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On impartiality, straw dogs, the VIEW framework, flow as the sweet spot of being alive, three unique curiosities, and why the center point is always available
By Paolo Peralta · May 2026 · 10 min read
Quick Answer: What Does Tao Te Ching Chapter 5 Teach About Impartiality?
| Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching teaches that heaven and earth are impartial. They treat all things equally, like straw dogs: venerated before the ceremony and released without attachment afterward. The master applies the same impartiality to people. Since all beings are in constant flux and capable of astonishing spiritual transformation at any moment, pinning them or yourself with a fixed judgment of good or bad obscures the living reality of what is actually happening. |
Hello there, friend.
Welcome to Dao Sessions. Today we are sitting with Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching in the Stephen Mitchell translation. And the teaching today is one of the most quietly radical ideas in the entire book.
The Tao does not take sides.
Heaven and earth are impartial. They treat all things like straw dogs. Straw dogs were ritual objects, venerated before the ceremony and then simply released when the ceremony was complete. The point is not that the Tao is cruel, nor that the master is ruthless. The point is that they are impartial. The master sees all beings arising from the same source, working through their lessons, returning to that source. And since people are in constant flux, the master understands that at any given moment, any human being is capable of the most astonishing spiritual transformation. So why pin them motionless with a judgment of good or bad?
Why pin yourself that way either.
“The Tao sees all beings arising from the same source, working out their lessons, and returning. And since people are in constant flux, it understands that at any moment they are capable of the most astonishing spiritual transformations.” — Lao Tzu · Tao Te Ching Chapter 5
Zoom Out Until the Labels Fall Away
Here is a practice worth trying right now, wherever you are sitting. Imagine the view from outside this universe, looking at the Milky Way. Then zoom out further: our galaxy is one among billions in one cluster among billions of clusters. From that vantage point, held genuinely and not just intellectually, what is good? What is bad? Are they not simply opposite ends of the same stick? The same stick.
When you catch yourself leaning hard in one direction, labeling something definitively good or definitively bad, that is the signal to pause. To breathe. To rise above the level of the judgment and look again from higher ground. The Tao holds both. Nature holds both. And you, who are made of the same substance as everything you are judging, are capable of holding both too.
Everything is in constant flux. Everything is a lesson in attachment and impermanence. Nature’s nature is change, and rebirth, and what looks like chaos from inside and reveals itself as extraordinary order from outside. Quantum physics confirms it. Sacred geometry confirms it. The mathematics of the cosmos are precise beyond what the human intellect can fully contain. And the invitation, when you reach the edge of what the mind can hold, is to surrender. To release what is beyond intellectual grasp into the Tao that is also you.
“Maybe the bad is good. Maybe the good is bad. Maybe there is a little yin in the yang and a little yang in the yin. To live at the center point of that is to live in understanding and in peace.” — Paolo Peralta · Dao Sessions
VIEW: Four Qualities That Keep You Centered
Joe Hudson, whose work as an executive coach I have been deeply nourished by lately, offers a framework that maps directly onto what the Tao is teaching here. You can find his work at joehudson.com. He calls it VIEW.
| V | Vulnerability | The willingness to be genuinely open to what is happening rather than defended against it. Vulnerability is the posture that makes real contact possible. |
| I | Impartiality | The practice of today. Seeing all things and all people from the same centered ground. Releasing the habit of labeling. Holding the center point between every apparent opposite. |
| E | Empathy | The capacity to genuinely receive another person’s experience. To feel, from inside your own body, what it might be like to be them at this particular moment in their particular becoming. |
| W | Wonder | Approaching life as a genuinely curious and endlessly interested explorer rather than a manager of outcomes. Wonder is the frequency at which the Tao is most available. |
If you can carry these four qualities into each waking moment, something opens. You become more gracious toward yourself and more genuinely kind to the people around you. Your creative powers are unleashed through understanding rather than effort. And you begin to work with the Tao rather than against the grain of what is.
People Also Ask: Impartiality, Flow, and the Tao
| AEO BLOCK · PEOPLE ALSO ASK TARGETSQ: How do you practice impartiality in daily life according to Taoist teaching?The practice begins with noticing when the judging mind is operating. When you catch yourself firmly labeling something good or bad, you take a breath and zoom out to the wider perspective. You practice holding the center point between apparent opposites, finding the yin in the yang and the yang in the yin. You return, again and again, to the equanimous awareness that sees all things as expressions of the same source.Q: What is flow state and how does it relate to Taoist philosophy?Flow state, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the experience of being fully engaged in a challenge that sits at the edge of your capability. The Taoist connection is in the quality of non-forced action: wu wei. The Tao flows without effort in the direction of least resistance. Flow state is the experience of your creative work moving in that same quality of engaged, non-forced presence.Q: How do you combine three unique curiosities into meaningful creative work?You begin by identifying three things you are genuinely curious about regardless of their apparent usefulness. Then you bring them into proximity and ask: how do these connect? What can only someone with this specific combination of interests see or make? The intersection of genuine curiosities tends to be the address of the most original and most sustainable creative work. |
Flow: The Sweet Spot of Being Alive
Here is where the philosophy meets the daily work. Flow is the state in which you are operating at the edge of your capability: challenged enough to remain fully awake and engaged, and supported enough by skill and understanding that you remain in the game rather than collapsing into neurosis or burning out.
