Preface

Here’s how the book came about. When I first met Katie, I was profoundly impressed by her openness of heart and her wisdom, which seemed to be a kind of transparence. She was a total innocent: she had read nothing, she knew nothing, about Buddhism or Taoism or any other spiritual tradition; she just had her own experience to refer to. The most wonderful insights would pop out of her mouth, sometimes straight from a sutra or an Upanishad, without any awareness on her part that anyone had ever said them before. Early in our marriage, partly out of curiosity, I began reading passages to her from the great spiritual teachers: Lao-tzu, the Buddha, the Zen masters, Spinoza, and others of that ilk. (She calls them “your dead friends.”) Katie would take in their words, nodding sometimes, or saying, “That’s accurate,” or “Yes, it’s exactly like that!” Occasionally, to my surprise, she would say, “That’s true, as far as it goes, but it’s a little ‘off.’ Here’s how I’d say it.”

Eventually I read her my version of the Tao Te Ching, all eighty-one chapters of it, and wrote down her responses, which were the raw material for this book. Sometimes, at my prompting, she would respond to every line; often she would focus on one passage, or elaborate on just a few lines. (The epigraphs that begin each of the following chapters quote the lines from the Tao Te Ching that are most relevant to what she is talking about.) Along the way, I would ask her to refine or expand upon something in the text, or I would point her in a particular direction that seemed helpful. Sometimes she had no reference for a question, and I felt as if I were asking a fish what it’s like to live in water. I suggested the specifics for “beautiful” and “ugly” in chapter 2, for example, since I adore Mozart and I don’t yet appreciate rap. It’s useful that I have these strong likes and dislikes; it gives Katie a reference for concepts such as “noise,” which are outside her experience of reality.

When we first began talking about the text, Katie asked me what Tao means. I told her that literally it means “the way,” and that it’s a word for ultimate reality, or, in her own terms, the way of it: what is. She was delighted. “But,” she said, “I don’t understand concepts like ‘ultimate.’ For me, reality is simple. There’s nothing behind it or above it, and it holds no secrets. It’s whatever is in front of you, whatever is happening. When you argue with it, you lose. It hurts not to be a lover of what is. I’m not a masochist anymore.”

I have known the Tao Te Ching since 1973, and with particular intimacy since 1986, when I wrote my version. I respect it as much as any book in the world, I owe it a great deal, and I know its power. (A friend told me that when he was in emotional trouble as a young man, what saved him was that he read my version from cover to cover—notes included—every single day for a whole year.) It’s wonderful to discover that there is such a thing as a manual on the art of living, a book this wise and this practical. But it is one thing to read about being in harmony with the way things are, or even to understand what that means, and quite another to actually live it. Even the wisest of books can’t give us its wisdom. After we have read the profound insights and nodded our heads—“Stop trying to control,” “Be completely present,” “See the world as your self,” “Let go,” “Have faith in the way things are”—the central question remains: But how? How can we learn to do that?

Katie has written two books that show how to end suffering by questioning the thoughts that create it, the thoughts that argue with reality. No one knows how to let go, but anyone can learn exactly how to question a stressful thought. When you’re feeling upset, for example, and it seems impossible to let go of that feeling, you can question the thoughts that say, “I’m not safe,” “I can’t do this,” “She shouldn’t have left me,” “I’m too fat,” “I need more money,” “Life is unfair.” After that questioning, you can’t ever be the same.  You may end up doing something or doing nothing, but however life unfolds, you’ll be coming from a place of greater confidence and peace. And eventually, once your mind becomes clear, life begins to live itself through you, effortlessly, with the joy and kindness that Lao-tzu points us toward. Though reality itself is unnamable, Katie says, there are a thousand names for joy, because nothing is separate, and joy, deep down, is what we all are.