XPERIENCEIT PRESS IS PROUD TO PUBLISH
It: Forty Years in Conversation with the Tao Te Ching
Eighty-one spare, contemporary renderings shaped through one life’s forty-year conversation with the Tao Te Ching.
liff Kayser’s conversation with the Tao Te Ching began in 1984 and continued through four decades of leadership, human development, Polarity Thinking, loss, recovery, and ordinary life.
It gathers his interpretive renderings of all eighty-one chapters in language designed to preserve openness, cadence, and room for the reader’s own encounter. It is not presented as a direct translation from Classical Chinese, but as the record of a sustained relationship with one of humanity’s enduring wisdom texts.
No religious identity is required. Readers may enter these pages through philosophy, poetry, spiritual reflection, leadership, personal development, or simple curiosity.
Words such as “Way” and “Path” can make Lao Tzu’s subject feel more bounded than the reality toward which he points. Kayser uses It as an open pronoun: a word that can point without pretending to contain.
It preserves the eighty-one chapters in their most elemental form. The longer Just Tao It series carries them into conversation with contemporary life through personal reflection, leadership and coaching applications, Polarity Thinking, and Polarity Map® applications.
Together, they form two movements of one conversation: the source renderings carried across forty years, followed by an exploration of what they may ask of us now.
Cliff Kayser is an author, executive coach, leadership educator, and longtime practitioner of Polarity Thinking. His work explores wiser decisions, adult development, interdependent tensions, and the conditions that help people and human systems become more whole.
XperienceIT Press is an author-centered home for individual AND shared writing. It exists to help consequential work become visible while protecting the author’s voice, the integrity of the work, and the relationship between book and reader.
It: Forty Years in Conversation with the Tao Te Ching is its inaugural publication.
Full Description of
It: Forty Years in Conversation with the Tao Te Ching
For more than forty years, I have lived in conversation with the Tao Te Ching.
The conversation began in 1984 on an undergraduate World Religions syllabus. It continued through leadership, human development, Polarity Thinking, loss, recovery, and the ordinary tests of living. Across decades, I compared English-language translations, listened for the meaning that seemed to endure among them, and gradually shaped an interpretive rendering in my own voice.
I do not read Classical Chinese, and this book does not claim to be a direct translation. It records one life’s sustained encounter: reading, comparing, questioning, living, losing, returning, and listening again.
The Tao Te Ching became a companion to my own religious inheritance. It did not ask me to reject that inheritance or exchange it for another. I am grateful for the ways it returned me to what I experience as the best within my own tradition while opening me to wisdom carried through other traditions, philosophies, relationships, and lives.
Different religious, spiritual, philosophical, and secular ways of understanding life do not need to collapse into sameness to illuminate one another. We can be rooted without becoming closed, receive across traditions without appropriating them, and allow difference to deepen rather than end the conversation.
No religious belief or identity is required to enter this book. You may come from an inherited faith, a chosen spiritual practice, several traditions, a secular or philosophical orientation, uncertainty, or no declared religion at all. You may meet these chapters as wisdom literature, philosophy, poetry, leadership reflection, spiritual companion, or simply another way of attending to life.
It presents all eighty-one chapters in spare, contemporary language. Each chapter preserves openness, cadence, and room for your own encounter. The titles are doorways. You may read the poems in sequence, hold one at a time, or open the book wherever the moment leads.
The title reflects the heart of the undertaking. Over time, words such as “Way” and “Path” began to feel more bounded than the reality toward which Lao Tzu points. I use It as an open pronoun—a word that can point without pretending to contain. Wherever It appears, I am asking us to remain in relationship with something that cannot be reduced to a word.
Polarity Thinking later gave me contemporary language for dynamics the Tao Te Ching had been illuminating throughout my life. My work with Barry Johnson and the Polarity Partnerships community deepened my understanding of interdependent tensions: realities in which apparent opposites need one another over time. It also helped me recognize the movement between Either/Or AND Both/And thinking—and the discernment required to know when each is needed.
It stands on its own as a complete rendering of all eighty-one chapters. It is the source text beneath my Just Tao It series.
Where It preserves the chapters in their most elemental form, Just Tao It carries each one into conversation with contemporary life. Through personal reflection, leadership and coaching applications, Polarity Thinking, and Polarity Map® applications, the series explores how ancient wisdom might help us engage the interdependent tensions shaping our choices, relationships, organizations, and communities.
The essays do not attempt to settle the poems’ meaning. They allow ancient rendering AND present-day experience to illuminate one another—creating another doorway through which readers can enter, question, and develop their own relationship with the wisdom.
Together, It and Just Tao It form two movements of one conversation: the eighty-one renderings carried across forty years, followed by an exploration of what they may ask of us now.
It is the inaugural publication of XperienceIT Press. It is the source work beneath what follows—and an invitation for you to begin, or continue, a conversation of your own.