THE TAO (2) 
237 
present this translation of The Tao Teh King to the public. I 
hope and believe that careful study of the text, as elucidated 
by my commentary, will enable serious aspirants to the 
hidden Wisdom to understand (with fair accuracy) what 
Lao-tze taught. It must however be laid to heart that the 
essence of his system will inevitably elude intellectual 
apprehension, unless it be illuminated from above by actual 
living experience of the truth. Such experience is only to be 
attained by unswerving application to the practices which he 
advocates. Nor must the aspirant content himself with the 
mere attainment of spiritual enlightenment, however sublime. 
All such achievements are barren unless they be regarded as 
the means rather than the end of spiritual progress; allowed 
to infiltrate every detail of the life, not only of the spirit, but 
of the senses. The Tao can never be known until it interprets 
the most trivial actions of every day routine. It is a fatal 
mistake to discriminate between the spiritual importance of 
meditation and playing golf. To do so is to create an internal 
conflict. "Let there be no difference made among you 
between anyone thing & any other thing, for thereby there 
cometh hurt." He who knows the Tao knows it to be the 
source of all things soever; the most exalted spiritual ecstasy 
and the most trivial internal impression are from our point of 
view equally illusions, worthless masks, which hide, with 
grotesque painted pasteboard false and lifeless, the living face 
of truth. Yet, from another point of view, they are equally 
expressions of the ecstatic genius of truth-natural images of 
the reaction between the essence of one's self and one's 
particular environment at the moment of their occurrence. 
They are equally tokens of the Tao by whom, in whom, and 
of whom, they are. To value them for themselves is to deny 
the Tao and to be lost in delusion. To despise them is to deny 
the omnipresence of the Tao, and to suffer the illusion of 
sorrow. To discriminate between them is to set up the 
accursed dyad, to surrender to the insanity of intellect, to 
overwhelm the intuition of truth, and to create ciyil war in 
the consciousness.