Church of the Churchless

Who's afraid of The Big Bad Contingent World? Sartre, but not me!

Here's a true tale about my life that does a pretty good job of illustrating the philosophical notion of "contingency." I related it in a comment on my 2006 post, "Breaking free of family influences." 

I graduated with a useless BA in psychology and was contemplating applying for an appropriately menial job. Then I overheard a conversation in the San Jose State cafeteria.

"Man, I can't do anything with a psych degree. And it takes at least three years to get a Ph.D." His friend replied, "You should get a M.S.W. It's just two years, and there are good jobs available after you graduate."

I had no idea what a M.S.W. was. I went to the library and looked it up. Everyone was talking about beautiful green Oregon, so I applied to the only school of social work in the state. Was admitted. Thirty-six years later, I'm still here.

A brief overheard conversation. My life heads off in a new direction. Go figure. I sure can't.

Seemingly, if I hadn't been in a certain spot in the San Jose State cafeteria at a specific time, in just the right location to overhear this conversation, I never would have applied to the Portland State University School of Social Work, never graduated with a M.S.W. and gotten a job at the Oregon Health Sciences University as a research associate, never moved to Salem to work for the State Health Planning and Development Agency, never met my second wife through her personals ad in Willamette Week, and, in general, never had the life I've lived here in Oregon since 1971.

That's contingency. Which is opposed to necessity. Here's a one-minute video that explains the difference between them. 

Now, in my true-believing days -- when I accepted the notion of karma, basically an Eastern version of "God's will" -- I considered overhearing the cafeteria conversation as part of my destiny. A non-theistic person might say, It was the universe sending you a message.

Either way, there's a strong sense of necessity in these points of view. I was meant to go to graduate school in Oregon, where I'd settle down and have all sorts of Oregon'ish experiences, which are continuing as I type these words in rural south Salem. 

But I don't see the conversation that way anymore. 

Understand: I do still believe in determinism. Meaning, things happen for a reason. More accurately, reasons. Lots of them. Countless, in fact. So many reasons, of such astounding complexity, in most human circumstances it is impossible to fathom why this happened rather than that. 

There were reasons why I was in a certain place in the San Jose State cafeteria at a certain time. There were reasons why the people I overheard talking had the conversation that they did. There were reasons why I was instantly attracted to the idea of getting a M.S.W. at an Oregon college.

However, it is easy to envision how, if those deterministic influences had been just slightly altered, my life would have taken a very different direction. There was no force of fate guiding my life, no God in control of my destiny.

There is just the brute fact of what happened: I overheard a cafeteria conversation that led me to move to Oregon. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Facticity is closely related to contingency. Things could have been otherwise, but they ended up being what they are. It is what it is, as I've talked about here and here.

I don't find this at all disturbing.

Yes, I used to enjoy believing that a higher power had my life (and afterlife) all mapped out for me in a loving, caring way. I was being taken care of. All I needed to do was go with the spiritual flow of my chosen religious belief system. Now, though, I'm unable to accept what I used to embrace on the basis of faith. My eyes have been opened to the contingency and facticity of reality.

Having dived deeply into existentialism in my early college years, I bought Sarah Bakewell's book, "At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails." It's both a history and overview of 20th century existentialism. Here's some mentions of how Sartre viewed contingency in his writings.

Sartre's narrator is overwhelmed by nausea -- but with it comes an insight: that nothing in the world happens with any necessity. Everything is "contingent," and it could all have happened a different way. The revelation horrifies him.

...Eventually, while looking at the "boiled leather" of a chestnut tree in the local park and feeling the nausea again, Roquentin realises that it is not just the tree but the Being of the tree that is bothering him. It is the way in which, inexplicably and pointlessly, it simply sits there refusing to make sense or tone itself down. This is what contingency is: the random, outrageous thisness of things.

...Viscosity is Sartre's way of expressing the horror of contingency. It evokes what he called "facticity," meaning everything that drags us down into situations and inhibits us from flying free.

Well, even when I was deep into Sartre (I read every page of "Being and Nothingness"!) I never felt nauseous or horrified that the world is simply what it is -- with no overarching god-given or fateful necessity lording over the could-have-been-otherwise nature of existence.

