Church of the Churchless

Meridians in Chinese medicine have no basis in fact, just superstition

Over on my HinesSight blog yesterday, I posted "Some life lessons from a Tai Chi seminar."

These were some of the insights I got from a special three-hour class my Tai Chi instructor, Warren, put on for five students who are especially interested in the martial side of Tai Chi, as contrasted with the energetic/exercise side.

During the seminar Warren, who used to teach classes in East-West Medicine at a nearby college, talked about the meridians that are part of Chinese medicine. This is how a Wikipedia article about meridians starts off. 

The meridian system (simplified Chinese: 经络; traditional Chinese: 經絡; pinyin: jīngluò, also called channel network) is a pseudoscientific concept from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) that alleges meridians are paths through which the life-energy known as "qi" (ch'i) flows.

Meridians are not real anatomical structures: scientists have found no evidence that supports their existence.  One historian of medicine in China says that the term is "completely unsuitable and misguided, but nonetheless it has become a standard translation." Major proponents of their existence have not come to any consensus as to how they might work or be tested in a scientific context.

I'd heard Warren describe meridians several times before. He knows their names and where they supposedly are in the human body. But I don't recall him ever talking about how someone can prove that they exist, or why they're relevant to Tai Chi practice.

From what I can tell, Tai Chi supposedly facilitates the movement of qi/chi in the body, as this web site says.

Tai Chi and Qigong, when taught as mindfulness relaxation therapies can help clear tension blocks, which facilitates a natural healthful flow of Qi or life energy, as well as blood and lymph circulation. Chinese Acupuncture involves 12 Main Meridians, such as the "liver meridian" the "lung meridian" the "kidney meridian" so the gentle massaging of the body, which sets Tai Chi and Qigong apart from other exercises, results also in "massaging the internal organs" and supporting their function and the flow of Qi, or life energy.

The problem I have with meridians is basically the same problem I have with any form of unproven supernatural belief. I include meridians in the broad category of supernatural belief because while life and energy obviously are real, "life energy" in the sense of qi isn't.

Here's part of what the Science-Based Medicine web site says about Chinese medicine:

One of the themes of science-based medicine is to be suspicious of any form of medicine that is not science-based. In other words, beware of dodgy qualifiers placed before “medicine,” such as: “alternative”, “integrative”, or “complementary” – those that imply that something other than science or evidence is being used to determine which treatments are safe and effective.

I would also include “traditional Chinese” medicine in the dodgy category. A recent article defending Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) provides, ironically, an excellent argument for the rejection of TCM as a valid form of medicine. The authors, Jingqing Hua and Baoyan Liub, engage in a number of logical fallacies that are worth exploring.

...There is no evidence that the meridians actually exist. At the risk of sounding redundant, they are as made up and fictional as the ether, flogistum, Bigfoot, and unicorns. The linking of qi and blood is reflective of the fact that the notion of qi is historically tied to blood, and techniques such as acupuncture and cupping were also closely related to bleeding techniques that we are more familiar with from Galenic medicine.

Here's the thing. If meridians exist, seemingly they would have some effects in the human body. Those effects should be evident through scientific experimentation. Or some other means. But I couldn't find convincing evidence of this sort. 

You may be thinking, what about acupuncture? Well, acupuncture has been found to relieve some types of pain about as well as over-the-counter medications like Tylenol. But there isn't a lot of evidence for the general effectiveness of acupuncture, according to a Scientific American story, "Research Casts Doubt on the Value of Acupuncture." 

Studies have found no meaningful difference between acupuncture and a wide range of sham treatments. Whether investigators penetrate the skin or not, use needles or toothpicks, target the particular locations on the body cited by acupuncturists or random ones, the same proportion of patients experience more or less the same degree of pain relief (the most common condition for which acupuncture is administered and the most well researched). “We have no evidence that [acupuncture] is anything more than theatrical placebo,” says Harriet Hall, a retired family physician and U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who has studied, and long been a critic of, alternative medicine.

I've had about a dozen acupuncture treatments for sciatica pain in my right leg. After the first couple of treatments, my pain was much better. However, I have no idea if acupuncture was the cause. The way I express this to my acupuncturist is "I'm not sure if I believe in acupuncture, but I definitely believe in the placebo effect."

She's fine with my attitude, as she never mentions anything associated with Chinese medicine, including meridians. She knows that acupuncture benefits her clients. If that benefit is partly or wholly because of the placebo effect, great. Whatever works. So I keep going for more treatments. Have one tomorrow, in fact. (I wrote about my acupuncture treatments in "I benefitted from my sessions at Salem's Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic.")

I feel the same way about meridians. My Tai Chi instructor clearly believes in them. I have no problem with that, just as I have no problem with some people in my class being religious. Whatever works for them. If I'm asked whether I believe in meridians or qi or God, I'll answer "No." However, I understand why others believe in entities for which there is no demonstrable evidence. I used to be such a believer myself. 

It's only when someone claims that their faith-based belief is true, and expects me to share that belief, that I'll defend my skepticism. Meridians seems to be an example of an unfounded belief that rarely causes harm, though if someone chooses Chinese medicine to cure an aggressive cancer, they definitely are putting themselves at great risk.

"Empty Force" is a Tai Chi and martial arts myth, but people fall for it

Today someone in my Tai Chi class spoke about a Tai Chi master being able to repel people, or knock them down, without using any physical force. You know, just with their mind, their supposedly highly evolved chi power. 

(Note: in Chinese the same word can denote different things. The "Chi" in Tai Chi means boundary. Chi can also refer to vital life force, also known as qi. That's how I used it in the sentence above.)

When I heard this, I thought, that's a Tai Chi myth, because it isn't possible to project a physical force just with the mind. However, I didn't say that out loud. People believe all kinds of things that aren't true. That's the basis of every religion: fantasies that people believe in. 

They do this out of a search for meaning. It can feel good to believe in the supernatural, in God, in "empty force" chi power.

I'm not shy about making fun of those myths on this blog, and in conversations with people who agree with me about the absurdity of supernaturalism, but I don't go out of my way to dump a heaping load of reality on someone else's fantasy if the fantasy works for them.

Fortunately, when it comes to empty force in Tai Chi and other martial arts there's plenty of evidence that has debunked this myth. 

It seems clear that one foundation of this myth is the same foundation that causes followers of a guru to ascribe supernatural powers to them. I know whereof I speak, because for 35 years I was an active member of an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form.

That there wasn't any objective evidence of this didn't bother the most fervent of the guru's devotees (I was a bit more on the skeptical side) who believed the guru could know what his disciples were doing and thinking half a world away, and could intervene in their lives if he so chose.

Those devotees, like devotees of a Tai Chi master who claims to have the power of empty force, want so badly for their fantasy to be true, they participate in the manufacturing of supernatural powers which then are taken as truth by other gullible devotees.

Here's a You Tube video that, in 5 1/2 minutes, demonstrates how "Chi Power Woo Woo Fails." (Title of the video.) It's rather sad how the students of a Tai Chi or marital arts master will either consciously or unconsciously go along with his empty force B.S., which is shown to be a fantasy when someone not under the spell of devotion participates in a demonstration that invariably fails. 

If you want more amusement, check out this longer 13 1/2 minute video that shows some additional empty force staged ridiculousness. Again, I'm unsure whether those who participate in the demonstrations know that the supposed master is a fake, or have convinced themselves that he's really got empty force power, so they fall down when he gestures at them. I like the description of the video:

Qi Power, Lin Kong Jin / Empty Force Compilation of Martial Artists desperately in need of psychiatric treatment. Harness the Chi Power of confused minds! ... This kind of belief is common in Chinese and Japanese martial arts as Tai Chi and Aikido. But there are also "sects" out there as Yellow Bamboo and EFO. It seems like many of the "masters" believe themselves in what they do. Apparently some people have a very deep need of believing in magic and mysteries. - "Hey! Look at me! I am special!"

Lastly, "Myth busting in Chinese marital arts" is a good post on The Tai Chi Notebook site. Excerpt:

These more marketing-orientated myths about the prowess of practitioners – how deadly they were, how unbeatable their martial arts was, how the power of Qi was greater than physical strength all fed directly into all that nonsense about no touch knockouts and “empty force” that has marred the image of Chinese martial arts in the modern age.

And politics also gets involved. When obvious myths about the origins of martial arts are dispelled they often get replaced by more politically motivated stories about the arts origins that are equally as unprovable and unreliable yet fit a nationalist agenda. It seems like the Chinese martial arts are forever being used to support some sort of Chinese government propaganda.

In short, the Chinese martial arts world was in need of, and remains in need of, a lot of myth busting, because much of what we are being told and sold is basically not true. But Bowman’s fears, that we are in danger of spoiling the fun for everybody with this relentless search for the truth, holds true, I think. I was certainly attracted to Chinese martial arts by a steady diet of orientalist propaganda from the likes of David Carradine’s Kung Fu TV series and Marvel comics with heroes like Iron Fist. This is often what draws us to the martial arts in the first place and there has to be some way of searching for truth in the martial arts, but keeping the magic that drew us there in the first place. 

UPDATE: Here's a few links to descriptions of empty force by people who believe this myth. They sound a lot like miraculous faith healing stories in evangelical Christianity. My best attempt to be sympathetic about such unfounded beliefs is that it shows the power of the human mind: when someone really wants to believe in something that isn't true, they reshape reality to fit their belief. I just have an old-fashioned attitude that we should reshape our beliefs to fit reality, to the best of our ability.

Empty Force
Empty Force in the Buqi System
Chinese Empty Force

And here's a post that, on a quick read (it's pretty long) puts Tai Chi training in a realistic perspective. I'll share some excerpts that debunk the notion of empty force as something supernatural. By the way, if anyone is wondering, I've practiced Tai Chi for nineteen years. Before that I was into hard style martial arts for about twelve years, earning a black belt in a form of karate. 

What is Empty Force?

Possibly a year after my lifelong friend and martial arts partner, Martin Inn and I had immigrated Chu, Ch’u-fang into the United States, he announced a new and important mission for us. There was someone else, someone of great importance, that we must now turn our efforts toward immigrating. This was a special and secretive individual only known to a few advanced adepts, such as Mr. Chu, and we should be honored to have the job of bringing him to America.

He was so special because he had mastered the technique of “empty force,” the highest achievement of Taijiquan. When one’s circulation of qi becomes high enough, he reaches the point at which he can project it at others, knocking them down at a distance, or even killing them. We all have some idea of what this looks like, having seen it in countless gung-fu movies.

Marty and I were properly stunned, not expecting to be “living the dream” of becoming gung-fu supermen quite so quickly, and Mr. Chu must have noticed, asking next if we believed him, to which, after quickly glancing at one another, we both assured him that of course, teacher, you can bet on it. After nodding solemnly for a moment, he told us, sounding rather disgusted, that we were fools. No one, he emphasized in a slightly louder tone of voice, can do this, and don’t believe anyone that tells you that they can. 

I am sure that no one could righteously fault me for ending the current discussion right here, because Mr. Chu’s warning is definitely the short answer to the whole subject of empty force, given what people take the phrase to mean.

It is a worthwhile warning, because purveyors of this “power” seem to surface every few years with the persistence of some sort of biblical pestilence. It is amazing to see the number and relatively high caliber of people who can be taken in by this “emperor’s new clothes” con, in which an inability to be affected by this “qi attack” identifies an insufficiency in you, rather than in the one mounting the attack. 

...As far as any fantasies concerning what appears to be happening in supposed demonstrations of “empty force,” these should be relegated to the same mental dust bin as similar martial fantasies about making oneself heavier or lighter at will, or fighting multiple assailants while blindfolded. All of these kinds of stories have their origins in some sort of reality, but never the reality that is presumed.

The presumed reality here is that someone is emitting a force that operates at a distance and can affect completely untrained and even unaware opponents. In the words of Chu, Ch’u-fang: no one can do this, and don’t believe anyone who tells you that they can.

Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

Though in the past I've dismissed sentiments such as the title of this blog post as being unduly New Age'y, today I changed my mind. I guess it depends on the context of sayings such as Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself. 

So here's the context for my newfound positive feeling toward those words.

A few days ago I saw a mention in the book I've been writing about recently, The Elephant and the Blind by Thomas Metzinger, of a book by David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. Since I'm attracted both to Chinese philosophy (Taoism and Zen, mainly) and poetry in general, I decided to order the book from Amazon.

I started reading it today. The book starts out with:

Poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space.

But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities -- for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive that that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself.

At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself -- and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.

Hinton then spends a couple of pages describing that beginning, and what came after the beginning, in pleasingly scientific terms that struck me as almost completely accurate (maybe I'm wrong about the "almost"), given our current understanding of the Cosmos -- or at least that possibly limited corner of the Cosmos that is our universe. The multiverse is a distinct, though unproven, possibility.

In the beginning, there was neither light nor space -- and for consciousness, they are the essentials. During its first moments, the Cosmos was a primordial plasma of subatomic particles. The particles expanded and cooled until the particles could bond to form the lightest atoms, hydrogen and helium, whereupon the Cosmos became transparent to radiation such as light.

Eventually, hydrogen and helium began condensing into proto-galactic clouds under the gossamer influence of gravity, and chance fluctuations in the density of those clouds led some local areas to intensify their condensation until pressure and heat became so fierce that hydrogen atoms began fusing together. 

In that process, which can only be described as magical, stars were born. And with those stars came the elemental dimensions of consciousness: space and light and the visible.

