With more than 250 translations, Lao-tzu’s masterpiece is one of the most translated works in history, yet its opening line, “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao,” still leaves readers sensing a deep truth they cannot quite grasp. The author argues that the mystery was never in the text. It was in the vocabulary. Lao-tzu was describing a reality for which sixth-century BCE Chinese had no words, and the words have only recently arrived. Read with those words, the Tao Te Ching turns out to be about the same things as the Book of Genesis: how the universe came to be, and who its ultimate Source is. Yet who is this ‘Father within’ to whom Jesus so often pointed during his life on Earth? Most ancient scriptures turn the powers of nature into gods. The Tao Te Ching does not, and perhaps for that very reason it comes closer than any other to revealing who the Father within is.
Drawing on the planetary history disclosed in The Urantia Book and the definition of universal consciousness given in the Christ Letters, this book traces a single thread across four thousand years: from Melchizedek, the enigmatic priest-king of Salem who blessed Abraham, through the missionaries who carried his teaching along the ancient road into China, to the archives of Zhou where Lao-tzu gave that teaching its most enduring form. Along the way it explains the three concentric circles carved into sacred stones on every inhabited continent, and turns to the bioelectric research of Michael Levin’s laboratory at Tufts to show that intelligence and love are not metaphors but physical facts, written into every living cell.
The second half of the book is a complete new translation of all eighty-one chapters, rendered in verse with the Tao read as Supreme Intelligence and Te as Unconditional Love. Read this way, Lao-tzu is not counseling passivity. He is describing how creation actually works, and how a human life can align with it.