In a lecture on Sartre, Ron McClamrock clearly explains the notion of nausea. I accept that Sartre felt this. I just don't feel myself that it is a necessary or typical reaction to understanding that the world is contingent. So what if things could have happened other than how they did? I'm fine with the thisness of existence and don't find it at all outrageous.

Nausea

One major theme of Sartre's existentialism is the nausea of confronting being. Nausea, for Sartre, is a kind of philosophical vertigo which comes from grasping the utter contingency of all existence.

To grasp this, one can begin by reflecting on the utter contingency of your being where you are now. Consider all the details which had to be just so simply in order for human beings to exist on this planet --- the expansion rate of the universe, the balance of chemicals on the Earth, the cosmic rays penetrating the atmosphere to cause exactly the right mutations in earlier organisms, and so on.

Consider in addition all those precise coincidences needed for your parents to be born, to meet, to have children. Add to this all those improbable circumstances necessary for your being born --- for say, exactly that sperm cell to fertilize exactly that egg, so that you and not one of your possible siblings were born. And, of course, pile on all the circumstances necessary for you to have come to where you are today, reading this --- the influences of parents, friends, and teachers; the circumstances of education, employment, and affection.

How likely is that all of those factors came together in exactly the way they did? It is so absolutely, utterly unlikely that we find ourselves perched on a pinnacle of utter improbability, of total contingency, and the height of improbability is dizzying.

There is absolutely no reason that there should have been such a ridiculous coincidence of events; but such a ridiculous coincidence is exactly what the existence of each of us rests upon. My own non-existence is so immensely much more likely than my existence that the foundation of my existence is left as a needle-thin tower of improbability. It is from this that the existential vertigo of nausea comes.

It's important to see that the point here really has very little to do with issues about determinism at, say, the physical level. Regardless of whether some kind of physical determinism is true about the world (or even about our actions), the sort of utter contingency which is important for Sartre still remains.

The critical point for the purposes of nausea or existential vertigo is that there is no reason why the real world is the real one rather than some other possible world being real. There may be causes (say, stated in some micro-physics) such that the state of the universe at the big bang determines my existence and position now. But that does not give a reason why I am here rather than not --- that is still, if you like, a kind of cosmic accident.

So it's not determinism that's at issue here, but a kind of fatalism.

There is no reason that I should have been born, even if it turn out that there is a physical causal story to tell about how the physical events which were my birth came to happen. There is no explanation for it as my birth. My birth was not destined, in that nothing was working to insure that I was born, even if the physical event of my birth was causally necessitated by the initial conditions of the universe and the blind laws of nature.

To twist around Leibniz, we might call this the "principle of insufficient reason": there is no reason for anything being the way it is (even if there are causes of it); this is not only not the best of all possible worlds, it is as unlikely as any, and thus utterly contingent.

Again, fine with me. I like the idea that I've living in an utterly unlikely world. 

Post-election anxiety? Breathe... cool down... let go of fear

Along with my progressive, liberal, Clinton-voting friends and acquaintances, I've been struggling to come to grips with the bizarre reality of a President Trump. 

(Yikes, just writing those last two words brought about a feeling of impending doom.)

Today I came across a Vox post, "An ancient Buddhist strategy for overcoming paralyzing fear," that contains some good advice. Here's some passages from the short piece that I particularly resonated with.

In the days since November 9, an oppressive cloak of fear and dread has descended upon a great many Americans.

...This fear is not trivial and it may not be easily subdued. Fear is a biological response we’ve evolved to protect ourselves from threat, and it originates in the limbic system of the brain, the primitive reptile inside us.

Neuroscience tells us that uncertainty inflates our estimates of threat. So it’s not surprising that the uncertainty of what will come to pass in a Trump administration is leading many people to flirt with all-consuming, paralyzing panic.

...We’ve got 62 days until Trump takes office, so it seems like a good time to seek out the world’s oldest psychological teachings on transforming oppressive fear into something more productive.

...One of the most fundamental Buddhist teachings is mindfulness — the act of bringing awareness to the present moment. I spoke to Brother Phap Dung, a senior monk and teacher at Plum Village, the Buddhist community founded by the Zen master and author Thich Nhat Hanh, about bringing mindfulness to bear on fear.

“We see the mind like a house, so if your house is on fire, you need to take care of the fire, not to go look for the person that made the fire,” Dung says. “Take care of those emotions first, because anything that comes from a place of fear and anxiety and anger will only make the fire worse. Come back and find a place of calm and peace to cool the flame of emotion down.”

