get one result, but you're going to miss a far greater one. So be careful of the attempt to control or meddle in other people's lives.

Now, the other teaching that I hear in this verse is, you know, the question rhetorically is being asked, why do people not consider death? Now? For some of us, that might seem like Well, yeah, I'm not going to sit around and think about death all the time. That would be morbid. But for a Taoist sage, the reality of death is something that you should live with some awareness of because it is a co-present reality.

It's in us and around us all the time, whether it's something as simple as, you know, winter or the death that you see in nature if you just take a walk in the woods. Or it's the fact of people dying in the world. We've there's a lot of distance now between us and death. And this verse says, Well, we know why do people not consider death, because again, for a Dallas sage, death would have the power to, you know, sort of paradoxically be very liberating, that there's a sense that you should live with an awareness of death, not as a morbid thing, but as a real thing. Why do they not? Why do they take it so lightly?

And the answer is because they're so absorbed and wrapped up in their own living that they don't see death, they don't regard it, they don't even notice it. And so we have two different teachings, one, don't try to meddle with or control other people. And the other one is, don't get so wrapped up in your own living that you're not aware of the reality of your own dying or death, or just of death in general.
And, by doing these things, again, the treasure of life is missed by those who hold on and gained by those who let go.

Okay, so all beautiful teachings, where do we see a parallel in ancient astrology? Again, the simplest thing that all of the ancient texts tell us about like astrology as a spiritual practice is that when you live life, with a sense that the treasure is in the experience itself, not in what type of experience, but in experience itself, that that is what makes you truly wealthy, internally, a wealth of heart and soul. How do you do that?

Well, you do that by noticing that fortune fluctuates, fortune goes up, and fortune goes down. And fortune is the real ruler of the world. So meddle or try to control things, if you will, but fortune has the upper hand, which is to say that there's a kind of divine intelligence that's running the show here. And the kind of control we have should be moving along with it, like floating down a river and using our hands on an inner tube to slightly guide us along with the currents.

But the more that you try to control that force, if you're someone who lives an astrologically reflective life, the more you realize how futile it is. So astrology teaches us that trying to control the universe, rather than learning to be a part of its flow, of its currents, is a pointless enterprise.

Not only that, but there's also a sense that you especially can't do that in the lives of other people, you know, because everyone has their own, their own spiritual guidance system that's at play, or maybe their own spiritual guides or daimons that are at play in their lives. So, you see, that fortune fluctuates, it goes up, and it goes down. And because you see that, and you notice it, and you surrender in a sense to that, to that react to that greater reality.

In that kind of living, there is a richness of the soul. And it's sometimes described as the soul becoming confident that the soul becomes confident in its knowledge that it can't control destiny and that the real richness is not in one thing versus another, good stuff versus bad stuff. But in the treasure of experience itself. The experience itself is the treasure. Life itself, in all of its movements and seasons, is the treasure, and an astrological lifestyle puts us in touch with this over time; gradually, it gives us an appreciation for living. It also puts us closely in touch with dying because you recognize by the vacillations of the planets that all seasons come and go, and so impermanence is a basic feature of living an astrological life.

Verse 76
When life begins, we are tender and weal
When life ends, we are stiff and rigid
All things, including the grass and trees, are soft and pliable in life dry and brittle in death
So the soft and supple are the companions of life
While the stiff and unyielding are the companions of death
An army that cannot yield will be defeated
A tree that cannot bend will crack in the wind
Thus by nature's own decree, the hard and strong are defeated, while the soft and gentle are triumphant.

Here's a deeper teaching about the pointlessness of trying to control things with our will. So we have; let's go back over it a little bit. When life begins, we are tender and weak. When life ends, we are stiff and rigid. All things, including the grass and trees, are soft and pliable in life dry and brittle in death. So the soft and supple companions of life while the stiff and unyielding are companions of death.

The stiffer and harder we become, the more insistent we become on my way or the highway on this is what I want. This is what I'm here to get. This is what will happen; this is what I'll manifest, and the more rigid we become about those things, the closer we get to a posture psychically that resembles a stiff, rigid old tree that will get knocked over in the wind.

Whereas when we embody a kind of, let's call it, a flow state, a state of moving in alignment with the rhythms of the archetypes and the gods and the planets. When we do that, then we're like a soft, supple, youthful tree that can bend and sway in the wind and is not going to be defeated.

So it's actually a strategy not only for enjoying and appreciating experience in life itself, but it's a strategy for being able to live a rich and healthy life, one that is not easily knocked over and brutalized and beat up. The more frustrated and willful, and defiant we get with the forces of reality, especially when things don't go our way. The easier it is to topple us.

Whereas the more if we stay curious, appreciative, humble, reflective, and contemplative, we have a good sense of humor. And all of that can be found by living a life that looks at experience through the reflective lens of astrology. When we do that, then we will find that the soft and gentle are triumphant and that there's a feeling of being of life being successful.

Successful might even be the wrong word. But it's, it's a sense that life is worth living. And that you're never defeated by an experience that doesn't go as you hope it will. Because you stay curious, you stay humble, you stay open, and you stay receptive. That's not an easy thing to do in some situations, not easy at all. And yet, I know of no other practice, you know, when it comes to, like, astrology is absolutely brilliant in the way that it can give us these tools so that we can remain adaptable. And almost like musical, it's like your life goes from trying to assert something and seeing it either succeed or fail, getting frustrated, or feeling like you're conquering life through the exertion of your will. And it goes into more of a play, more of a dance, more of a, something like you're trying to move along with the time signature, or you're trying to improvise along with a rhythm section or something like that.

These are, again, the same values that we find in Taoism; the same instructions remain soft and pliable. This is the heart of usefulness, vibrancy, health, and life is to stay sort of vibrant and adaptable. State if you're rigid, hard, and willful, you're easily toppled. There's a reason that you know, most, many ancient astrologers are stoics. Right? This is basically the same exact philosophy. And you find them saying that why do we consult with the planets because they are teachers of pliability and flexibility in their constant circular dance in the sky; they resemble and teach us how to live a life. That is a harmonious one.

So anyway, I'm stumbling over my words today a little bit, but I hope that this was useful for all of you. It's been really nice to spend time with all of you week after week looking at this text. We have a couple of weeks left. After the series is over, we're going to be moving into an exploration of the moon through the 12 signs for our special series.

We always have a series going on. So Moon signs will come up next. I'm looking forward to making that we have a few more sessions left in our study of the Tao Te Ching. So we will come back to this again next week. And in the meantime, I hope you guys are having a great week and that this midweek pause and reflection is useful for you. Alright, that's all I got; take it easy, everyone. Bye