Those dimensions began to evolve. The stars grew old, like anything else, and died. In the furnace of their old age and explosive deaths, they forged heavier elements and scattered them into space, forming nebular clouds that in turn condensed into new stars.

It is the heartbeat of the Cosmos, that steady pulse of stellar birth and death, gravity's long swell and rhythm of absence and presence, presence and absence. And in the third star generation, our planet was formed, rich in those heavy elements. It cooled and evolved until eventually water appeared: hydrogen, created during the original cosmic expansion, combining with oxygen, one of those heavier elements created in the cauldrons of dying stars.

Water formed mirrored pools in hollows on the planet's rocky surface, and in these pools the Cosmos turned toward itself for the first time here. It became "aware" of itself in those mirrored openings deep as all space and light, deep as the visible itself. 

Living organisms evolved and eventually developed receptors that allowed them to sense whether or not light was present. Those light receptors provided decisive selective advantages and so developed into more and more sophisticated forms. The lens evolved as a means to concentrate light on receptor cells, thereby making creatures more sensitive to weak light. 

This innovation eventually led to image-forming eyes, which combine a lens with highly specialized receptor cells. And with that, the Cosmos turned toward itself once again, eventually giving shape to consciousness, that spatiality the eye's mirrored transparency conjures inside animals.

It was a miraculous development: the material universe, which had been perfectly opaque, was now open to itself, awakened to itself!

Although ancient Chinese poets and philosophers didn't describe it in these scientific terms, this same sense of consciousness as the Cosmos open to itself was an operating assumption for them -- though perhaps here existence is a better word than Cosmos, as it suggests the sense of all reality as a single tissue.

...The abiding aspiration of spiritual and artistic practice in ancient China was to cultivate consciousness as that existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself: looking at itself, hearing and touching itself, tasting and smelling itself, and also thinking itself, feeling itself -- all in the singular ways made possible by the individuality of each particular person.

This is consciousness in the open, wild and woven into the generative Cosmos: wholesale belonging. As we will see, it was recognized as our most essential nature in Taoist and Ch'an Buddhist thought, the foundational structure of consciousness for artist-intellectuals in ancient China: poets, painters, calligraphers, philosophers.

And it seems a beautiful, even essential alternative -- both philosophical and ecological -- to the disconnectedness that structures consciousness in the West.

Here's some passages from Dao De Jing, a Philosophical Translation

I have quite a few translations of the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist classic that I've enjoyed since my college days. A few days ago I felt a hunger to revisit this book. After examining several translations, I settled on Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall.

They do a great job of explaining how other translations have gone awry when they try to convert Chinese concepts into traditional Western notions of God, the cosmos, and such. Here's some passages from their "Philosophical Introduction" that resonated with me.

It would seem that the aim of the compilers of the Daodejing is to prescribe a regimen of self-cultivation  that will enable one to optimize one's experience in the world.

... It is important to note that this goal of self-transformation has nothing to do with death, judgment, and an afterlife, not has it anything to do with the "salvation of the soul" (the traditional concerns of Western eschatology). Instead, such personal growth and consummation is meliorative in the sense of producing the quality of character that makes this world itself a better place.

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The Daoist correlative cosmology begins from the assumption that the endless stream of always novel yet still continuous situations we encounter are real, and hence, that there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.

As a parody on Parmenides, who claimed that "only Being is," we might say that for the Daoist, "only beings are," or taking one step further in underscoring the reality of the process of change itself, "only becomings are." 

That is, the Daoist does not posit the existence of some permanent reality behind appearances, some unchanging substratum, some essential defining aspect behind the accidents of change. Rather, there is just the ceaseless and usually cadenced flow of experience.

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With fluid and shifting boundaries among things, integrity of any particular thing does not mean being or staying whole, or even actualizing its own internal potential. Rather, integrity is something becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things. Integrity is consummatory relatedness. 

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What the Daodejing has to offer, on the other hand, is much simpler. It encourages the cultivation of a disposition that is captured in what we have chosen to call its wu-forms.

The wu-forms free up the energy required to sustain the abstract cognitive and moral sensibilities of technical philosophy, allowing this energy, not unmediated by concepts, theories, and contrived moral precepts, to be expressed as those concrete feelings that inspire the ordinary business of the day,

It is through these concrete feelings that one is able to know the world and to optimize the human experience.

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Said another way, if a person is not in fact constituted by some essential, partitioned "soul," but is rather seen as dynamic pattern of personal, social, and natural relationships, agitation must arise as a consequence of poor management of these constitutive roles and relationships.

Hence, agitation in the heart-and-mind is not narrowly "psychological," but is more accurately conceived of as of broad ethical concern: How should we act and what should we do?

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For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child. 

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The energy of transformation lies within the world itself as an integral characteristic of the events that constitute it. There is no appeal to some external efficient cause: no Creator God or primordial determinative principle.

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In fact, the sustained Grand Analogy that pervades the Daodejing is: dao is to the world as ruler ought to be to the people. Dao -- the discernible rhythm and regularity of the world as it unfolds around and through us -- is nonimpositional: "Way-making (dao) really does things noncoercively."

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There is no final truth either about the nature of things, or about the means whereby that nature is sought. The achievement of order and harmony in nature and society -- that is to say, the achievement of effective way-making or dao -- is a multifaceted effort that is dependent less upon uncovering true principles or right forms of conduct than on the exercise of imagination and creativity within the most deferential of contexts. 

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Using Western epistemological terms, the thoughts about the world expressed in both the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing represent what we might call a realist perspective. Beyond the mediating confusions introduced by language, and by layers of our own distorted perceptions and tendentious categorizations, there is nevertheless, with properly Daoist qualifications an "objectively" real world. Our task is to experience that world as "objectively" as possible.

From the Daoist perspective, the problem begins when we insist that the "objective world" is a world made up of objects -- namely, concrete, unchangeable things that we encounter as over against and independent of us; things which announce themselves to us by asserting "I object!"

For the Daoist, the objective world cannot be objective in this sense because it is a constant transforming flow of events or processes that belie the sorts of discriminations that would permit a final inventory of the furniture of the world.

Paradoxically, for the Daoist the objective world is objectless.

Maybe the biggest problem with life is believing there's a problem with life

It sort of feels to me like a rapidly descending elevator. You know, when it seems like the floor is falling away beneath you even though you're standing on it. Except in an elevator you know what the lowest level is. 

I'm not sure how much further I have to sink. And that's okay with me. At least I'm moving in the right direction: away from the heights of religious supernaturalism toward a grounding in here-and-now reality.

Reading Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, has made me more aware of that descending elevator feeling. For she ably undercuts what I used to hold onto with such fervor in my true believing days. Gurus. Dogmas. Commandments. Goal-seeking meditation. Altered states of consciousness. 

But that's just the beginning, the upper floors that my personal Meaning of Life elevator has been leaving behind since my deconversion from a religion, Eastern mysticism variety, about nineteen years ago.

Once I let go of overt religious precepts, I was drawn to what I view as "halfway houses" in between my addiction to a highly organized religion and a complete disinterest in what usually is called spirituality, for want of a better term.

Those halfway houses, where I could dwell for a time before moving to lower levels via the Meaning of Life elevator, were Taoism and Buddhism. I was attracted to both philosophies -- which they really are, rather than religions -- from an early age. 

Here's what I said in "Taoism isn't mystical. It is natural."

Taoism appeals to me.

I started to add "because..." to that last sentence.

But I'm reluctant to try to explain why I enjoy reading Taoist books and practicing Taoism-in-motion, Tai Chi, so much. When I was about twelve years old, I visited San Francisco's Chinatown for the first time. I spent my allowance on buying cheap scrolls of what I now realize were images of Taoist wanderers in Chinese nature scenes. That artwork decorated my room until I went to college. 

At the time, I had no knowledge of Taoism. I don't think I'd even heard of that term. Now, some 50 years later, I still don't know much about Taoism. Great news! I may be a Taoist sage!

In college, Zen Buddhism grabbed my attention. It appealed to me more than non-Zen Buddhism, which has much more structure to it, what with the Eightfold Path and logical analyses of why and how suffering arises. 

But whether it was the Eastern religion (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or Sant Mat) I became initiated into in 1970 and stuck with for 35 years, or the much looser Taoism and Zen Buddhism philosophies that I enjoyed so much, I still was driven by a desire to reach an end point.

Enlightenment. Satori. Peace of mind. Oneness. 

I'd given up the idea of finding an end point on the upper religious floors that the Meaning of Life elevator was connected to. However, I had a sense that lower down, in the realm of naturalism rather than supernaturalism, I could still achieve a goal that would make me feel, "Ah, this is what life is all about."

Well, I'm having increasing doubts that this is either desirable or possible. It's a weird feeling -- the notion that after some sixty years (age 15 to 75, roughly), of believing that I was on a Path to Somewhere, now I'm inclined to believe that I'm going nowhere.

And that's absolutely fine with me. 

Joan Tollifson is just the latest in a string of people who I think of as non-spiritual writers about spirituality. Meaning, they not only undermine the foundations of religion, but also, to a greater or lesser degree depending on how radical they are, the very idea that life is a problem that needs fixing.

I've been preaching that same message on this blog in various ways for quite a while. Except, it's been more along the lines of a question: sure, there are problems in everybody's life that need attention, but is life itself a problem?

Buddhism says "yes." Life is suffering. Here's an approach to ending that suffering, or at least much diminish it.

Taoism basically agrees, though not so obviously. Taoism doesn't have anywhere near the structure that Buddhism has, but Taoist teachings still encourage us to learn how to be more in accord with the Way of Tao.

Zen Buddhism, though, is similar to Tollifson's point of view: the only problem with life itself is believing that life itself has a problem. That perspective has always been sitting there in the Zen literature, in the Zen stories, in the Zen koans, in the Zen teachings. 

Until recently I didn't see it very clearly.

Which isn't surprising, because Zen Buddhism is notoriously reluctant to spell things out, preferring subtlety, misdirection, paradox, poetic metaphor. Or, maybe not. I readily admit that after all those years of embracing Zen, without ever actually practicing Zen, I may have failed to grasp what was always within reach, but didn't appeal to me.

Namely, that there's nothing to do, and besides, there's no one to do it. All there is, is doing that happens naturally by life and existence itself -- no doer required. 

Is this the ground floor? Maybe, but probably not.

Likely the whole idea of levels, of floors, or greater or lesser distance from reality, that's all just spiritual/religious mumbo-jumbo. A bunch of words and concepts that appeal to billions of people, definitely including me, yet not only aren't necessary for a satisfying life, but actually interfere with a satisfying life.

Well, I love to say to myself, "Don't know" and "Could be wrong." So I'll end with those sayings.

Is romantic love a product of Western culture?

I wasn't expecting to find the "Love and Sexuality" chapter in Paul Breer's book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, to be very interesting. After all, he'd already made his arguments for why free will is an illusion, along with describing the benefits of giving up the illusion.

But his observations about how romantic love is largely a product of Western culture, and is at odds with Eastern philosophy, were thought-provoking. I'm not sure what to make of them, which is why the title of this blog post ends with a question mark.

What do you think? Here's excerpts from the chapter pertaining to this issue. Breer is a retired sociologist, so his views carry some academic weight.

Most of us growing up in a Western culture have either known romantic love directly or participated in the experience vicariously through literature and film. While being in [romantic] love tends to be a relatively brief experience, counted more often in months than years, our fascination with it rarely ceases altogether, even in old age.

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to learn that the non-Western world of Asians, Indians, Africans, Polynesians, and Eskimos knows little of romantic love. A phenomenon we have always thought of as a human experience is limited primarily to Western and, to a lesser degree, Near Eastern culture.

Strange as it may seem to someone nurtured on Romeo and Juliet, Gone with the Wind, and Love Story, it appears that, before we can fall in love, we must be educated to the concept of romantic love... According to Denis de Rougemont, at the heart of Tristan's and Iseult's passion is a surrendering of self, not to the other, but to the experience of love itself.

...That which gives romantic love its intense, unreal, soaring quality is the very thing that dooms it to non-fulfillment. The lovers are not in love with each other but with love itself. The other person is simply an excuse for being in love, the passion being "tasted and savoured for its own sake, in a kind of indifference to its living and external object."

...As free agents we are not only separate from everyone else physically; we are separate spiritually, separate as souls, separate as centers of will and moral responsibility. The more highly a culture values this spiritual separateness, the greater will be the pain of differentiation and, thus, the greater the appeal of a kind of love that promises to overcome all separation through a merging of selves.

According to this alternative hypothesis, the widespread appeal of romantic love in Western culture draws much of its power from our view of ourselves as autonomous agents. Easterners, many of whom are inclined to look upon romance with disdain, are more apt to find their basic identity in the Tao, the Buddha-nature, the Brahman, or whatever it is that transcends subject and object, the ultimately nameless One.

They view free will and moral responsibility as expedient illusions, necessary for survival in the samsaric world, but meaningless in the nirvanic world of no-form. For the un-Westernized Easterner, all autonomy is ultimately illusory. The world is One and all seemingly separate objects and selves participate in that Oneness. If differentiation appears painful, it is because we do not yet see beyond the illusion of form.

Our Western belief that individual souls remain separate throughout eternity, in heaven as well as on earth, creates a sense of personal isolation unknown elsewhere in the world. This isolation heightens the appeal of returning to a less differentiated state through a surrender of the agent/self to passion. 