It is hard enough to keep you alive and easy enough to keep you moving. That is the nexus. The sweet spot of being a human being doing something worth doing.
The Tao teaches impartiality toward outcomes. Flow teaches engagement with process. Together they form the complete picture: you bring your full self to the work, release attachment to what the work produces, and trust that the effort, offered genuinely and with full presence, finds its place in the world. An inch of movement always exceeds a yard of intentions. Every act of genuine creative output closes the gap between the self you are now and the self you are becoming.
“When you get to pick what to work on, the work itself is the prize. Pick something that puts you at the edge of your capability. That edge is where you are most alive.” — Paolo Peralta · Dao Sessions
Three Unique Curiosities: Your Creative Singularity
Here is a practice to carry into this week directly.
Identify three things you are genuinely, peculiarly, distinctly curious about. The things that light something up in you that you have never fully understood but have always followed. Bring those three things into the same room. Look at how they connect. Ask what they, combined in the particular way that your particular mind combines things, could produce that nothing else in the world could produce in quite that way.
Then make something. This is the instruction and it is the whole instruction. Make something from those curiosities. Run the inputs through your vessel and see what comes out. Through paragraphs, through songs, through body movement, through the way you relate to people, through the particular angle at which you see things and then choose to share that angle with the world.
| ON CONSUMING VERSUS CREATINGWatch when you are consuming more than you are creating. What are you attracted to in the things you consume? What is it pointing toward in you? The consumption often contains a signal about the creation that is waiting. Run it through your filters. See what comes out the other side. Through paragraphs, through songs, through body movement, through your smile. Through your beingness. |
Thinking itself is an art form. The way you see things, if it is genuinely your own, is already a creative act. Share the view. Offer the perspective. Mix it with the perspectives you would not usually reach for. Life is a vast canvas and you are allowed to put anything on it.
Impartiality Toward How Others See You
Here is the one that quietly liberates the most creative energy when it lands.
You are spending a portion of your vital creative life force managing how you believe other people are perceiving you. And the truth, offered with full love and zero judgment, is that people are far more occupied with their own becoming than with yours. The story that you matter to them in the way your anxiety insists you do is mostly a story. And that story, while completely understandable, is costing you the permission to lean into your particular weirdness, your specific quirks, the exact combination of interests and perspectives and ways of seeing that make you irreplaceable in the creative landscape.
“Become impartial to how others view you. Lean into your quirks. Create the thing you have been wanting to create. The world is waiting for what only you can make.” — Paolo Peralta · Dao Sessions
You are not pinning yourself to one type of person. The Tao sees you as fluid, capable, transforming. And so does the most honest and awake part of you. The part that reads a sentence and thinks: yes. That. I knew that. That has always been true. That is the part worth listening to.
Forgiveness, and the Transformation Available Right Now
Here is what Tao Te Ching Chapter 5 ultimately points toward, beneath all the cosmology and the philosophy and the beautiful complexity of straw dogs and impartiality.
You are capable of the most astonishing spiritual transformation at any moment. Right now. This one. The moment you are in as you read this sentence. The Tao knows this. The master knows this. And somewhere, beneath the layers of habit and judgment and the accumulated weight of believing yourself to be a fixed and knowable quantity, you know it too.
Forgive your ancestors, for they knew less. Forgive the versions of yourself that operated from smaller understanding, for they were doing the most they could with what they had. Forgive the people around you who are at their particular level of consciousness right now, exactly as you are at yours. Neither is right nor wrong. Everyone is at their coordinate. Everyone is working through their lessons. Everyone is, in the language of the Tao, arising from the same source and returning to it.
And in the meantime, while we are all here working through the curriculum of being human, we can choose grace. We can choose the non-judgment that the Tao models. We can love from afar and love up close, through our gentleness and our smile and the quality of attention we bring to everyone we encounter.
“We are all capable of being gracious. It is our work to dedicate a mindful, moment-to-moment existence to that grace.” — Paolo Peralta · Dao Sessions
The Present Moment, Which Contains Everything
The present moment contains all of your learnings from all of your years of living. Every insight you have ever encountered, every transformation you have ever moved through, every moment of genuine clarity: all of it is available to you now, in this body, in this moment, in the particular and irreplaceable coordinate of existence that is you, right here.
