You can look, but it cannot be seen.
You can listen, but it cannot be heard.
You can grasp, but it cannot be touched.
When something is incapable of being sensed or categorized or measured in this way,
It is because it is not a thing—
It is an undifferentiated field of potential.
It is neither light nor dark, high nor low, up nor down.
Rather, its process prefigures the very division of opposites,
And thus it is impossible to define.
It emerges only to vanish again and again.
We might consider it a formula for the unformed,
An illustration of the undefined,
An outline of ambiguity.
Don’t try to examine it directly,
You won’t make heads nor tails of it.
Rather, practice abiding the path of Tao in the here-and-now.
In doing this, you will share in its momentum,
An unimpeded unfolding
Which started back at the beginning of all things.
You may order or download The Tao Te Ching here.
List of verses here