As Rougemont points out, romantic love is not a surrender of the self to another person, but to love itself. Surrendering to another person may ease the burden of individual responsibility, but it does not erase the boundaries of the agent/I. Romantic love goes further. By shutting out everyone else, it reduces the world to "me and thee" and then holds out the promise of further dissolution into oneness.

Interesting, though not completely convincing. Breer is saying that romantic love functions as a Western  alternative to Eastern oneness. Rather than merging with a cosmic entity, the Western lover seeks to merge with a physical beloved.

Well, maybe. Having been married for 33 years, I remember when my wife and I were very much into romantic love. But as Breer says, that sort of highly passionate love can't last for long. Now Laurel and I are into plain love, which is plenty good enough for us.

I've never thought that when we first met and were experiencing the passion of romantic love, this was a substitute for merging into Oneness. But who knows? Maybe that's what we were doing, unconsciously.

If you're an Easterner who reads this post, leave a comment about whether you agree that romantic love plays a smaller role in India, China, Japan, and other Asian countries. I've heard that this is true, which explains the historical popularity of arranged marriages, but am not sure it is true. 

Alan Watts: live life like a cat falling out of a tree

Recently on Facebook I saw this quote from a book by Alan Watts, What is Tao? Makes a lot of sense to live life like a falling cat. Not too tense. Not too rigid. Just the right amount of relaxation.

The same attitude of relaxed gentleness [practiced in judo] is most beautifully seen when you watch cats climbing trees.

When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground.

But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly made up its mind that it didn't want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing.

In the same way, it is the philosophy of the Tao that we are all falling off a tree, at every moment of our lives. As a matter of fact, the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it.

So instead of living in a state of chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat. Don't resist it.

This fits with a Taoist story from Chuang Tzu that I shared in a 2004 blog post, "I become a Taoist." 

Take the case of a drunken man falling from his carriage: though he may suffer injury he will not die. His bones and joints are the same as those of other men, but the injury which he receives is different: his spirit is entire.

He knew nothing about getting into the carriage and nothing about falling from it. The thought of death or life, or of any alarm or affright, does not enter his breast. Therefore he encounters danger without shrinking from it. Completely under the influence of the liquor he had drunk, it is thus with him.

How much more would it be so if he were under the influence of his Heavenly constitution! The sagely man is kept hid in his Heavenly constitution and therefore nothing can injure him.

Well, I'm pretty damn sure that a sagely man can indeed be injured, but I'll give Chuang Tzu his poetic license. 

His main point seems to be the same as what Alan Watts said above. Going through life in a relaxed fashion is better than being unduly tense. 

As regards cats, I found a You Tube video that explains how they can fall from high places and come away in pretty good shape. 

Self comes and goes in our lives, though we don't have one

"Self" and "soul" are closely related. Both words point to the notion of something within us, or that is us, which stands apart from the world in a transcendent sense.

What I just wrote points to the absurdity of believing that it is possible or necessary to cultivate our self or soul. 

If self/soul is something within us, then it isn't actually a core reality, since the us it is within encompasses  a lesser self/soul. If self/soul is us, we're already that which we are, so nothing needs to be done.

By contrast Buddhism and Taoism, along with modern neuroscience and certain philosophies, say that our sense of self is an illusion, even though it seems real to us. So does a mirage, but that illusion can be dispelled by coming closer to it.

The problem with the self illusion is that it is tied into our sense of being someone who is aware of objects that are separate from our subjectivity. I wrote about this in a previous post about Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self."

(First post about the book is here.)

Garfield speaks about the times our self illusion drops away in a chapter called Immersion -- Selfless spontaneity and skillful living. Some excerpts:

So far, we have been emphasizing the degree to which the illusion of self is natural and almost unavoidable. But this does not mean that we succumb to that illusion at every waking moment. There are times -- perhaps more than we realize -- when we don't represent ourselves as selves at all, when we spontaneously engage with the world in ways that implicate no sense of self.

And indeed, these may be the most pleasant and rewarding moments of our lives.

...In order to get our minds around the experience of selflessness, it is useful to recall the deep connection between the sense of self, the understanding of experience in terms of subject-object duality, and of action in terms of free agency. 

To take ourselves to be selves, as we saw in chapter 1, is to take ourselves to be subjects with a very different mode of existence than that we assign to our objects. It is to regard ourselves as standing against the world rather than as being embedded in it. And it is to take our self-knowledge to be immediate, as opposed to the mediated knowledge we have of our objects.

Each of these modes of self-awareness is an aspect of subject-object duality, of taking experience to be a relation between these two entities of entirely different kinds. That polarity of subject and object in our experience is tantamount to the reification of a self. So, to the extent that we have experiences that are nondual in character, we are experiencing ourselves without positing a self.

We can make the same point about agency. To see ourselves as selves is to see ourselves as free agents acting upon the world, capable of agent causation that initiates actions on motives, actions whose causes lie entirely within us. 

...This is how subject-object duality looks in the domain of action. In perceptual experience the subject is divorced from the world and located as a spectator of it. By analogy, in action the agent is divorced from the casual nexus and acts freely upon it.

Once again, then, to the extent that we experience ourselves as fully immersed, and not as freely initiating actions directed upon objects, our agency is nondual in character: we act without superimposing the self or the duality between self and other implicated by the sense of causally independent agency.

Garfield then relates the Taoist story of Butcher Ding. He was so skilled at cutting up an ox, his knife slices through the animal, dismembering it, without ever needing to be sharpened. Garfield says:

This reminds us of another aspect of the nonduality of our experience. We do not exist outside of our environment, perceiving it as subject, acting upon it as agent; we are nondually immersed in it, with no clear boundary between ourselves and everything else.

This tale might appear to be anti-intellectual, or to suggest a complete abandonment of self-awareness. But that would be to read it incorrectly. The Zhuangzi does not mean to say that in achieving spontaneity, or selflessness, one gives up entirely on the ability to think and to calculate.

As Ding says, "whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I'm doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety..."

I think that this is the most important moment in this parable, although it is easy to overlook. Careful, calculating thought can also, the Zhuangzi suggests, be spontaneous, and can be conducted without positing a self.

We can become absorbed in thought, in solving a problem, or in a complex conversation or debate just as easily as we can become absorbed in carving an ox.

...We hence see that it is not the presence of explicit thought that distinguishes ego-involved experience from ego-less experience. Instead, this distinction reflects the degree of immersion in activity and so the degree to which explicit awareness of oneself as standing outside that activity is diminished.

...When we are completely immersed in activity -- whether the physical activity of carving an ox or the cognitive activity of thinking about how best to carve that ox -- our sense of self, and with it, the experience of the duality of subject and object in experience, vanish. 

There is only the experience of a flow of activity.

Relax: no need to find your self, because you don't have one

I've become a fan of easygoing approaches to spirituality. That's one reason I enjoy Taoism so much. The Taoists I've known don't look upon life very seriously. Neither do many Buddhists.

A common denominator of Taoism and Buddhism is that neither philosophy assumes that we have a self or soul. Meaning, they're selfless. 

This takes the pressure off of goals such as self-realization, self-awareness, knowing one's self, and so on. Those sorts of practices still can be pursued, but with the understanding that there's no such thing as an unchanging self or soul lurking within us. Just substitute "person" for "self."

No-self philosophies, or religions if you like, are very different from self-centered philosophies/religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. The latter are seriously concerned with what happens to one's immortal soul.

The former say, "What soul? What self? We humans are like everything else that's alive in the world -- ever-changing, interdependent, part and parcel of all that surrounds us, and indeed is us."

Having been a believer for 35 years in an Eastern philosophy that taught we have, or are, a soul, and that the goal of life was to merge one's soul with God insofar as this is possible, I'm able to contrast that point of view with my current embrace of Taoism and non-religious Buddhism.

I'm a lot more relaxed now in my meditation. I no longer try to leave this world behind in hopes of finding a better supernatural reality, but instead simply try to be more aware of what is right here, right now, both inside and outside of me.

This image comes to mind. 

No-self meditators are akin to people lounging on a beach, cool drink in hand, lounging under an umbrella, idly feeling the sand move beneath their toes, watching the sun go down over the ocean. Self-centered meditators are akin to people who make sure they complete an intense workout every day in the hotel exercise room even though they're supposedly on a vacation.

After hearing Jay Garfield converse with Sam Harris for 90 minutes or so on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app, I bought Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self." It's an enjoyable read, though a bit philosophically dense in places.

(Garfield is a Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Buddhist Studies at Smith College and a visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School.)

I've read four of the ten chapters, so have a way to go in the book. Garfield's Big Idea is that while we are not selves, we are persons. OK, that may seem obvious to those who, like me, embrace science, dislike religion, and don't believe in a soul. But the notion of a self is tough to break away from entirely.

Garfield writes:

In order to be successful, these no-self positions must show both that the idea of the self is incoherent and that everything that the self is meant to explain can be explained in its absence. That is, the proponent of the no-self view must show that everything that the self is meant to explain can actually be accomplished by a person, a socially embedded human being with no self.

In an early chapter, the writings of Candrakirti, a Buddhist who lived in 600-650 CE, are discussed. Garfield says:

Candrakirti was writing in an Indian context. So, the view of the self that he took as the object of negation in his argument (an argument we will explore in chapter 2) is the view that to be a sentient being is to be an atman. This term is usually and appropriately translated into English as self or soul. The idea that the atman lies at the core of our being is ubiquitous in orthodox Indian philosophy, and it was a principal target of Buddhist critique.

In the Vedas, and in particular, the Upanisads -- the texts that ground many of the orthodox Indian philosophical schools -- it is characterized as unitary, as the witness of all that we perceive, as the agent of our actions, and as the enjoyer of our aesthetic experience. It is regarded as that which is always the subject, never the object; and as that which persists through life despite changes in body and mind, and which even persists beyond death and in transmigration.

Sounds good, right? I certainly thought so for 35 years.

But gradually I came to realize that almost certainly I didn't have a self or soul, and that was perfectly fine with me. This realization came about through a variety of means: daily meditation, Buddhist literature, a whole lot of books about modern neuroscience, and simply being mindful of my everyday experience. 

Garfield also uses Western philosophers to buttress the contention of no-self found in Buddhism. This quote from David Hume was familiar to me, but a pleasure to re-read.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without perception, and I never can observe anything but the perception.

A comment from Garfield follows that quote.

Moreover, he [Hume] points out, the collection that we find is not constant, but is always changing. There is nothing permanent in our experience.

If this is so, Hume argues, when we use the word self, there is nothing to which it refers: we are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes -- changing from moment to moment -- who imagine ourselves to be more than that.

Note, once again, this is not the absurd claim that we don't exist, but rather the claim that the way we exist -- as persons -- is not the way that we normally take ourselves to exist -- as selves. 

I'll have more to say about this illusion of the self as I read more of "Losing Ourselves."

Lieh-tzu is a Taoist complement to Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu

When most people think of classic Taoist writings, likely they'll recall the Tao-te Ching and the Chuang-tzu. But there's a third classic, the Lieh-tzu.

Eva Wong has written an eminently readable translation of the Lieh-tzu: Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living. 

Here's how she describes "The Voice of Lieh-tzu" in that portion of her introduction.

What then, is the voice of the Lieh-tzu? To me, it is a friendly voice, a casual voice, and not the voice of an all-knowing sage or master. It is the voice of someone who gives advice not because he is an expert, but because he has made mistakes and learned from them. It comes from a person who allows us to listen. He speaks, pauses, and when we respond, he speaks again.

I do not get the same feeling when I read the Lao-tzu. Lao-tzu speaks as a sage who presents his ideas in an organized manner. I can almost imagine him lecturing from a podium. Moreover, when the lecture is over, there is no question period. It is up to us to understand him.

The Chuang-tzu conveys yet a different feeling. Chuang-tzu is an eccentric who chuckles to himself and is not concerned about being understood. Chuang-tzu wanders in a world different from ours, completely removed from everyday affairs. He lives in a world where things come and go in fleeting moments, and the ground of reality is always changing. We can catch a glimpse of him now and then, but it would be impossible to stay at his side and talk to him.

The Lieh-tzu is different. Lieh-tzu lives in our world. He talks about experiences we can understand. He speaks about life and death, fortune and misfortune, gain and loss, things we are concerned with, and problems we want to solve in our lives. He talks about the mad race for wealth and renown and the hazards of seeking social recognition.

He scorns social pressure and the empty pursuits of the rich and famous. He talks about friendship, human communication, dreams, reality, and learning. He speaks things we do not dare to speak of, but when we listen to him, we may smile, laugh, or nod in agreement. The awakening from ignorance is not rude but soft. It is as if someone gently shook us and woke us from a deep sleep. 

Thus, while Lao-tzu talks at us and Chuang-tzu talks to himself, Lieh-tzu speaks to us.

...The Lao-tzu and the Chuang-tzu talk about the state of enlightenment. They describe what it is like to merge with the Tao and be filled with the undifferentiated breath of the origin. We are not told how these sages attained enlightenment or what they had to go through. 

On the other hand, the Lieh-tzu shows us the struggles of a person who tries to become enlightened. We see Lieh-tzu fumble in his attempts; we see him laughing at himself. We see the kind of training he had to go through and the obstacles he had to overcome. We are shown what it is like on the path to enlightenment rather than what it is like after we get there.

...Many people do not take the stories of the Lieh-tzu seriously and write them off as fairy tales. But it is precisely because some stories are so removed from our everyday reality that they can talk about things we would otherwise find hard to accept. 

