A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.
A truly good man does nothing,
Yet nothing is left undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done
When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order
Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower,
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.
Tao te Ching–(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)
literary lew 
I really love this but I can’t say I understand it. Just glimpses. I can see myself as the disciplinarian sometimes (more often than I would like). Does “When Tao is lost there is goodness” mean when all sense of self or all concern about self is lost, “there is goodness”? I can see when one’s sense of goodness is lost, there is kindness and when one’s sense of being kind is lost, there is justice as everyone is on an equal footing (just human). I can even see when justice is lost there is only ritual, because we are just going through the motions (husk of faith and loyalty) and so the beginning of confusion. I can really identify with that.
“Knowledge of the future is only a flowering trapping of the Tao”. Love that! When I think I know the future, I don’t know!
I’m struggling with a decision I have made. I’m not sure it is just or kind or good… Not sure at all… and was based on what the future could look like….Maybe there was a bit of a disciplinarian in there and yet …Your wisdom please….
Another thing. I came across this from Walter Bruggemann which I love which also speaks to me, “We can never make ourselves secure. We can only allow ourselves to be secured by the faithfulness of others. It is always relational.”
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I would say that when Tao is “lost”, there is the ego attraction to a perfunctory, ego driven. “goodness.” The Tao te Ching is so valuable.
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