The simplest way to calm the mind is with the basic meditation practice of sitting quietly, focusing on the breath.

...“Unskillful fear … has got such a good argument: which is, anything can happen in the next moment.” A President Trump raises a multitude of deeply troubling possibilities of harm in the future, and while “that seems like a really convincing argument to keep on worrying and being afraid,” it’s actually not a good reason to remain gripped by fear in the present. We can’t know the future, and so allowing fear to hold us prisoner in the present is ultimately unskillful.

Skillful fear is watching it, getting really close to it, and uncovering the purer feelings, like love, underneath it. We can use fear skillfully by redirecting its energy and our attention toward more wholesome virtues, like courage and kindness, Lesage explains. “We must build dikes of courage to hold back the floods of fear,” Martin Luther King Jr. said.

On a more practical level, Brother Phap Dung recommends that people stop reading the news if it feeds fear. “Go take refuge in nature, and find a cause where your heart doesn’t feel inactive and in despair,” he says. “This is the medicine.”

As wise as this advice is, everybody will have a different way of dealing with negative emotions stirred up by the presidential election.

Personally, I find a lot of comfort in reminding myself that "I" don't really exist -- at least, not in the way most of us feel ourselves to be. Namely, an independent free-willing self who continually faces choices about what to do, and is responsible for the actions that we either decide to undertake or forego.

This feeling places a huge unnecessary burden on us. Unnecessary, because both ancient Buddhism/Taoism and modern neuroscience say that the self is an illusion. 

Five days before the November 8 election, I pointed to this understanding in "A Taoist approach to coping with the presidential election (and everything)."

Most people believe in free will, even though 21st century neuroscience strongly argues against its existence. We feel like there is a "me," a "self,"  that floats around independently inside our head, somehow disconnected from the goings-on of the physical brain and able to make decisions unaffected by prior experiences or external influences.

...People today still struggle with the same question: if I'm part of the world, why does the world so often seem to be at odds with me?

...Something is making everything be what is is, and do what it does. That something can't be separate from nature, unless we embrace some sort of nonsensical dualism. So why not call it the Way?

...The human mind can experience the world more clearly, or less clearly. We all know this to be true. Some days our mind seems to be in such frantic motion that it can't discern what is happening in the ever-moving outside world. Becoming calmer, more centered, helps us gain a clearer perspective. If I read or watch too much political news, I get information overload. Relaxing, I realize that there isn't any sort of objective presidential election reality. How things appear in our pre-election day perspective depends on what enters our minds, and how we look upon it.

...When I'm impelled to be politically active, to care about the presidential election, to help a chosen candidate, I need to realize that it is the World, the Way, that's bringing this about. Sure, I may feel like I'm making choices to donate money, vote a certain way, and such, but this is illusion. I, along with everybody else, am just a small cog in the Great Machinery of the Cosmos. My doing ultimately doesn't come from me, it comes from everything. 

...Almost certainly, either Trump or Clinton is going to be elected president in a few days, an Electoral College tie being very unlikely. To deny the November 9 result is to deny reality. To believe "this wasn't supposed to happen" is to embrace an utterly crazy worldview, one which posits a schism between the what should be mind of the believer and the what is of existence.  

I, like you, am part of the Way, the Tao, that also can be called Nature or the Laws of Nature. There isn't us and the world, or us and the presidential election. We're all in this together. We're all producing this together. We're all responsible for what happens together. 

Three philosophical approaches for coping with a Trump presidency

Like a lot of people, I was shocked last Tuesday when, instead of the Hillary Clinton win that I expected, I went to bed with the nightmare of a President Trump coursing through my still-awake brain. 

It took me a long time to fall asleep. I did my best to relax, to reassure myself that this wasn't the end of the world. But damn, it sure felt like it. 

During the past post-election week, I've been exploring mental defusing approaches to keep my head from exploding.

They seem to be helping, though it's difficult to separate the healing that comes from the simple passage of time and relief provided by the three philosophical approaches described below.

Your results may differ, of course, because you and I are different people.

I'm a godless scientific-minded materialist. So "Trump's election is part of God's plan" doesn't do anything for me, while it may for you. However, my first philosophical approach has some similarities to this sentiment. Minus God and plan.