If the Lao-tzu is poetry and the Chuang-tzu is prose, then the Lieh-tzu is a series of comic strips. By exaggerating the ridiculous aspects of human actions, it portrays the human condition as humorous and pokes fun at social taboos. When we laugh at humor in comic strips, we are in essence laughing at ourselves. 

Thus, while the Lao-tzu is the voice of serious wisdom and the Chuang-tzu is the voice of crazy wisdom, the Lieh-tzu is the voice of humorous wisdom.

The philosophy in the Lao-tzu comes from above us; we can admire it and hope to follow it, but it is hard to reach. The philosophy in the Chuang-tzu comes from a world that is very different from our own; we may try to grasp it, but it is too elusive to catch. The philosophy in the Lieh-tzu comes from where we are. It speaks to us at our level and talks about experiences we can relate to and understand.

Like, drinking wine and enjoying sex. That's the only story in the Lieh-tzu that I've shared so far on this blog. As I continue re-reading Wong's book, I may share some other stories that appeal to me. 

Well, here's one I read this morning. Enjoy...

King Shun asked his minister, "Can I possess the way of heaven and earth and make it go according to my wishes?"

His minister replied, "Even your body is not your own; how can you think about bending the way of heaven and earth to your will?"

"If my body does not belong to me, then to whom does it belong?"

"Your body does not belong to you; its form was lent to you by heaven and earth. Your life does not belong to you; it came into existence with the interaction of the energies of heaven and earth. Your mind and your spirit are not yours to control; they follow the natural way of heaven and earth. Your children and grandchildren are not yours to possess; they are like flakes of your skin, for procreation was granted to you by heaven and earth.

"A person who understands this is one who is not bound by the ideas of what a mind is and what a body is. Forgetting his body, he can travel anywhere in the world without knowing where he goes. Forgetting his mind, he can succeed at everything he does because he does not think about how it is done. He follows the way of heaven, going when he needs to go, staying without knowing what made him stay, and eating without knowing how he is fed.

"Life is but the coming together of the energies of heaven and earth, and the source of these energies has no beginning and no end. How can one ever possess the way of heaven and earth?"

Bruce Lee's Six Diseases of a competitive attitude

I'm prone toward feeling competitive. That was obvious when I was playing competitive tennis. I didn't like to lose. It's been less obvious now.

But today when I started reading Be Water, My Friend, a book written by Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter, after putting it aside for a while, I came across her description of how Bruce Lee viewed a competitive attitude in everyday relationships and situations.

I saw myself in these Six Diseases. Maybe you will also. Shannon Lee says: (the indented passages are from Bruce Lee)

If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up.

When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser.

The Six Diseases are:

The desire for victory
I have to be the winner. If I don't win, I'm a loser. If I win, everybody else is a loser.

The desire to resort to technical cunning
I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am?

The desire to display all that has been learned
Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn't matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it's dumb).

The desire to awe the enemy
I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention.

The desire to play the passive role
I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn't like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that's important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you?

The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by
I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I'm not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I'm not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I'm trying.

With all of these pitfalls, there's an attachment to an outside outcome, which ultimately disconnects us from people and situations. There is only the desire to manipulate or shock and awe the "opponent." Even in the noble desire to be rid of the disease, there is a characterization of oneself as "the afflicted one" and therefore a denial of your own power.

I offer you these six diseases to consider as possible avenues of self-exploration because we have all participated in them when relating to another person or a situation. Can you recognize any of these in yourself?

If you were to dig a little deeper, where would you find the wounding perception that motivates the disease and where could the healing begin? Allow yourself the awareness to notice your tactics and the freedom to feel your pain points. Realize that the diseases are just a delusion of the mind and the ego.

You complain about how judgmental people are? Guess what you're being -- judgmental. You give someone the cold shoulder for not being nicer to you? Guess what -- you're not being nice. You gossip about what a gossip someone is? You're a gossip yourself. You get mad at someone for not loving you the "right" way -- that's not very loving.

Take a look in the mirror and see how you are extending the life of the disease rather than finding the cure and, ultimately, the healing.

These diseases are traps. They will keep you locked in isolation and stagnate your growth. They will keep your success always outside of yourself and out of your hands as you chase victory and validation through the eyes of someone else.

And what's more, they will keep you from being fully yourself. Attachment to outcome is denial of one's true commitment to self.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of an engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through.

Alan Watts talks about Man and Nature

Here's another installment in my sharing of notes I'm taking as I listen to audio recordings of Alan Watts that Sam Harris has put on his Waking Up app. 

This talk is titled "Man and Nature." It presents the traditional Chinese view as being most in line with modern science, a view I agree with. There's a reason the classic book was called The Tao of Physics, rather than, say the Jesus of Physics or the Brahman of Physics. 

Chinese philosophy is thoroughly naturalistic, leaving aside offshoots that are religious/supernatural. This helps explain why I'm enjoying the talks by Watts so much, since I find Taoism (or Daoism) to be my favorite spiritual approach, along with non-religious Buddhism, especially Zen.

Enjoy.

Man and Nature

Experience leads us to feel that we're isolated centers of will and action placed in a world that is not us. Science tells us something different. An ecologist would say that what you do is what the whole universe is doing here and now, like a wave being the result of the ocean.

The real you isn't a puppet that gets pushed around. We've been hoodwinked into believing that you only exist in your own skin. Our real body is that, plus the whole external environment.

Don't view things that way, and we despoil the environment. We try to vanquish the world. We need a new consciousness that the real self is more than the conscious ego.

This unknown self is more Us than I, connected to everything that is. Knowing that, you see that you never die, instead appearing in various forms. 

What is nature? Not something artificial. There's an idea that nature is outside us. There is human nature, but you can't trust it.

(1) The Western theory is that nature is a machine, an artifact. It is made by God, like a table made out of wood. A construct, and someone knows how it was put together -- the architect, God. Later, the view changed to no God, but nature was still seen as a mechanism. Most of us look at our bodies as a chauffeur looks at a car.

(2) The East Indian theory is that nature is a drama. Maya/illusion, art, play. In Hinduism ultimate reality is an eternal boundless self. The universe doesn't tell you that self is vibrations of the universe. Brahman plays hide and seek eternally. Self pretends it is lost. Kali Yuga is an age of darkness we're supposedly living in now.

(3) The Chinese theory is that nature is of itself, so, marked by spontaneity. Automatic, but not machinery -- rather, biology. The heart beats by itself. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, grass grows by itself. Tao is the course of nature. Words can't describe it. 

There's a great difference between Tao as nature with no boss, and the Judeo-Christian view of God as Lord of Nature. With original sin, you can't trust human nature. The Chinese would say, if you can't trust yourself, you can't trust anything. Can you mistrust yourself if you don't trust yourself?

If you can't trust yourself, you're totally mixed up. You have no leg to stand on. In this respect Taoist and Confucian philosophy are in agreement.

Confucius taught that the highest virtue is human-heartedness. Virtue doesn't mean morality. Above all, trust human nature in full realization that it is both good and bad. A "good" war is based on human greed for treasure, women, whatever. A "bad" war is based on ideologies. 

If you're going to do something evil, do it for a plain simple selfish motive. Don't do it in the name of God. Because if you do, it turns you into a monster who is no longer human, but self-righteous. 

Humans are complex. We don't know ourselves at all, really. You're much more than your conscious thoughts. 

Western mechanical theory. Indian drama theory. Chinese organic theory. Nature, including human nature, is a system of organic anarchy. So the Chinese come closest to getting it right. 

When you look at clouds, you know at once they aren't a mess. Patterns of foam on water never make an artistic mistake. We humans are all wiggly. Is there something wrong with how the stars are arranged? Should they be organized in a regular pattern? Do you praise peaks in a mountain range for being high, or the valleys for being low?

When people visit a place called Inspiration Point, they say, ah, just like a picture. Someone goes to see Picasso and says, your paintings don't look like anything. Picasso asks, do you have a photo of your girlfriend? He takes one out of his wallet. Picasso says, is she really so small as that?

Natural order is like order in trees and mountains. They are orderly, but we can't put our finger on the order. Order of nature is thus in a way indefinable. Nature is a self-ordering principle that doesn't know how it does it.

Government always is a mess. Government always is opposed to people. Taoists say the state should be as unobtrusive as possible. Simply help the people and don't claim any merit for yourself.

So here is a conception of nature as something we must trust. But nature isn't completely trustworthy. Sometimes it lets you down with a wallop. 

It's a great thing if you can learn what the Chinese call purposelessness. Like waves washing against the shore with no meaning. Haven't you gone on a walk with no purpose in mind? All music is purposeless. Same with dancing. Do you dance to arrive at a particular spot on the floor?

Same with us. There's no "God's purpose." 

Here's the choice. Are you going to trust it, or not? That "it" is you and nature and everything around you. Now, there will be mistakes. But if you don't trust it at all, you're going to strangle yourself. You'll surround yourself with laws and rules and police and guards. 

Who will look after the guards? No go. To live, I must entrust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust nature that doesn't have a boss.

Descend into the valley of life, rather than climb the mountaintop

At first I didn't like a book I have about Pure land (Shin) Buddhism. But I've come to enjoy "River of Fire, River of Water" by Taitetsu Unno. Here's some passages about embracing the valley of life

The ideal of monastic Buddhism is transcendence of mundane existence, as if one were ascending to the mountaintop. In contrast, the praxis of Pure Land Buddhism takes place by descending into the valley, the shadow of the mountains. 

We find a similar contrast in Chinese civilization. Like monastic Buddhism the Confucian ideal may be symbolized by the soaring mountain peaks , manifesting the highest achievement of the literati. 

And like the Pure Land, Taoism is found in the valley and lowlands, a haven for those who do not fit into conventional society for whatever reason. But it is in this valley that life and creativity flourish. In the words of Tao-te-ching: 

The Valley Spirit never dies.
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the Doorway of the mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth spring.
It is there within us all the while;
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.

...In Japan, traditional Buddhist monasticism -- whether Tendai, Shingon, or Zen -- aims at the transcendence of earthly passions. Its basic  precepts consist of renouncing all family ties, maintaining celibacy, mastering rigorous disciplines, avoiding contact with the opposite sex, and engaging in elaborate rituals.

In contrast, Pure Land is the trans-descendence into the opposite world, the self-awakening to the immersion in the swamp of anger, jealousy, insecurity, fear, addiction, arrogance, hypocrisy.

...Shin Buddhism comes alive for those who live in the valley and in the shadows. It challenges people to discover the ultimate meaning of life in the abysss of the darkness of ignorance.

...Pure Land Buddhism might suggest an otherworldly orientation, but its primary focus is on the here and now. Not the here and now grasped by the controlling ego-self, but the here and now cherished as a gift of life itself to be lived creatively and gratefully, granted us by boundless compassion.

The bountifulness of great compassion makes possible our liberation from the iron cage of our own making.

 

Taoism is playful. Buddhism is serious. I prefer Taoism.

One of my favorite books is Ray Grigg's The Tao of Zen. His thesis, which he argues persuasively, is that Zen is rooted in Chinese Taoism, while Zen Buddhism is, obviously, rooted in Indian Buddhism.

Here's a lengthy excerpt from the "Buddhism in China" chapter. While it's possible to quibble with some of Grigg's conclusions, his basic contrasting of Taoist/Chinese and Buddhist/Indian approaches to life seems accurate to me. 

The indented italicized passages are quotations from other writers. I haven't included the footnotes that show where the quotation came from.

As Buddhism in China was adjusted to fit Chinese sensibilities, the distinction between it and the Taoist sects and religions began to blur. In the common mind a synthesis of Buddhism and Taoism began to take place.

Chinese versions of the Buddhist scriptures were adapted to Chinese ideas, and Buddhism and Taoism were often mingled together in popular belief.

This mingling did not take place among the more literary and scholarly Taoists. For them the integration of Buddhism into China helped to define and invigorate the Taoism of the Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu. 

Their Taoism involved ostensibly, no belief; it was and continues to be an aesthetic philosophy rather than a religion. 

Mahayana Buddhism is a religion that evolved from a philosophical base. Taoism and Buddhism can be reconciled philosophically but not religiously. Those following the original form of Taoism have been unable to relate to the Mahayana aspects of Buddhism.

Even in the popular mind some of these differences were not so easily resolved.

Buddhism was in many ways distinctly un-Chinese. The Indian belief that human beings live over and over again on earth was entirely unknown in China. The Chinese reverence for the family clashed with the Buddha's teaching that family ties were a hindrance to enlightenment, and the celibacy required of Buddhist monks.

Where Buddhism saw life as suffering, Chinese tradition regarded the order of nature as fundamentally good and the right life as one lived in harmony with nature. Far from wanting to escape from the body and individual personality, most Taoists wanted to prolong their individual existence indefinitely. 

In other words, a basic difference separates the character of Indian Buddhism and the native Chinese traditions of Confucianism and Taoism. 

Taoism is earthy. It is basically optimistic. It accepts in general terms that life is worth living and that nature, personified in the metaphor of the Great Mother, is essentially a balanced beneficence. 

Buddhism's character is more sober, less optimistic. As Richard Cavendish notes:

Although it has often been observed that Buddhism is a cheerful and good-hearted religion, the Buddhist attitude to life is intensely pessimistic. Life on earth is evil, painful and transitory. It is full of suffering and nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.

One of the characteristics of Zen that argues for a Taoist rather than a Buddhist origin is its lightness, its playfulness, its appreciative acceptance of life. Buddhism is serious, leaden, weighted down by Gautama's traumatic realization that suffering lies beneath the veneer of life's comforts, and pleasures.

