Being full of power is like being a baby. Scorpions don’t sting, tiger’s don’t attack, eagles don’t strike. Soft bones, weak muscles, but a firm grasp. Ignorant of the intercourse of man and woman, yet the baby penis is erect. True and perfect energy! All day long screaming and crying, but never getting hoarse. True and perfect harmony!

To know harmony is to know what’s eternal. To know what’s eternal is enlightenment. Increase of life is full of portent: the strong heart exhausts the vital breath. The full-grown is on the edge of age. Not the Way. What’s not the Way soon dies.

Note UKLG: As a model for the Taoist, the baby is in many ways ideal: totally unaltruistic, not interested in politics, business, or the proprieties, weak, soft, and able to scream placidly for hours without wearing itself out (its parents are another matter). The baby’s unawareness of poisonous insects and carnivorous beasts means that such dangers simply do not exist for it. (Again, its parents are a different case.) As a metaphor of the Tao, the baby embodies the eternal beginning, the ever-springing source. “We come, clouds of glory,” Wordsworth says; and Hopkins, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” No Peter Pan-ish refusal to grow up is involved, no hunt for the fountain of youth. What is eternal is forever young, never grows old. But we are not eternal. It is in this sense that I understand how the natural, inevitable cycle of youth, growth, mature vigor, age, and decay can be “not the Way.” The Way is more than the cycle of any individual life. We rise, flourish, fail. The Way never fails. We are waves. It is the sea.