Once upon a time those who ruled according to the Way didn’t use it to make people knowing but to keep them unknowing.

People get hard to manage when they know too much. Whoever rules by intellect is a curse upon the land. Whoever rules by ignorance is a blessing on it. To understand these things is to have a pattern and a model, and to understand the pattern and the model is mysterious power.

Mysterious power goes deep. It reaches far. It follows things back, clear back to the great oneness.

Note UKLG: Where shall we find a ruler wise enough to know what to teach and what to withhold? “Once upon a time,” maybe, in the days of myth and legend, as a pattern, a model, an ideal? The knowledge and the ignorance or unknowing Lao Tzu speaks of may or may not refer to what we think of as education. In the last stanza, by power he evidently does not mean political power at all, but something vastly different, a unity with the power of the Tao itself. This is a mystical statement about government — and in our minds those two realms are worlds apart. I cannot make the leap between them. I can only ponder it