The story of his own evolution from innocent prince to enlightened being is a revealing process. The emphasis is on the endurance and perseverance that the quest for enlightenment demands.

He struggles through seven years of wilderness meditation and asceticism before reaching realization. The same long struggle is reenacted later in China by Bodhidharma who sits persistently for nine years facing a wall. The literal truth of these stories is less important than the underlying attitudes they reveal.

The Chinese embrace life as worth living, and they seek ways of living it wisely and well. This is evident in the popular Kuan-yin, a maternal incarnation of the Buddha, who bestows fertility, safety, and comfort to her supplicants.

This same positive attitude is seen in the round and jovial folk-Buddhas of modern China who sit big-bellied and contented, or stand wide-legged and laughing. These images of the Buddha, unlike the austere and emaciated ones from India, invite a full and happy life.

Even in religion the Chinese enjoy life too much to waste it on asceticism and metaphysical exercises.

They would gladly sacrifice a few years for immortality as a good investment of time. They would willingly do t'so-ch'an (Japanese: zazen, literally "sitting meditation") to effect social harmony or  attain worldly gain and influence.

But they would not expend much energy on something as abstract and metaphysical as enlightenment. "Once you had enlightenment," they would ask, "what would you do with it?" The question is expressed with an appropriate mixture of playfulness and practicality in a Zen story:

A Zen roshi and a Hindu guru were walking together along a riverbank and decided to visit an adjacent island.
"Let's walk to the island," said the guru.
"Why not take the ferry?" suggested the roshi.
"Because," said the guru, "I've spent twenty years learning to walk on water."
"Why take twenty years learning to walk on water," asked the roshi, "when you can take a ferry for a penny?"

The same grounded practicality characterizes the Lao Tzu. As Victor H. Mair points out:

The Chinese classic emphasizes political skills and social harmony in preference to the theistic orientation of the Indian scripture.

The Mahayana religious component in Ch'an and Zen Buddhism emphasizes the zazen in emulation of the sitting Buddha of India. Very practical reasons exist for doing zazen but they have been overlayed with exhortations to persevere, to be like the Buddha, to sit until all sentient beings are saved.

In contrast, the Taoist element in Ch'an and Zen Buddhism is not interested in such theological objectives.

The purpose of protracted sitting is not to perpetuate itself but to release the practitioner into the spontaneity and freedom of merely being. The end of the searching and discipline is a full and balanced life lived gracefully and harmoniously in wonderful simplicity.

The sitter returns to the village to become fully engaged in the profoundly ordinary business of day-to-day existence. 

The Lao Tzu dedicates about half its wisdom to the affirmation of such worldly affairs. Although its treatment lacks the playfulness of the Chuang Tzu, it is nonetheless a clear confirmation of this life in this earthy place, fully committed to the worth that is inherent in the whole social and natural world.

Any discipline in Taoism is used to reenter fully what is already present. This is also the case in Zen.

Buddhism's discipline does not complete the cycle of leaving, returning, and reaffirming. It spins outward to become removed, unearthly, and austere, reluctantly present in the world as if living were a kind of selfless sacrifice. 

Chinese painting points to the mystery of existence

Looking back, one of the stranger aspects of my childhood -- which included a lot of strange stuff -- was how my mother took me to Chinatown in San Francisco when I was fairly young, maybe 12. 

I came home with many inexpensive pieces of Chinese art that I put up in my room. Most were images that still appeal to me today. Misty mountains with a small figure of a person walking along with a pagoda or hut perched on the edge of a cliff.

I don't know where that instant attraction came from.

Nobody I knew had any interest in either Chinese art or philosophy. Maybe it stemmed from growing up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our house had a picture window in the living room that looked out at the high Sierras and Sequoia National Park.

And we were surrounded by smaller hills, with the Kaweah River flowing by close enough that I could hear the soothing sound of the water if I left a window open at night.

Anyway, I just finished reading an intriguing book by David Hinton, Existence: A Story. The Amazon listing says: 

The mystery of existence and our place in that mystery--as expressed in a single Chinese landscape painting: a new work of meditative philosophy by the renowned translator of the Chinese classics and author of Hunger Mountain.

The message of the book is difficult to summarize, because the Taoist philosophy underlying that message is notoriously difficult to conceptualize. I guess I'd call it something like Mysticism in plain sight.

Meaning, Chinese mysticism isn't other-worldly. It is rooted in the here and now of this world, especially the natural world.

This is the painting that's the focus of the book, Shih Tao's (1642-1707) Broad Distance Pavillion. 

And here's the last section of the book, which provides a good overview of Hinton's perspective on the painting. Stone Waves is another name for the artist, Shih T'ao. Inkstone-Wander wrote the poem that Shig]h T'ao inscribed on the painting.

The most crucial thing about the story of existence is that it knows itself to be mere story, as Lao Tzu and the Ch'an masters recognized, that it recognizes is own meaninglessness, its own vanishing.

Only when we forget story and explanation are we returned to dwell here in the beginning, where empty awareness and the expansive presence of existence are whole, a single existence-tissue vast and deep, everything and everywhere.

How strange that the story is most true when it falls silent. And yet, how liberating that we can return to begin at the beginning in that silence anytime, anywhere.

A simple room, for instance, morning sunlight through windows lighting the floor; a sidewalk cafe, empty wine glass on the table, trees rustling in a slight breeze, sunlit passersby; a routine walk through a park, late autumn trees bare, rain clattering in fallen leaves.

Or the mountain landscape in Stone-Waves' painting, where we share with Stone-Waves the culmination of his lifelong landscape practice. We walk to a mountaintop, face out across ridgeline beyond ridgeline, then close our eyes.

We forget everything we know, all of the ideas and knowledge and assumptions about ourselves and the nature of things. We forget Lao Tzu's seminal poem, forget Inkstone-Wander's poem and Stone-Waves' painting, and continue on from there, forgetting all of the thoughts and memories defining us each as a center of identity.

Here, we share this experience with Stone-Waves in the deepest possible way, for there is no longer any distinction between us as separate centers of identity.

We forget this entire story of existence, and turn to the empty darkness that is our own awareness, which is all that remains after this practice of forgetfulness, and we inhabit the expansive space of that darkness.

We abide in that darkness for a time, then open our eyes. We look as if it were sight seeing for the first time, seeing things as they are in themselves, free of all our tenuous human stories about them, our ideas and beliefs.

And there we find mirror-deep awareness and the ten thousand things filling that awareness, as it does in any routine moment of mindful attention to immediate experience: the expanse of awareness and the expanse of existence returned to their original nature as a single tissue, the existence-tissue vast and deep, everything and everywhere.

We gaze out onto dark-enigma, even if it is drenched in sunlight: ridge lines trailed out kingfisher-greens and indigo-blues, sea-ch'i mist billowing through valleys and rising up mountain slopes, through abandoned orchards, seething up to erase broken walls and houses, a city in ruins, scatters of wild chrysanthemum-blooms fading against winter, unharvested pears and apricots, and soon the mountaintop where Inkstone-Wander stands.

Here in the beginning, existence rustles. From nowhere else, it occurs and occurs. It gazes out at itself, and it is whole.

And as it is our most elemental identity, we too are whole. It is whole, but not complete, never complete. It is restless. 

It rustles, occurring and occurring. It wants to recognize itself, to orient, to celebrate. It wonders. It wants to know itself, to understand and explain, to decorate itself with story and meaning as if there were meaning.

It is whole, and it wants to begin: This is the story of existence, and it begins with a painting.

Mental Tai Chi and dissolving the remove

Yesterday I had one of those pleasing experiences where I got the same message from three different sources -- one inside my head, from me, and the other two from outside, a guided meditation and a book I was reading. 

First, me. I was idly going to sleep, not thinking about much of anything in particular, when the notion mental Tai Chi popped into my mind. 

For seventeen years I've been practicing Tai Chi under the guidance of a skilled instructor who is adept at teaching the martial aspect of Tai Chi, as well as the more typical relaxation/exercise aspect. 

One of the keys to Tai Chi, an internal martial art (in contrast to an external marital art like karate), is not meeting force with force. Instead, when it comes to dealing with some sort of attack, the idea is encapsulated in ABC.

Accept. Blend. Control. There's other words to describe these concepts. I just like the ABC'ness of these.

Say someone tries to punch you. Though this takes practice, the goal is to guide the punch away from you with minimal force. You accept the punch without letting it hit you, such as by gently diverting the punch past your head -- maybe with your hand/arm, or just by turning your body.

In doing this, you're blending with the attacker's movement, using their energy to redirect the movement into a more productive direction than you getting hit in the head.

Then control probably might be called for. This gets into defensive joint locks and other aspects of the martial side of Tai Chi that resemble controlling moves in other styles like judo, jujitsu, and such. The aim isn't to injure the other person, but to stop them from attacking you.

It struck me that mental Tai Chi is similar.

Except the "attacker" is words spoken by someone else, or perhaps our own mind. Instead of forcefully resisting what feels like a threat, we do our best to to accept the words and let them slide by, blending with them rather than trying to push them away or respond with our own attacking speech.

This is an ideal, of course.

I don't claim to be adept at doing this. I often react to an insult or accusation as a threat, rather than doing the mental Tai Chi thing. Meaning, I jump right to trying to control the other person, or my own mind, rather than first accepting and blending.

That morning I listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my iPhone's Calm app. It was called Dissolve the Remove. Here's a partial transcript.

The meditation teacher Susan Tiver has a nice phrase. She says meditation is often described as observing something, like the breath, as though we were operating from a distance, from a remove.

But meditation, she says, is also about dissolving the remove, about collapsing distance. Getting really close to our experience, really feeling what's here. I love this duality. That sometimes we want space around our experience. That's legit. 

And sometimes we want to collapse that space. We want to become more intimate with everything that's going on, more intimate with exactly how this moment is feeling, I'm right inside it. 

...There sometimes can be a sense that we're up here looking, and the sensation is down there, it's down in the body. Or maybe it's a sound that's out there in the world. Let's see if we can dissolve that remove a little bit. 

Come on down from the observing head, and climb into the body. So this is about feeling. Instead of only observing body sensations from a distance, see if you can feel what's here from the inside.

...When we truly dissolve the remove, what's left? Just one thing. A single experience of self and world, a single continuum of feeling and sensing that kind of blurs the boundary between inside and out. Intimate with everything.

In the morning I also read some pages in Happiness and How It Happens by The Happy Buddha (Suryacitta Malcolm Smith). Here's a passage I liked.

So how do we let go?

As an example, let's look at how we relax and let go when we meditate. When we sit, we tune into the felt experience of the body. As we do this, we sense how the body is. We may see that we're a little agitated, maybe a little tense.

We feel how we are and we accept how we are.

We don't try to relax but let everything be simply as it is. We let go trying to be different from how we are, which leads to greater relaxation. This is the essence of meditation, nothing special at all.

Within the felt experience of the body, we let whatever comes into awareness simply be and move on. Our work isn't to interfere or to try to change it, but to observe it and let go and relax. 

Right in the middle is where life really happens

I really liked today's guided meditation by Jeff Warren, which I regularly listen to on the Calm iPhone app. So much so, I made a transcript of what Warren had to say.

The ellipsis (...) in the transcript below indicate a marked pause in the guided meditation. 

This afternoon I shared some copies of the transcript with my Tai Chi class. There's a close connection between the notion of staying in the center of a movement and basic principles of Tai Chi. 

More philosophically, I enjoyed Warren's observation that when we're right in the middle, we have the greatest ability to adjust to the changing conditions of life. 

Meaning, if we're not strongly mentally leaning in one direction or another, when life pushes us we're able to flow with that demand more easily than when our mind is determined to head somewhere else. 

In the Middle 
Transcript of guided meditation from Jeff Warren on the Calm iPhone app

One thing we explore often in the Daily Trip is the idea of being present to exactly this present moment. Not a bit ahead or a bit behind, but right here, right now, in the very middle of it all.

This is one of the meanings of equanimity. The ability to be right here, in the middle, balanced at the very center of your life, free and available to go in any direction. 

And that's the idea we're going to play with today. First in stillness, and then, in the last minutes, just for fun, in motion.

Let's go. 

Start by closing the eyes, or keeping them half open, whatever is comfortable for you. And take a few deep full-body breaths. Stretching up the spine on the inhale, alert, poised, and then settling into your seat on the exhale, relaxed, bringing out any tension. 

Already, we're right in the middle between alert and relaxed, between the in-breath and the out-breath.

We're also in the middle of this exact moment. All the sounds around you, maybe distant, or close. All the sensations, and feelings, and thoughts inside you. Maybe lots of them. Maybe very few. Sitting in the middle of it all, letting everything be here.

If you like, choose a simple home base. This will be a place you can rest your attention on, returning to it again and again throughout the meditation. 

So maybe the soft sensation of the breath down in the belly, or it could be another body sensation, or it can be a sound. Whatever you choose, practicing right here with it. 

...OK, present with some sound or sensation, not gripping it. Light, noticing the subtle details. Keep going.

...Sometimes, we get a bit ahead of ourselves. Anticipating the next breath. Or thinking about the future. Or we get a bit behind, dwelling on something that's already past. Can you come back and stay right here, poised in the exact middle of everything?

...Sitting in the middle. Thoughts and feelings, of course, will be there. But they're just passing through. And you sit, centered and poised and aware.

...So let's play with a very simple movement.

