The five colors the human eye will blind.
The five notes the human ear will rend.
The five tastes the human mouth offend.
Racing and hunting will human hearts turn mad,
Objects of prize make human conduct bad.
Therefore the holy man attends to the inner and not to the outer. He abandons the latter and chooses the former.
Translation: Paul Carus, 1898 (public domain)
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The next time you reach for the screen out of habit rather than need, can you pause long enough to feel the quieter hunger underneath the loud one — and ask what it actually wants?
A Practice
Pick one stretch of today — a meal, a walk, a short errand — and take it with the screen left behind. Let one sense have your full attention: the actual taste of the food, the sounds of the street, the air on your skin. Notice what returns when nothing is competing for it.
A Guided Meditation
Read the transcript rolls with the audio
Take a comfortable seat.
Let your hands rest gently.
Allow your eyes to soften or close.
Begin by noticing your breath.
Not changing it.
Just witnessing it as it arrives… and leaves.
Verse 12 teaches that the senses, when chased, can overwhelm the mind.
Colors can dazzle until we lose clarity.
Sounds can excite until we lose silence.
Tastes can tempt until we lose balance.
The world pulls at us… and the heart becomes restless.
Today, we practice releasing that pull.
Bring your attention to your eyes.
Imagine all the colors of the world passing before them—
bright, vivid, shifting, demanding attention.
And now imagine gently stepping back from them.
Let the colors fade into softness.
Let the eyes rest in darkness.
Nothing to grasp.
Nothing to chase.
Now bring your awareness to your ears.
Sounds rise and fall—
voices, music, noise, movement.
Notice how sound wants to pull you outward.
And now imagine each sound dissolving,
like ripples fading on a still lake.
Let the ears rest in quiet.
Shift your awareness to your mouth and tongue.
All the tastes you've known—sweet, sharp, rich, tempting.
Notice how taste invites desire, memory, craving.
And now imagine the mouth becoming neutral,
simple, calm, unprovoked.
Let the tongue rest in stillness.
Now bring your attention to the heart.
Feel how the world invites you to chase—
to run after experiences, achievements, sensations, rewards.
Feel how that chasing can stir the heart,
make it race, make it restless.
And now imagine stepping out of the chase.
Imagine placing all striving down,
like setting a heavy bag on the ground.
Feel the heart soften.
Feel it slow.
Feel it return to its natural rhythm.
Now bring your awareness inward.
The verse says:
"The holy one attends to the inner and not to the outer."
Let this be your practice now.
Turn your attention toward the quiet space inside you—
the space untouched by color,
untouched by sound,
untouched by taste,
untouched by the rush of the world.
A space that is always here.
Always steady.
Always yours.
Rest there.
If a sensation arises,
notice it…
and let it pass.
If a thought arises,
notice it…
and let it pass.
If an emotion arises,
notice it…
and let it pass.
Nothing to hold.
Nothing to resist.
Nothing to chase.
Just awareness.
Just presence.
Feel how spacious you become
when you stop gripping the outer world.
Feel how peaceful you become
when you stop feeding the senses.
Feel how clear you become
when you return to the inner.
Western Commentary
Lao Tzu lines up the whole menu of pleasure — the five colours, the five tones, the five flavours — and then names what happens in excess: each one cancels the very sense it was meant to delight. The eye flooded with colour stops seeing. The ear crowded with sound stops hearing. The palate chased from taste to taste forgets what anything actually tastes like. The paradox is quiet and a little unwelcome: past a certain point, more stimulation buys you less of the thing you were chasing it for.
There is a part of most of us that leans toward the brighter thing, the louder one, the next one. The verse calls it the chase — the wild hunting that makes mad the mind — and the word madness is doing honest work there. It is not condemning desire; it is describing what happens to attention when it never gets to rest: a low, humming restlessness that more input only feeds. The hunger to be stimulated, it turns out, is rarely satisfied by stimulation. It just learns to want the next round sooner.
It is not hard to hear our own hours in these old lines. The feed engineered so the bottom of the screen never arrives. The autoplay that decides for you. The faint, familiar agitation of having looked at a great deal and taken in almost none of it. The holy man, the verse says, attends to the inner and not to the outer — chooses what genuinely nourishes over what merely flashes. You might notice, the next time the screen pulls at you, that there is a quieter hunger underneath the loud one, and that it asks for far less than the loud one claims. And if that pull ever feels heavier than something a single verse should carry — if it has the shape of a compulsion rather than a habit — that is worth honoring too; there is no weakness in reaching for real support.
It could be easy to read this as an old man scolding the senses, or a call to go grey and austere. It is not. The senses are how the world reaches you; the verse is pointing at proportion, not denial. A meal tastes like something when you are not already reaching for the next one. Colour returns when the eye is allowed to rest. What blinds is not the world's richness — it is the chase that never lets you actually arrive in it.