In this passage, Lao-tzu asks you to change the way you look at your mortality. The Tao teaches that death is an insignificant detail that doesn’t need to be consciously struggled with or dreaded. As this verse of the Tao Te Ching informs you, there’s a “place where death cannot enter.” Talk about your life changing when you change your thoughts! This is the ultimate, since the fear of death tops virtually everyone’s list of anxieties.
If you see yourself solely as a physical mortal, then you’re part of the 90 percent of the population that this passage refers to as “followers of life,” “followers of death,” or “just passing from birth to death.” Here you’re being encouraged to aspire to be part of the remaining 10 percent, for whom thoughts of mortality don’t invade the heart space or life in general. By altering the way you see death, you’ll be in that select group. You’ll experience life on the active side of infinity, knowing yourself first and foremost as a spiritual being having a temporary human experience, rather than the other way around.
In this realm, you’ll be gracefully adept at moving along free of the fear of life-threatening events. You’ll have a knowing about your self and your connection to the Tao that simply allows you to ride with life like a fearless downhill skier who’s at one with the snow covered mountain. Without resorting to judgment, you’ll notice others who are perpetually victimized by scams, bureaucracies, indifference, natural disaster, criminals, or meddling relatives.
With an intimate awareness of your infinite essence that’s centered in the Tao, you’ll most likely escape from victimization your self, and you’ll lightly deal with situations that others tend to get stuck in. In other words, when you know your own endless nature and live each day with this awareness directing you, there will sim ply be no space within you for mortality to call the shots. If harm ever does make an attempt to inflict damage or death on you, it won’t find a place to sink its hooks into.
Change how you think about death by seeing your essential spiritual beingness, and you’ll be able to enjoy this world without the dread caused by believing you are of it. When you know your immortality through the flow of the Tao, you won’t even need to assign it a worldly concept or formal religion. And when the time comes for you to remove the wornout coat you call your body, Lao tzu says that “you will witness the end without ending.”
Contemplate the teachings of the Tao Te Ching and realize that you can never really be killed or even harmed. With this view of life, you’ll be able to clear your inner battlefield of the army of be liefs that continually try to march on your essential self. Fear and dread are weapons that can’t hurt or threaten you. Even the natural elements symbolized by rhinos’ horns and tigers’ claws can’t inflict damage because they butt against and tear at a space that has no solidity for them to inflict pain. You dwell in a place that’s impenetrable to death - no longer are you clutching at the 10,000 things and treating your short journey from cradle to grave as your one and only ultimate life experience. Now you are the infinite Tao, living your real essence.