It's my favorite, so I'll describe it in more detail than the other two approaches.

(1) Determinism rules the world. And, elections. I'm a big non-believer in free will. (Type "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar to find my many posts on this subject.) There's just no evidence that anything other than deterministic laws of nature are responsible for why things turn out the way they do.

It's easy to accept this when it comes to events involving entities that aren't alive, such as earthquakes. When a town is devastated by the ground shifting underneath it, nobody blames the earth for doing something wrong.  

Likewise, if a lion attacks someone in an African jungle, the animal isn't viewed as blameworthy. At least, not in the sense of "it could have acted otherwise." Lions do what they do because that's their nature. But most of us view human beings differently.

We have this strange idea that Homo sapiens is a species that isn't governed by the deterministic laws that everything else in the universe, living and non-living alike, must follow. The reason: evolution has given us a sense of being an ethereal free-floating consciousness that is able to freely choose what the mind and body do.

Almost certainly, this is an illusion, one that has benefits, yet also drawbacks.

Just as a wrongly-held belief in free will makes us judgmental toward criminals (vindictive punishment isn't scientifically justified in a deterministic world, while controlling their behavior and rehabilitation is), so does it make us think "Donald Trump wouldn't have been elected president if only... ."

Clinton hadn't wanted her own email server. Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee. FBI Director Comey hadn't released his letter soon before the election. Etc. Etc.

There's no such thing as "if only" in a deterministic world. Only one thing can happen at a time. Then another thing happens. And a following thing. There is no reality where anything happened differently than what actually occurred. 

I find this comforting. This is why I enjoy dispassionate fact-based analysis of 2016 election results, as described in a recent post on my other blog.

As weird as Trump is, his winning the White House wasn't a random unexplainable bolt of electoral lightning. Like everything else in life, it was the result of causes and effects, some of which can be understood by us humans, and some of which elude our current ability to make sense of political reality.

I don't like what happened on November 8. But then, I don't like a lot of things that happen in the world.

Having Dover remind me that everything happens for various reasons, including presidential victories, helped me view the reality of President Trump as simply one more explainable undesirable event -- like an epidemic, earthquake, or economic downturn.  

Now, I want to be clear: believing in determinism doesn't mean that one is fatalistic. Rather, just the opposite. Earthquakes and lion attacks have to be fought, resisted, dealt with, anticipated. But our reactions to determined events also are determined. (As is someone writing a blog post about determinism, and other people reading it.)

The advantage of a deterministic point of view is that energy isn't wasted in non-productive negative feelings of "this shouldn't be happening."

A skilled boxer doesn't worry about the punch that didn't land, or his opponent's blow that did. He uses that information in deciding what to do next. Focusing on a non-existent might have been distracts from bringing about the potential actuality of what can be. 

(2) There is no objective right or wrong, good or bad. Related to my strong belief in determinism is a conviction that nowhere in the universe does an objectively real entity known as "right," "wrong," "good," or "bad" exist.

These labels are applied to things, people, events, and such by subjective human beings. They don't possess any reality outside of the human mind. Which doesn't mean they are unimportant judgments; deciding what is right or wrong, good or bad is an inescapable part of being human. 

Our makeup is such that, in contrast to animals, we continually draw abstract conclusions from concrete happenings.

An earthquake isn't only that. It gets adjectives: devastating, horrific, terrifying. Similarly, the election of Donald Trump isn't only that. It gets the same sort of adjectives from people who were opposed to him: frightening, disastrous, dangerous.

I try to keep in mind that about half of the electorate was pleased, if not overjoyed, by Trump's victory. At the same time, about half was saddened, if not seriously depressed. Was one of these reactions correct, in tune with objective reality, commensurate with the way the world really is?

No. Both were subjective. The only objective truth is: Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. 

(3) Expanding our perspective alters our point of view. Obviously. Yes, it is possible to see the universe in a grain of sand. Still, there is a difference between the universe and a grain of sand. 

Science-lover that I am, news that there are hugely more galaxies in the universe than previously thought helps me to view Trump, myself, and everything else in our world as less cosmically significant. 

Recent research conducted by an international team led by Christopher Conselice, an astrophysics professor at the University of Nottingham, found that the universe has about 2 trillion galaxies, which is 10 times more than previous estimates.