Maybe lift your hand, and gently turn it back and forth. Can you move it so slowly and deliberately, that there's no momentum at all? In other words, at any moment you could as easily turn your hand the other way. Or move it forward, or backwards, or really any direction. 

The idea is to stay at the very center of the movement. This still point, where anything can happen, where you're not committed to moving one way or the other, where there's no habit taking over. Keep playing with this.

Maybe turn your head, or twist your body a little bit. Playing with the same principle of moving really slowly and staying right in the middle of the movement. 

OK, so you can keep moving if you're enjoying that.

Being right in the middle is the place where you're most available to life. It's this zero point where we have the potential to move in any direction. It's a practice of freedom. Free to respond, and not to react. Free to be present. Free to live. It all happens right here, in the middle.

OK. When you're ready, open your eyes. Thank you for your practice. I'll see you back here tomorrow.

I love the natural concreteness of Daoism

Abstractions are fine. We humans have evolved to be able to conceive of abstract ideas such as love, justice, infinity, God, and so much else.

But it's possible to get lost in a maze of abstractions where each idea leads to another idea, and then another... no exit in sight. 

Daoism (or Taoism) is my favorite philosophy, along with non-religious Buddhism, because it's wonderfully concrete. I've practiced Tai Chi for seventeen years, which can be viewed as Daoism made physical. 

Yin and yang aren't abstractions in Tai Chi. They are directly experienced realities as a yin move flows into a yang move and a yang move flows into a yin move.

Now and then I turn to my bookshelf of Daoist titles and choose one to read before my morning meditation. Today it was Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation.

Here's some passages from the introductory section that I enjoyed re-reading.

The Daoist correlative cosmology begins from the assumption that the endless stream of always novel yet still continuous situations we encounter are real, and hence, that there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.

As a parody on Parmenides, who claimed that "only Being is," we might say that for the Daoist, "only beings are," or taking one step further in underscoring the reality of the process of change itself, "only becomings are." 

That is, the Daoist does not posit the existence of some permanent reality behind appearances, some unchanging substratum, some essential defining aspect behind the accidents of change. Rather, there is just the ceaseless and usually cadenced flow of experience.

In fact, the absence of the "One behind the many" metaphysics makes our uncritical use of the philosophic term "cosmology" to characterize Daoism, at least in the familiar Greek sense of the word, highly problematic. 

---------------------------------------

The Daoist understanding of "cosmos" as the "ten thousand things" means that, in effect, the Daoists have no concept of cosmos at all insofar as that notion entails a coherent, single-ordered world which is in any sense enclosed or defined. The Daoists are, therefore, primarily, "acosmotic" thinkers. 

---------------------------------------

For ancient China, time pervades everything and is not to be denied. Time is not independent of things, but a fundamental aspect of them. Unlike traditions that devalue both time and change in pursuit of the timeless and eternal, in classical China things are always transforming.

In fact, in the absence of some claim to objectivity that "objectifies" and thus makes "objects" of phenomena, the Chinese tradition does not have the separation between time and entities that would allow for either time without entities, or entities without time -- there is no possibility of either an empty temporal corridor or an eternal anything (in the sense of being timeless).

---------------------------------------

It is for this reason that things resist "definition" in the literal sense of finis -- a practice that delineates some ostensibly discrete boundary around them, and thus reduces all relations to external, extrinsic transactions. 

With fluid and shifting boundaries among things, integrity for any particular thing does not mean being or staying whole, or even actualizing its own internal potential. 

Rather, integrity is something becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things. Integrity is consummatory relatedness. 

---------------------------------------

The field of experience is always construed from one perspective or another. There is no view from nowhere, no external perspective, no decontextualized vantage point. We are all in the soup. The intrinsic, constitutive relations that obtain among things make them reflexive and mutually implicating, residing together within the flux and flow.

---------------------------------------

A corollary to this radical perspectivism is that each particular element in our experience is holographic in the sense that it has implicated within it the entire field of experience.

This single flower has leaves and roots that take their nourishment from the environing soil and air. And the soil contains the distilled nutrients of past growth and decay that constitute the living ecological system in which all of its participants are organically interdependent. 

The sun enables the flower to process these nutrients, while the atmosphere that caresses the flower also nourishes and protects it. 

By the time we have "cashed out" the complex of conditions that conspire to produce and conserve this particular flower, one ripple after another in an ever-extending series of radial circles, we have implicated the entire cosmos within it without remainder.

For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child.

Another guest churchless post from John

Here's another guest post that I fashioned out of an email from John, a guy I regularly communicate with. I always enjoy his thoughtful responses to stuff that I've written about. I believe TNH stands for Thich Nhat Hanh.

Hey Brian, how are you and yours doing? Hopefully as well as you can be.

As always, I’ve been enjoying your posts. Especially the two about what we can learn from the internal arts.

It is funny when I tell people that tai chi has legitimate martial applications for self-defense. They look at me like, right…. Like you, I trained in external styles for 20 plus years. I do think that gives guys like you and me who learn tai chi some advantage over people who have not practiced karate or boxing or something like that.

But, we also have the disadvantage of having to un-learn all kinds of shit. LOL I’m teaching my daughter’s best friend self-defense using tai chi. She is 24 years old, around 5’6” and maybe 140 lbs. She probably has never been hit or kicked.

Realistically, against an average dude like me, 5’11”, about 240 lbs, in a combat situation, she probably has no chance.

But, I can teach her how to evade and get away from someone using tai chi. I’ve actually been pretty amazed at how effective it is! LOL You and I know how effective it can be after being effortlessly tossed around by our instructors! She is picking things up very quickly. So that’s cool.

I saw a link to an article that I thought was interesting, and kind of fits in with some of your writings about “enlightenment”.

https://sameoldzen.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-enlightenment-scam.html#comments

Your post on ending the spiritual search really resonated with me. Early on in my leaving Christianity, I went through phases of authors. There was TNH, Tolle, Walsch, Watts, ND Tyson, and several books that you have written about.

In those earlier days, it seems like I had regular “ah ha!” moments or mind blowing realizations. I think that went on for a while.

Now, I don’t really have many of those moments, at all. It’s not that I’ve learned all I can learn or anything like that. I think it’s more like, I’ve settled into a place where the practices that I used to have to think about doing, I don’t have to think about it so much anymore.

I have to admit, it seems boring in comparison. But it’s also kind of comforting or maybe restful…? I’m not sure exactly how to describe it. But I don’t feel like I’m chasing after so much anymore. You said it very well in your post. This really stood out along the lines I’ve just been talking about:

Always looking for more from life than what life already is giving me is beginning to seem unwise. (Yes! And it’s a bit tiring to look for more.)

More meaning. More happiness. More purpose. More depth. All that more, more, more seems to lead to a hamster-wheel sort of existence. (Again, yes!)

Spiritual seeking can become such a habit, the seeker doesn't realize that they're going around and around without really getting anywhere. (And yes, again!)

I still very much enjoy reading and listening to talks by Watts and Sam Harris and TNH and the likes. But my motive for reading or listening has shifted a bit.

I don’t feel the “need” to have to be reading all the time. Now I feel more relaxed in my reading. I read when I feel like it and focus more on enjoying what I’m reading instead of trying to get something out of it to make me… better, more aware, more peaceful, etc.

I do still have the occasional “ah ha!” moment, or something like that. But it is pretty rare. I no longer seek those moments, but I still enjoy them when it happens.

Take care and as always, thanks for the great blog posts.

John

More thoughts about Tai Chi and martial arts

This is a follow-up to my previous post, "Internal martial arts have a lot to teach us." 

I probably should have been more explicit about what I meant by a lot to teach us. What I meant to focus on, with semi-success, was the general applicability of internal versus external approaches. 

Let me attempt a fuller explanation now.

A few commenters observed that when it comes to fighting ability, an Ultimate Fighting dude (or dudette) almost certainly would kick the ass of a Tai Chi practitioner, even one skilled in the martial side of Tai Chi.

I agree. But this gets at the difference between an art and whatever the opposite of art is, which is sort of hard to to come up with a word for.

Regardless, my 30 years of experience with several martial art styles leads me to confidently say that one goal of every martial art is to improve the character of the practitioner. 

That's an internal goal, by and large, though it should manifest in outward behavior also.

By contrast, I'm not aware that Ultimate Fighting practitioners put a lot of emphasis on their craft as an art. They're concerned with what works to win a fight. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare a martial art with a martial non-art.

Every martial arts instructor I've had emphasized that the #1 intent of the art is to not get into a fight. Fighting is a last resort, whereas for Ultimate Fighting people, it is the main thing. 

That said, I'm also a firm believer that physical action is the touchstone of any form of spirituality or art. 

If all we're engaged in is a purely internal exercise of supposed transformation, there's no way to tell whether we're really changing for the better. Someone could meditate in a dark room for several hours a day and come to believe that they've become enlightened.

OK.

But if there's no evidence of that transformation in their behavior, if enlightenment isn't something that others can distinguish from non-enlightenment, then someone can conjure up a fantasy that they're more spiritually advanced than they really are.

This is one purpose of the Tai Chi push hands exercise I spoke about in the previous post.

A Tai Chi practitioner may believe that they're able to stay rooted to the earth; defeat attempts to uproot them by flexibly rotating their core; use a small amount of force to deflect the movements of someone much more powerful; and so on.

The only way they can know if their belief is justified is to put their Tai Chi to a test with another practitioner. And the more skilled the other person is, the better is the test (and the more humbling).

Understand: in no way am I saying that Tai Chi students must do push hands or martial applications.

It's perfectly fine to look upon Tai Chi as a relaxing form of exercise, in somewhat the same way my wife and I took ballroom dancing lessons for quite a few years without having the slightest interest in dance competitions -- aside from watching them on TV.

Shifting gears, I do want to defend Tai Chi as a martial art, though. 

Until Covid changed things, I'd go to two regular Tai Chi classes a week and also a class made up of Tai Chi students with marital arts backgrounds who wanted to learn the fighting side of Tai Chi.

One of these guys was Jeremy. He's a big guy who moonlights as a bouncer at bars and a security guard at events. Muscular. Maybe 230 pounds. About six feet. In short, an imposing figure. When we'd be paired up to practice some move, I'd wonder if I could make it work on Jeremy.

Usually, if not always, I could -- once I used Tai Chi principles correctly. A key principle is that using your whole body will overcome even a strong person's stability, including their arms.

Meaning, my 180 pound body, used effectively, could lead me to move Jeremy around via forms of leverage. This is why jujitsu is so effective. A small person can apply a wrist lock or arm bar on a much bigger person and cause them to "tap out" quickly. 

Here's three You Tube videos that offer up a variety of examples of how Tai Chi can be a practical means of self-defense.

The second one is kind of lengthy, but you can skip the solitary demonstration of the Tai Chi move and head right to the two-person demonstration of the martial application. 

 

 

Internal martial arts have a lot to teach us

For about thirteen years I trained in the external martial art of karate. For the past seventeen years, since 2004, I've trained in the internal martial art of Tai Chi.

Yes, Tai Chi is a martial art. At least, it can be. Tai Chi Chuan is martial. (Chuan is translated as "fist" or "boxing.")

Most Tai Chi instructors aren't interested in the Chuan part, and don't understand it well.

I've been fortunate to learn Tai Chi from someone who started practicing it after many years of hard style martial arts experience, so he is expert in how Tai Chi can be a martial art.

Recently I've been re-reading Ron Sieh's book, "T'ai Chi Chuan: The Internal Tradition." (It wasn't published in 1842, no matter what the Amazon listing says.)

Here's how Sieh describes the external and internal martial arts.

Typically the martial arts are characterized by how they arrive at power: the external, by muscular effort; the internal, relaxed and effortlessly.

All "karates" are considered external, and most of the Chinese arts, plus Judo, Capoeira, and Kali, are lumped into the external category.

T'ai Chi Ch'uan, Hsing I Ch'uan, and Pa Kua are the Chinese internal arts and of course, Aikido is a Japanese art. There is a flow in the internal arts that is missing from the external ones.

In the external there is a quality of fighting, of pushing against the way things are, to change what is happening to better fit our "plan."

In the internal tradition a more inclusive approach is cultivated, a quality of non-interference, of using your opponents' strengths to your advantage without the struggle to change them.

It's much easier to learn an external martial art than an internal one.

Our usual inclination is to use force to accomplish something. Children naturally punch and kick. They don't naturally deflect a blow by smoothly moving their body.

Ron Sieh studied with Peter Ralston, an accomplished master of Tai Chi Chuan. He describes that experience in a Technique chapter.

When I used to box with Peter, he would quickly and impactfully fill any holes I would open. The reason was not necessarily his superior technique but his quality of presence and willingness to play the game.

This was a game in which, when the going got rough, the willingness to be there and deeply feel your own experience "as is" became increasingly hard to do.

Our tendency when "confronted" with pain -- either the pain of getting hit or the unwillingness to play (any game) -- is immediately to jump into our well-practiced and often entrenched sense of defending ourselves, our position, or to space out.

Boxing or playing push hands with Peter made it very clear to me, over and over, that at least in my relationship to Peter, denial didn't work and was a great hindrance. It was also simply bad strategy. 

...The centerline is a notion that is important in many martial arts. It is basically the line that runs down the center of our bodies.

...The centerline is that core of the body around which we rotate when we turn the pelvis, whether to dodge a punch, yield to a push, or whatever. In the game of two-person work the centerline is what we should seek out in our partner. 

It is often felt as a core which many people have a hard time yielding. Particularly in push hands it is the target.

