(Up to: Taoism Ceci NEst Pas Une Pipe )

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe". This is not a pipe. A picture is not a pipe. The word "pipe" is not a pipe, merely a representation. The word "this" is not a pipe, nor is the picture it refers to.

The painting of a pipe, however, is merely a representation, or a description (if verbal, rather than textual) of the original pipe. It is not a representation of all pipes - how can it be? Nothing is the pipe except the pipe, and any attempt to portray or describe it can only mirror it, always to some lesser extent (as it cannot actually be the pipe itself, even though it looks and behaves identically).

Consider too a quote from Magritte:

"Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

(lifted from Foucault's "This is not a Pipe".)
"Resemblance" in this case is a re-enactment, or a copying in the image of the actual item being perceived. The mind has the power to construct - within its own confines - an idea that resembles something in the real world. However, this idea is not the actual thing, and so that which we see is not that which is there at all. Words are even further away from this "reality" - they are the symbols that represent our ideas, rather than the the thing in the real world from which those ideas formed. Words are "meta-ideas".

This is how I "imagine" the Tao - an entity that exists somewhere behind the objects that we perceive, but as soon as it (or these "real" effects) is interpreted, it is no longer the Tao, merely a resemblance, a shadow. This includes all representations - our concepts of it, as well as our attempts to define it for the purposes of communication. There is no way for us to understand truly what the Tao is.

In this way, the Tao is like everything, and indeed is everything - or at least comes from it - and everything behaves as the Tao. People may describe me, take pictures of me, or call me by my name, but only I am me.

See also a snippet from "The Tao of Music":

"Consider Magritte’s painting of a pipe under which he placed the words (in French), “This is not a pipe.” It cannot escape our notice that one of the most compelling interpretations of this work, with respect to its influence on other artists, took the paradoxical statement as a stimulus to a higher, and more consistent, level of discrimination. In this view, one is meant to see that a painting cannot be a pipe; it can’t be used to have a smoke. One thing is a pipe, and another thing is a painting. In other words, the painting is not meant to blur the distinctions but to clarify them more consistently. This is, of course, the typical western response. Ambiguities are not easily tolerated in the western mind."