Two trillion galaxies. Not two hundred billion, which is still a heck of a lot. Two trillion. Each containing on average maybe 100 billion stars. 

I feel very, very small. Not insignificant. Just small. 

Understand: it is vitally important that we protect the livability of our one and only planet Earth. All those other galaxies, all those other stars with all those other planets, they don't do us a bit of good, because we're stuck with our galaxy, our star, our planet. 

Still, I enjoy having my mind blown by the thought of those 2 trillion galaxies. It doesn't change the reality of what just happened in the 2016 presidential election. But it damn sure gives me a different perspective on it.

A Taoist approach to coping with the presidential election (and everything)

November 8 can't come soon enough for most of us. The presidential election campaigning feels like it has been going on for years. Because, really, it has. 

We're stressed out.

Whether someone is a Clinton fan, a Trump supporter, a third party embracer, or a "none of the above" advocate, this 2016 election has gotten most Americans into a frazzled state of mind.

Me definitely included. 

I obsess over the latest poll results. I worry whether I've done enough to help my favored candidate win the White House. I fret about what will happen to this country after the election is over. 

So I thanked Tao for a feeling this morning that led me to walk over to my bookcase and pick up a book that I'd read years ago: Ray Grigg's "The Tao of Zen." (I see that Amazon has used hardback copies priced at one cent, plus shipping; this is a marvelous book, and that's an astounding bargain.)

Below I've shared the first 2 1/3 pages. 

Griggs does a pretty damn brilliant job of encapsulating a lot of philosophy in just a few paragraphs. I was tempted to write "Chinese philosophy," but the problem of how we deal with the tension between what is and what will be (plus what we want being to be) is universal. 

I felt much better after reading what Griggs wrote. He gave me a fresh perspective on how it is possible for me to be actively involved with politics without going any crazier than I already am. 

My thoughts on these passages are shared in green below, interspersed with Griggs' words.

As the consciousness of the early Chinese moved from superstitious defensiveness to volitional empowerment, what Arthur Waley refers to as the evolution from a "pre-moral" to a "moral" culture, people began to realize that direct action was more effective than religious ritual in influencing events.

Well, duh. This seems obvious to me now. But since I embraced a form of Eastern/Indian religiosity for over thirty years, where a daily ritualistic meditation practice was required of devotees, I understand the appeal of ritual. 

In early China this option of personal assertion as a response to unfolding circumstances first appeared in The Book of Changes, the I Ching.

I bought a copy back in my college days, 1966-71. We'd throw coins, as I recall, to find out what advice the I Ching had for us.

Its essential subject was the interplay between a constantly changing world and a self-conscious individual who was seeking options within these shifting circumstances. How was such a person to act within perpetual change and uncertainty, between what is and what will be?

This. Is. The. Big. Question. Right now we're getting lots of news about what's happening with the presidential election. But on November 9 we'll wake up to what actually did happen. The countless changing circumstances leading up to November 8 will produce a singular outcome: a President Clinton or a President Trump.

The obvious answer was to anticipate the changes by attempting to read the movement of circumstances, and then change them, avoid them, or be prepared for them.

Long ago, this was the job of the I Ching. Now we've got pollsters, analyzers like FiveThirtyEight, prognosticators, talking heads on cable news. More: everybody on Facebook has opinions, with supposed facts to back them up. We're addicted to trying to figure out what is going to happen before it happens, and what we need to do before there is a need to do it.

For a culture closely connected to the soil and the rhythms of the seasons, the Chinese became aware that all changes were linked to the ordered change of natural processes. Changes were not random or meaningless; they were bound by the character of the world itself and could be read in the images of rhythms of Nature.

A very scientific attitude in a pre-scientific world. 

Human nature was part of Nature. Together the two rose and fell in patterns and cycles of growth and decay, birth and death. The similarities between inner and outer movement were noticeable and clear.

The ancient Chinese were ahead of their time. There's a good reason why The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters were written. Chinese philosophy is largely in accord with the basic principles of modern naturalistic science.

The I Ching measured these movements so they could be harmonized with each other. But it also measured something else. The insight that defined individual volition became the first conscious separation between inner self and outer circumstances. The spiritual integrity of all being was consequently divided, and the magical wholeness of a solely religious existence was fractured by the effort to control events directly.