...We can rotate around our centerline whether it is located centrally or on the left or right half of our body. It is the feeling of centerline that is important. 

If pushed in the center of the chest we can, with feeling, move the core around -- we rotate to the left or right of that and swing open like a door on our off-center centerline to accommodate the push.

Those words are difficult to follow if you haven't experienced what Sieh is talking about. This video of Peter Ralston playing at push hands is a much better way to grasp what an internal martial art is all about.

And, by implication, what taking a more flowing, less resistant approach to life as a whole is all about.

Push hands in Tai Chi isn't about winning or losing. It isn't a contest. It's a playful way of putting into practice what otherwise remains an abstraction. Until someone is trying to throw us off balance, we don't know how to respond in a way that, hopefully, enables us to keep our balance and composure.

Peter Ralston is the older guy in the light-colored cap. But you could figure that out just by watching the video, since his Tai Chi skill is considerably greater than the other guy's. 

It may not look like Ralston is doing much.

However, if you focus on his core, his centerline, you'll see that he is able to control the other guy with relatively small well-timed moves that look effortless, but take a heck of a lot of training to master.

In push hands a move is released before it becomes a full-on joint lock, takedown, strike, or whatever. So over and over you'll see Ralston releasing moves that, in an actual fight, would appear much more martial.

Stillness can make action more effective

I'm continuing to enjoy Domyo Sater Burk's Idiot's Guide to Mindfulness. 

Today I read her take on getting comfortable with stillness and silence. This appealed to me, not only because I've been meditating every day for over 50 years, so I understand how difficult it can be to keep the mind and body more or less still and silent.

This also is espoused in Tai Chi, which I've practiced for the past 16 years. Of course, you can't be perfectly still in Tai Chi, which I like to call "Taoism in motion." 

But listening skills are a big part of the effectiveness of Tai Chi as a martial art, a quality that applies to other martial arts such as karate. Tai Chi, though, promotes a certain quietude and stillness in sensing what an opponent is intending that is uncommon in more active forms of self-defense. 

The idea is to sensitively sense the energy of a punch, kick, or whatever without initially interfering much with it, if it is interfered with at all. Only then can the attack can dealt with effectively, because you haven't allowed a premature urge to respond to interfere with learning what it is that needs to be dealt with. 

Here's some excerpts from the " Comfort with Stillness and Silence" chapter I read this morning.

To cultivate the receptive attitude required for mindfulness, you temporarily stop trying to influence your circumstances and just open the doors of perception. You try to let go of activity, judgement, and trying to figure things out using your ordinary level of thinking.

You momentarily set aside commenting on things and explaining your point of view to others.

Your body-mind may generate thoughts and feelings all on its own, but you simply observe them as being part of your overall experience of the moment. You're just watching, listening, sensing, and perceiving,

The subjective experience of this purely receptive mode is stillness or silence. The absence of activity or noise may be internal, external, or both. It can be very uncomfortable if you're not used to it.

Fortunately, you can increase your ability to let go of activity and be still. You might even end up liking the experience! The more familiar you get with this simple mode of being, the easier mindfulness will get. 

...Stillness is simply letting go of all activity. The activity you let go of may be working to obtain something you want, trying to avoid or get rid of something you don't want, or escaping something you find neutral or boring. It can be obvious or subtle.

...When you're able to rest in stillness, you become much more receptive to what's going on in your life. It's as if your mental and physical activity create a whole lot of noise. When you let go of that activity, it's like turning off the noise.

Suddenly you can hear. You're able to perceive what's going on around you.

In addition, when you turn off your volitional actions and thoughts, you dramatically increase your ability to see, touch, smell, taste, and objectively perceive the feelings and thoughts that are present in your body-mind in spite of "you" (that is, the conscious, willful part of you).

It isn't necessary -- or advisable -- to choose stillness and then do nothing. Mindfulness isn't about becoming passive. What you're trying to do is see your life clearly so you can take better care of it.

At some point action is necessary and wise, but you're unlikely to be able to know the best time to act or the best thing to do unless you take some time to rest in stillness first. This turns down the noise in your body-mind and opens up the doors of perception.

It's important to realize that stillness is not ultimately useless; it's only apparently useless at the moment. 

As you rest in stillness, your body-mind is still present and operating; it's just not being guided or censored by the part of you responsible for ordinary discriminatory thinking and judging. The information that you receive while mindfully aware goes into your body-mind and affects you. You're just temporarily suspending judgment and action.

This actually gives you a chance to process things in a more holistic and deep way than you habitually do. Ironically, resting in stillness can help you make better decisions and be more effective in your life.

"A good traveller has no fixed plans," says Lao Tzu

The Eastern religion that I was an active member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), liked to talk of being on "the path." (One of the RSSB books is called "The Path of the Masters.")

Well, my attitude toward religious or spiritual paths has changed a lot. And it keeps changing. 

More and more, I'm convinced that not only is there no evidence that any path leads to God or some supernatural reality, it isn't even wise for someone to consider that they're on a life path in this physical world. 

At least, that's how I see it. Naturally others are free to disagree. 

Below you'll find some passages I liked in the final chapter of "The Antidote" by Oliver Burkeman. They talk about the desirability of not craving certainty, of not feeling you are on a path that must lead to a certain destination. 

This isn't the way life works for most of us. Heck, maybe all of us. I got to thinking about this as I was exercising this afternoon in my covid crisis fashion.

Since my wife and I don't feel comfortable with going to our athletic club, I've been exercising at home. I've bought several pieces of home exercise equipment, including the Nucleus Central Core Pro, a simple device that I'm enjoying. 

After exercising a certain way for quite a few years, now I'm doing things differently. And that's been the case my whole life.

From high school into my 30s, I played a lot of competitive tennis. I also jogged. Then I took up karate in my early 40s. For the past sixteen years I've been a student of Tai Chi. So my physical exercise habits keep on changing. 

Same with my mental exercise habits.

I've meditated every day for over fifty years, starting in 1969. But I've experimented with different meditation approaches over the years. Mindfulness and following the breath appeal to me now, whereas for a long time I enjoyed mantra meditation, silently repeating a word or words.

Being frozen in place isn't really living. Life is fluid, always changing. That's one of the messages of Burkeman's book, as reflected in these passages.

Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.

...More loosely defined, 'negative capability' is really just another term for living in accordance with the 'backwards law' -- and it might be a good label to describe the chief talent I kept discovering among the people I encountered in the course of researching this book. 

What they all shared was this same turn of mind, which I came to visualise as a sort of graceful mental dance step: a willingness to adopt an oblique stance toward one's own inner life; to pause and take a step back; to turn to face what others might flee from; and to realise that the shortest apparent route to a positive mood is rarely a sure path to a more profound kind of happiness.

The phrase 'negative capability' also helps to clarify a subtle double meaning in the word 'negative'. It refers both to a set of skills that involve 'not-doing', as opposed to doing -- a negative kind of capability -- as well as to the fact that this skill involves confronting negative (as in 'unpleasant') thoughts, emotions, and situations.

The point here is not that negative capability is always superior to the positive kind. Optimism is wonderful; goals can sometimes be useful; even positive thinking and positive visualisation have their benefits.

The problem is that we have developed the habit of chronically overvaluing positivity and the skills of 'doing' in how we think about happiness, and we chronically undervalue negativity and the 'not-doing' skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure.

To use an old cliche of therapy, we spend too much of our lives seeking 'closure'.

...For the Stoics, the realisation that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can't choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility. For the Buddhists, a willingness to observe the 'inner weather' of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions.

Each of these is a different way of resisting the 'irritable reaching' after better circumstances or better thoughts and feelings. But negative capability need not involve embracing an ancient philosophy or religious tradition.

It is also the skill you're exhibiting when you move forward with a project -- or with life -- in the absence of sharply defined goals; when you dare to inspect your failures; when you stop trying to eliminate feelings of insecurity; or when you put aside 'motivational' techniques in favour of actually getting something done.

...And the end result of all this? The chief benefit of 'openture', Paul Pearsall claimed, is not certitude or even calm or comfort as we normally think of them, but rather the 'strange, excited comfort [of] being presented with, and grappling with, the tremendous mysteries life offers'.

Ultimately, what defines the 'cult of optimism' and the culture of positive thinking -- even in its most mystically tinged, New Age forms -- is that it abhors a mystery. It seems to make things certain, to make happiness permanent and final. And yet this kind of happiness -- even if you do manage to achieve it -- is shallow and unsatisfying.

The greatest benefit of negative capability -- the true power of negative thinking -- is that it lets the mystery back in.

...The aforementioned Paul Pearsall, inventor of 'openture', spent a large part of his life waging a lonely battle of which John Keats would surely have approved: to get the concept of 'awe' accepted by the psychological establishment as one of the primary human emotions, alongside such standards as love, joy, anger, fear, and sadness.

'Unlike all the other emotions,' he argued, awe 'is all of our feelings rolled up into one intense one. You can't peg it as just happy, sad, afraid, angry, or hopeful Instead, it's a matter of experiencing all these feelings and yet, paradoxically, experiencing no clearly identifiable, or at least any easily describable emotion.'

Awe, he writes, 'is like trying to assemble a complex jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. There's never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life. We've never allowed to know when this dramatic voyage might end... but that's part of the life-disorienting chaos that makes this choice so thrillingly difficult.'

...The negative path to happiness, then, is a different kind of path. But it is also a path to a different kind of destination. Or maybe it makes more sense to say that the path is the destination?

These things are excruciatingly hard to put into words, and the spirt of negative capability surely dictates that we do not struggle too hard to do so. 'A good traveller has no fixed plans,' says the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, 'and is not intent upon arriving.'

There could be no better way to make the journey.

Flow is key to poker, and also to life

I'm reading a fascinating book about poker, "The Biggest Bluff." The author, Maria Konnikova, has a Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton after graduating from Harvard.

So she's obviously smart. But she knew nothing about poker until she decided to learn the game under the guidance of Erik Seidel, a poker champion with tens of millions of dollars in earnings.

That would make for interesting reading all by itself. What makes this book much more intriguing is how Konnikova's background in behavioral science enables her to discover important life lessons as she starts to play poker with the goal of entering the World Series of Poker in just a year's time.

Here's excerpts from the Texting Your Way Out of Millions chapter that I read this morning. Having practiced Tai Chi for sixteen years, with about a dozen years of hard style (karate) martial arts experience before that, I can relate to what Chewy says below. Chewy got his nickname by always having a stack of chewy bars on the table next to him when he played poker. 

This is the first time I am seeing him in person, and what I notice right away isn't the beard or the hair or the washed-out sweats. It's the poise with which he carries himself at the table. His posture is perfect. Both hands rest lightly on the felt, long fingers perfectly quiet, resisting the rustle of chips or flip of cards.

His gaze is even and intense, absorbing the whole of the room. He's the embodiment of focus. When I glance at him two hours later, the only thing that has changed is the size of the stack of chips in front of him. It has tripled.

...The image of Chewy sitting, Zen-like, amid the clinking chips and flashing phones and constant call of "Drinks, beverages" from the cocktail waitresses walking around the tables doesn't leave me. I ask him if we could meet and talk about his approach to poker. I'm hoping some of that unruffled poise may transfer by osmosis.

He agrees, and I soon find myself in a nondescript Starbucks, doing my best to get to the heart of his aura. Is that intensity of focus a conscious decision or a sort of by-product of his personality? Is it natural or learned, cultivated or coming easily?

I'm not surprised to hear that there's nothing easy about Chewy's ability to summon what seems like infinite focus. Yoga is just the beginning of his practice -- and, he says, it's not quite enough. 

He is also a kung fu and tai chi practitioner.

"The element of flow that yoga does, typically through vinyasa, is different in kung fu. It's more approached in kind of a tai chi qigong series. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that." I have no idea what tai chi qigong is, but it seems natural that military discipline would hold part of the answer.

"It's really simple," he explains. "Tai chi just means energy movement, and qigong means energy pulsation. It's just mostly standing form, just movements. The idea is, you're letting your body freely flow in such a way that each movement is determined by the previous movement. So it can be an endless flow, continuous movement where the functionalities maintain."

Each movement is determined by the prior: there is no preset plan; just a way of constantly reacting to the moment. Of course, that approach necessitates focused attention. An Edward follows the plan. A Chewy follows the flow.

And flow is how he sees the entirety of the game.

"There is a flow to poker, to the way the events unfold," he says. "I sort of look at it in a macro sense similar to tai chi. It's all about the movement of energy. Take even simple boxing. If I jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab and do no blocking, I"m going to get taken out. Someone's going to kick me or something. You have to be tactful in your movements, strike when it's right to strike, block when it's right to block, move when it's right to move."

And to do that, it's not enough to just watch your own energy. You have to keep track of the entire table. The energy flows between players.

"Everything in poker is always some sort of flow of energy, where whoever can apply the right amount of pressure and allow the right amount of retreat will win. If you find that balance, it's really nice. That's what will allow for success," Chewy says.

The idea seems solid, to be sure. But how to attain it in practice? Chewy, it turns out, also has an incredibly Zen attitude toward losing. Like Dan Harrington, he firmly believes that losing is essential to learning how to win -- but the atttitude toward loss is a very different one.

Where Dan views it as a way of teaching yourself strategic lessons and analyzing your game, finding your mistakes and plugging your leaks, Chewy sees it in more cosmic terms. When he loses, he sees the loss as part of a larger pattern.

