The Tao Te Ching, Chapter Two

Balance II
The original has sold but let me know if you’d like a print.

(rod@herondance.org)

The sun rises out of darkness, and thus is beautiful
Mountains rise out of valleys, and thus are high
Without the lows of the ocean, rivers would stagnate
Without winter, no spring
Without yin no yang
Without opposites, no harmony.
And so the Master, cultivating the practice of harmony
Accepts good and evil as necessary to each other.
- Heron Dance translation of Chapter Two.

Red Pine’s (Bill Porter) translation of the second chapter is just below. His insights into Taoism and Zen Buddhism are particularly respected by many, including me. He can speak Chinese and has written a book on Tao mountain hermits that has sold millions of copies in China (Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits). There are excellent videos on YouTube of his interviews of Tao hermits in China, including here.

All the world knows beauty but if that becomes beautiful this becomes ugly
all the word knows good but if that becomes good this becomes bad
the coexistence of have and have not the coproduction of hard and easy the
correlation of long and short

the codependence of high and low the correspondence of note and noise the
coordination of first and last is endless
thus the sage performs effortless deeds and teaches wordless lessons
he doesn't start all things he begins he doesn't presume on what he does he doesn't
claim what he achieves
and because he makes no claim he suffers no loss.

A Note To Subscribers Regarding Zen Mountain Journal and my new Substack, Surviving Cancer
(www.emergingcures.org)

I love creating Heron Dance and plan to continue Zen Mountain Journal for a long time. The posts will likely become fewer though. I’ve launched a new coaching business focused on helping those navigating their way through a dire medical diagnosis, and gotten my first client. Mostly I will help clients stay on top of the emerging medical science related to their condition.

AI and Why I Launched This New Business

  1. Our lives are on the cusp of huge change. The future of humanity will be determined by artificial intelligence. For good or ill. There is no doubt it could destroy us as a species. If we survive, it will dramatically change our lives and mostly for the better. If you doubt this, I would invite you to watch this interview of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a major investor in AI biotech.

    I have coded artificial intelligence programs in Python, but can now access easily available programs to code for me and complete in a few minutes programs that would have taken me months to develop a couple of years ago. Ok, well it is a little more complex than that — the initial code generally needs a couple of revisions, sometimes several, but the point is that in a less than an hour, AI software will code programs that used to take months.

    A year from now, medical science, now evolving at an astounding rate, will experience an exponential acceleration. I am acting as a bridge into this new world for people who don’t know how to access it and who face a life-threatening medical condition.

    In addition to knowing how to use AI to research evolving medical science, I have developed substantial interview skills. Thirty-five years ago I had an independent research firm on Wall Street that did pre-offer due diligence for corporate acquirers, mostly to find hidden information that could lead to major financial losses after a transaction. In the course of that work, I built interview and digging skills. Those skills later helped me survive two cancer diagnosis including a terminal diagnosis thirty-five years ago. There’s more on my background here.

    This research can make a difference in the lives of people facing a life-threatening diagnosis. Sometimes it will make a huge difference in their lives as it has in mine.

  2. The unfortunate truth is that Heron Dance is not financially viable and hasn’t been for years. Many days I work 12 hours, many weeks seven days a week. Over eight thousand people subscribe to Zen Mountain Journal and maybe four hundred support it financially. Many more of those supporters are in their nineties than forties.

    The Tao tells us to go with the flow. With Heron Dance I’m going against the flow. Some of the problem has been the number of different content experiments and directions I’ve gone in. A friend and long time reader tells me he liked it better a couple of years ago. I think a number of long-time readers feel the same way. There are two problems with that. One, it wasn’t viable two years ago either and I felt compelled to experiment. Another is that I’m a creative person and I can’t do the same work, the same art, the same writing year after year. I need to evolve, to experiment.

    Heron Dance loses subscribers every year to death, dementia, blindness, etc. It was the number of long time readers who have contacted me over the last six months describing their major medical challenges that led me to start Emerging Cures. I’ve been offering them suggestions based on my experience but I know I could be of much more help in many cases if I could devote time to studying emerging medical science.

And so I will launch a new Substack Saturday, Surviving Cancer. I will talk about developments in medical science, about survivor psychology and about anything else that may have a bearing on surviving life-threatening diseases.

You can sign up for the new Substack here, or on the new Emerging Cures website here.

You can read more about the coaching services here.