Well, we're still fractured. Most people believe in free will, even though 21st century neuroscience strongly argues against its existence. We feel like there is a "me," a "self,"  that floats around independently inside our head, somehow disconnected from the goings-on of the physical brain and able to make decisions unaffected by prior experiences or external influences.

Attention shifted from passive ritual toward active influence. Although The Book of Changes recorded and then described this newly emerging relationship between the inner and the outer, it did not offer a resolution to the resulting split that now divided the sense of spiritual oneness. 

People today still struggle with the same question: if I'm part of the world, why does the world so often seem to be at odds with me?

A more sophisticated thinking was required to resolve this dichotomy. In the structure of the I Ching and within its underlying assumptions was the resolution. 

Now we start to get to why I'm so attracted to Taoism, and enjoy my Tai Chi practice so much (Tai Chi basically is Taoism in motion).

The condition that evolved from the I Ching held that two interactive elements influenced events. The first was the great force of circumstances, the universal principle that pervaded everything. This omnipresence was soft and nurturing but it was also hard and unfailing, both an energy of creative generosity and an inflexibility of order that was determined by the integrity of itself.

Poetic words that seem absolutely scientifically correct. The laws of nature can't be altered. Even when we think we're doing something unnatural, our ability to do that is part of what nature allows. Yet the natural world also is extremely appealing: beautiful, alluring, seductive.

Although immediate and obvious, this principle was also beyond thought and knowing. Because it was beyond words it was simply called the Way, the Tao.

Something is making everything be what is is, and do what it does. That something can't be separate from nature, unless we embrace some sort of nonsensical dualism. So why not call it the Way?

The second element was the virtue-power of individual character, the Te. It could be reached through tso-wang, "sitting with blank mind," by finding "the mind within the mind, or hsin tsung, the still place in the center of consciousness that was somehow connected to the Tao through the oneness of the inner and the outer -- a relationship somewhat like the Atman to the Brahman in Hinduism.

OK, this does sound sort of woo-woo. But I look upon what Griggs is saying here simply as a recognition that the human mind can experience the world more clearly, or less clearly. We all know this to be true. Some days our mind seems to be in such frantic motion that it can't discern what is happening in the ever-moving outside world. Becoming calmer, more centered, helps us gain a clearer perspective. If I read or watch too much political news, I get information overload. Relaxing, I realize that there isn't any sort of objective presidential election reality. How things appear in our pre-election day perspective depends on what enters our minds, and how we look upon it.

When this connection was entered, when the Te became one with the Tao, the result was a synchronistic accord between the inner person and the outer world. Thus people could live harmoniously within the bounds of natural order by becoming one with it.

Far out! Make me feel like I'm one with everything. Then there won't be so much of a Me that gets pissed at what Not-Me is up to.

They could be joint partners in the unfolding of circumstances, exerting their influence by taking part in the larger ordering process while remaining compliant to the larger ordering principle. Individual volition could become soft and cooperative, compliant rather than willful.

Wise advice. When I'm impelled to be politically active, to care about the presidential election, to help a chosen candidate, I need to realize that it is the World, the Way, that's bringing this about. Sure, I may feel like I'm making choices to donate money, vote a certain way, and such, but this is illusion. I, along with everybody else, am just a small cog in the Great Machinery of the Cosmos. My doing ultimately doesn't come from me, it comes from everything. 

By cultivating inner character, people could influence events but still be in accord with the great order of the Tao. Thus the inner-outer dichotomy was resolved. This school of thought and practice became known as Taoism.

Like the saying goes, it is what it is. Dude. (see here and here) This isn't a bumper sticker slogan. It's the truest thing that can be said.

Almost certainly, either Trump or Clinton is going to be elected president in a few days, an Electoral College tie being very unlikely. To deny the November 9 result is to deny reality. To believe "this wasn't supposed to happen" is to embrace an utterly crazy worldview, one which posits a schism between the what should be mind of the believer and the what is of existence.  

I, like you, am part of the Way, the Tao, that also can be called Nature or the Laws of Nature. There isn't us and the world, or us and the presidential election. We're all in this together. We're all producing this together. We're all responsible for what happens together. 

...Taoism is the resolution of the subject-object, active-passive paradox that was invented by self-conscious deliberation. It puts together the wholeness that personal willfulness took apart. In simplest terms this is done by entering the dichotomy and becoming the empty stillness in the center of the paradox.

Good words to stop commenting on.