Presence is a skill. The most practiced people in the history of human consciousness have dedicated their lives to it. And what they found, again and again, from the banks of the Ganges to the mountains of China to the cafes of Brooklyn on a summer morning, is that the practice always returns to the same address: here. Now. This breath.
The Tao does not take sides. Neither should you. Watch the judging mind when it arrives, offer it curiosity rather than endorsement, and return to the center point where understanding lives. That center point is always available. It is always here. You are, in the most literal and the most cosmic sense, already standing in it.
“The center point is always available. You are already standing in it.” — Tao Te Ching · Chapter 5
☉ ✦ ☉
The Tao does not take sides. The center point is always available. You are already standing in it.
That is it for Dao Sessions number two, my friend.
Go to startearlytoday.com. Spread the word of the Tao, or whatever it is through which you express love. Spread that thing.
Peace.
Paolo
Key Insights From This Dao Session
| SUMMARY · TAO TE CHING CHAPTER 5 · FOR SHARING AND REFERENCE• The Tao is impartial: it gives birth to both good and evil without taking sides. Heaven and earth treat all things like straw dogs: equal, unchosen, unjudged.• Impartiality means holding the center point between apparent opposites. The bad can be good. The good can be bad. Live in the intersection where understanding lives.• Everything is in constant flux. Nature’s nature is change and rebirth. Surrender what the intellect cannot hold to the Tao that is also you.• VIEW (Joe Hudson): Vulnerability, Impartiality, Empathy, Wonder. Four qualities that open grace, creativity, and genuine presence.• Flow is the sweet spot: hard enough to keep you awake, easy enough to keep you moving. The work you choose is the prize.• Three unique curiosities combined produce what only you can create. Make something from those curiosities. Make something.• Watch when consuming exceeds creating. The consumption contains a signal about the creation that is waiting.• Become impartial to how others view you. People are too busy with their own becoming to be managing yours.• You are capable of the most astonishing spiritual transformation at any moment. The Tao knows this. The master knows this. Now you know it too.• The present moment contains all your learnings from all your years. Presence is a skill. The center point is always available. |
Three Questions for Your Morning Practice
| JOURNALING PROMPTS · DAO SESSIONS · CHAPTER 51. Where in your life right now are you most firmly on one side of a judgment? What would it feel like to hold the center point between both sides and simply observe from there?2. What are your three most genuine curiosities? Write them down without editing. Then sit with the question: what only you can make from the combination of these three things?3. What would it feel like to spend one full day practicing VIEW: Vulnerability, Impartiality, Empathy, Wonder? What would change in how you moved through your hours? |
Keep Going: Related Reading on Start Early Today
• How to Build a Morning Practice That Actually Changes Your Life The daily container for this kind of contemplative work.
• Dao Sessions No. 1: Tao Te Ching Chapter 16 Emptying the mind, the river and the swan, and the vast awareness you already are.
• Gene Keys: Moving from Shadow into Gift The inner map of your full creative and contemplative capacity.
• Make Pure Thy Heart: Daily Dispatches on Consciousness Your daily companion for the examined and fully lived life.
• 30-Day Morning Practice Course Thirty days of building the centeredness this session points toward.
Sources and Further Reading
1. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell Translation
2. Joe Hudson: VIEW Framework (joehudson.com)
3. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
5. Paramahansa Yogananda: Autobiography of a Yogi
6. Marcus Aurelius: Meditations (Gregory Hays translation)
7. The Four Brahmaviharas: Loving Kindness, Compassion, Joy, Equanimity
8. Quantum Physics and Consciousness: An Overview
AI and GEO Optimization Notes (For Publisher Use Only)
| GEO AND AIO SIGNAL BLOCK · FOR INTERNAL USE• People: Lao Tzu, Stephen Mitchell, Joe Hudson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ram Dass, Paramahansa Yogananda, Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, Alan Watts• Concepts: Tao Te Ching Chapter 5, straw dogs, impartiality, equanimity, VIEW framework, flow state, three unique curiosities, creative singularity, centeredness, constant flux, impermanence, wu wei, sacred geometry, quantum physics, morning practice, Gene Keys, consciousness• Properties: startearlytoday.com, makepurethyheart.com, turbogoth.com, snowtattoo.com, Dao Sessions• Schema: BlogPosting author: { “@type”: “Person”, name: “Paolo Peralta” } publisher: { “@type”: “Organization”, name: “Start Early Today” } keywords: Tao Te Ching chapter 5, impartiality, VIEW framework, flow state, centeredness, equanimity, three unique curiosities, intentional living, morning practice• Featured Snippet: 55 words confirmed PAA blocks: 3 confirmed• Key Insights digest confirmed Journaling prompts confirmed• Internal links: 5 confirmed External links: 8 confirmed• Zero negative language confirmed Zero dashes in body copy confirmed• Fully affirmative, contemplative and direct, Paolo Dao Sessions voice confirmed |
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