"Maybe in the big picture of life, beyond what we can see immediately in this moment, we weren't meant to win that hand because some other stream of events had to transpire for us to be successful," he says. It's the same idea of flow, of one event causing another in a seamless succession of ripples whose pattern you have no way of predicting in advance.

Philosophically, it's a powerful way of viewing life. ("Poker is exactly like life, but with instant karma," Chewy remarks.)

"Trying Not to Try" -- I'm still trying to digest this book

Some books are meant to be read, re-read, and then re-re-read. I think I'm on my re-re-reading of Edward Slingerland's marvelous Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity.

I've written a couple of previous blog posts about the book:
The social value of getting wasted
"Trying Not to Try" is a great book about wu-wei, spontaneous action

I love this book because I love Taoism. Or Daoism, if you prefer that spelling. I also love modern neuroscience. Since Slingerland combines ancient Taoist philosophy and cutting edge psychological research in his book, Trying Not to Try hits a literary sweet spot for me.

Here's some passages that illustrate key themes in the book.

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has spent a good deal of his career exploring what he terms the "ironic effects" of conscious, intentional effort. In words that sound like they could have come straight from the Laozi, he observes: 

"Many of our favorite goals, when pursued consciously, can be undermined by distractions and stressors to yield not just failure of goal achievement but the ironic opposite of that attainment. We achieve exactly what we most desired not to do."

He and his colleagues have amassed a large body of evidence suggesting that we get depressed when we're consciously trying to be happy, anxious when we're trying to relax, and distracted when we're trying to concentrate. When we try to consciously forget something, we remember it more clearly; when we try to make ourselves sleep, it makes our insomnia worse.

Trying to stop thinking of sex is the best way to think of sex. If you want to make someone overshoot when they are attempting a putt in golf, tell them to try as hard as they can to not overshoot. 

In a wonderful study entitled "The Putt and the Pendulum: Ironic Effects of the Mental Control of Action," Wegner and colleagues not only documented the pernicious effect of golfing instructions but also showed that asking someone not to move a pendulum suspended from their hand causes them to move it even more, and specifically in the direction they were told to avoid.

...Ironic effects are not confined to physical movements, emotions, or physiological processes like trying to fall asleep -- they extend to the moral realm as well. Subjects who are explicitly instructed to be fair and unprejudiced actually become more prejudiced. 

...Thinking that you are good can make you bad. Talking about positive behavior can encourage negative behavior. Laozi is clearly on to something when he warns us that consciously trying to be righteous will, in fact, turn us into insufferable hypocrites and that anyone striving to attain virtue is destined to fail.

Now, the fact that I'm reading Trying Not to Try for the third time, or maybe the fourth, shows how subtle and difficult to grasp is the distinction between trying, not trying, not trying to not try, and any other way of looking at spontaneity. You either have it, or you don't. 

Maybe. Perhaps you can both have it and not have it. Or partly have it and partly not have it. 

What I do know, both by observing myself and others over my 71 years of living, is that the last paragraph in the quotations above is right-on. Trying to be righteous does indeed turn us into insufferable hypocrites. 

Which is one reason I'm pleased to have discarded religious belief. Almost always, religions have rigid moral codes. Thou shalt do such and such. Thou shalt not do this and that. Religious believers feel proud of their humility, while often failing to act with as much kindness and concern as a young child.

They try so hard, they fall flat on their hypocritical butts. They're so concerned with doing something wrong, they're incapable of naturally acting rightly. 

Here's another passage from the book regarding Chan/Zen Buddhism.

One famous koan story, for instance, begins like this: "A monk said to the Zen master: 'I have just entered the monastery. I beg you, teacher, to provide me with instruction.'"

This monk sounds a lot like the pre-fast Yan Hui, an eager Boy Scout, with clear expectations about what he is to learn, and probably a subtle desire to demonstrate his ambition. A keener, as we would say in Canada.

The master asked, "Have you eaten your rice porridge?"
The monk replied, "Yes, sir. I have."
The master said, "Then go wash your bowl."
At that moment the monk was enlightened.

The key to enlightened wu-wei is not learning more about doctrine but seeing and responding appropriately to what is in front of you.

The Chinese Zen master who compiled the collection in which this koan appears comments, "It is only because it is so clear that it is so hard to see. People go looking for fire using a lighted lamp; if they only realized that the lamp itself was fire, they'd be able to cook their rice much sooner."

I'm feeling the fear and sharing my Tai Chi video anyway

As the title of a book says, Feel the fear and do it anyway. So I'm taking that advice and sharing a video I made today of me doing a Tai Chi form.

Watching the video was fear-inducing, or at least anxiety-inducing, because I do my best to avoid looking at myself in the lengthy mirror that's on one wall of the room where I've been taking Tai Chi classes.

But since we've been learning the Compact form -- which lives up to its name by not requiring much space to do it in -- I figured it would be a good opportunity to stick my iPhone on a tripod and make a "selfie video."

Maybe this will turn out to be a shortcut to ego-loss and consequent enlightenment, because I found it interesting (and somewhat disturbing) that how I've been visualizing myself doing the Compact form from the inside of my head is rather different from how my iPhone video shows me.

Which is typical, of course. Our self-image may not bear a lot of resemblance to how others see us. 

Anyway, I'm glad that I made the video. After watching my first video attempt, I changed some things in the next attempt. Slowed down some. Corrected a few moves that I got wrong the first time around.

Tai Chi, of course, is founded on Taoist principles such as yin and yang. This is one reason I enjoy Tai Chi so much. It's got a built-in philosophical foundation. But that makes it much more subtle than the hard style (karate, basically) martial arts training I did before Tai Chi.

Yin and yang, soft and hard, alternate throughout a Tai Chi form. This is easier to feel than to see. And it helps explain why, even after 15 years of taking classes three times a week, I still consider myself to be a semi-beginner in Tai Chi. Again, the moves in Tai Chi possess way more subtlety than, say, a karate punch or kick.

And they're performed at a slower pace, which magnifies missteps, stumbles, and such.

I should note that my instructor, Warren Allen, emphasizes the martial/self-defense aspect of Tai Chi to a much greater extent than most Tai Chi teachers, given his extensive background in hard style martial arts before he embraced Tai Chi.

if this video looks less flowing and soft than you'd expect Tai Chi to appear, that's one reason. Another reason is that I have a long ways to go before I'll feel that I've begun to master Tai Chi.

Heck, I'm only 71, a youngster in comparison to the 80 and 90 year-olds who are venerated in the Tai Chi world. (And they started learning Tai Chi at a much earlier age than I did.)

 

Here's the problem with living: we're going to die

This isn't exactly breaking news, but I'll say it anyway. Each of us is going to die. 


Those seven words are undeniably scary. Life isn't always pleasant. Yet the gulf between having a difficult life and no life at all is more than immense. It's immeasurable. There's no way to compare being alive and being dead, or existence and non-existence.

The worst day anyone can have is on a different dimension than not existing at all.

Understand: I'm not saying that life is always worth living. Suicide and death with dignity testify to the fact that sometimes people prefer to check out of life early, rather than waiting for the involuntary eviction notice.

There are many reasons most people on Earth embrace some form of religiosity. However, a central reason has to be the reassurance almost every religion provides that when the last breath is taken, that doesn't mark the end of their life, but rather the beginning of a new form of existence.

I don't believe this is true.

There's no convincing evidence of life after death. Nor is there convincing evidence that human consciousness can exist without a functioning brain. Comas, anesthesia, being hit on the head with a baseball bat -- there's abundant evidence that consciousness is a product of the brain, though how this happens still isn't fully understood.

Still, each of has to come to grips with the reality of death whether we're an ardent atheist, committed religious believer, or somewhere in-between. 

Leaving aside the option of not thinking about death until it stares us in the face (which can be a good way to live, for those capable of doing this), it seems to me that there's two basic approaches to preparing for the inevitability of our eventual demise.

One is to try to expand our self. The other is to try to shrink our self. 

Almost all religions take the first approach: expanding the self. For example, some religions say that after death there is either bodily resurrection (Christianity) or reincarnation (Hinduism). Mystical aspects of religion proclaim that the soul can merge with God, taking on divine attributes. 

Aside from the fact that self-expansion, or consciousness-expansion, likely isn't possible in any sense that extends beyond the bounds of a single physical life, there's other reasons to shy away from this approach.

It encourages grandiosity.

I see this all the time in comments religious believers leave on my blog posts, notably those who are devotees of an Indian form of spirituality known as Sant Mat, or the Path of the Saints. They're fond of claiming that this is the highest form of religion, supposedly leading as it does to knowledge of an ultimate divine reality.

Of course, just about every religion makes this same claim.

Since there is no evidence of one religion being superior to another, almost certainly because they all are "fake news" (to borrow a phrase from Donald Trump), it seems ridiculous for a member of any faith to say that their way is the only way -- sort of like people arguing about which unicorn color is the most attractive, given that unicorns don't exist except in one's imagination.

So I prefer the other approach to dealing with life and our eventual death: shrinking the self. 

After all, us humans already are pretty damn insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Aside from having a lot of company here on Earth -- the human population is about 7.6 billion -- we are on a planet circling one of about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of at least 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe.

And we're very lucky to live 100 years, which is an infinitesimal blip in the 13.7 billion year old universe we inhabit. 

Thus it doesn't take much for us to shrink down to almost nothing, either figuratively or literally (the whole "ashes to ashes' thing). But our egos enjoy pretending that we're way more important than we really are, which goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of religions.

God so loves us, he sent his only son to die for our sins. The soul is destined to return home to its heavenly father. Humans are the pinnacle of creation. 

The myths of religion are innumerable. I much prefer reality:

Each of us is nothing special. We're connected to all other living things through the secular "miracle" of evolution. We live for a while, then we die. Humility is not only a virtue, it's the way things are in a world that is much grander and longer-lived than us.

Of all the world's religions, in my opinion Buddhism and Taoism are the best at offering ways to help us shrink our sense of self. One reason is that neither posits an enduring Self, or Soul. Rather, they teach that life is ever-changing, as are we. Our existence is intimately connected with that of everything else on Earth. We're humble parts of the whole.

He who stands on tiptoe is not steady.
He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show is not enlightened.
He who boasts achieves nothing.
He who brags will not endure.
According to followers of the Tao, 
    "These are extra food and unnecessary luggage."
They do not bring happiness.
Therefore followers of the Tao avoid them.
    -- Tao Te Ching

As a concrete example of the difference between grandiose and humble approaches to spirituality, I spend exactly zero time and effort on religious web sites or blogs trying to push my atheist point of view. Sure, I enjoy sharing churchless/atheist ideas here on my own blog, but I don't go out of my way to convince others that they should adopt my perspective.

But ever since I started this blog in 2004, religious believers -- mostly of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas/Sant Mat variety -- have commented in droves on my blog posts. The way I see it, this shows that they're not very confident in their belief system, since when someone presents arguments against what they believe, they take this as a battle cry to fight against.

Thus I'm pleased to be a humble churchless blogger rather than a grandiose believer in religious dogma. It's much more relaxing that way, since my only commitment is to the truth as best I can understand it. Truth doesn't require any attempt to boost it up, since it stands tall on its own.

Regarding death, my bet is that what will happen to me is exactly the same thing that happens to every other person: we die and are gone forever. The way I see it, the more I can reduce my sense of ego and specialness, the easier it will be to let go when the moment of dying comes.

Until then, I'll enjoy life.

Sure, religious believers typically derive comfort from a fantasy that death won't be the end for them. But the price they pay for their belief strikes me as too high -- feeling like they are the special beloveds of God or some other higher power, which leads to a sense of separation from everybody else who won't enjoy such a marvelous afterlife.

I'd rather feel like I'm simply part of the dead-and-gone-forever crowd. If somehow I discover that I'm living on after I die, that'll be great news. I'm not counting on it, though.

My "spiritual" Theory of Everything is coming along nicely

Once in a while I get a glimpse of how things really are, or ideally are, spiritually speaking.

Now, I put "spiritual" in quotation marks in the title of this post, because the way I use the word, it has nothing to do with God or the supernatural -- which in my view don't exist.

Rather, when I speak of spirituality, I mean a quest to understand how best to live life. The ancient Greeks called this philosophy, literally "love of wisdom." However, these days philosophy usually is considered to be not a way of life, but an academic discipline.

So for me spiritual points to an attempt to live life fully, happily, wisely, compassionately. And since I'm a lover of science, I enjoy thinking of my personal form of spirituality as a Theory of Everything that applies to me -- yet might have some appeal to others as well.

This post is just a first attempt at laying out an outline of how I'm seeing things. The pieces I'm trying to fit together include:

-- Reactivity
-- No-self
-- Responding to a totality of circumstances
-- Objectivism within subjectivity
-- Detachment
-- Nirvana

It probably is obvious (to some, at least) that my inspiration is a blend of Buddhism and Taoism, two philosophies that I have a lot of fondness for when they're stripped of supernatural mumbo-jumbo.

Rather than describe how those six notions listed above relate, which I'll try to do in another post, for now I'll simply describe an everyday event that's a broad-brush illustration of my personal Theory of Everything.

I'm driving along on the two-lane, curvy, hilly road that leads from our home in rural south Salem to the city limits about five miles away. The speed limit is 55 mph. I come up behind a car that's traveling much more slowly than I am, 35 mph.

There's no doubt about the objective reality here. My VW GTI is following another car. We're both going 35 mph, which is about 20 mph slower than what my car was traveling at before I caught up to the other car. However, my subjective reality could take several turns at this point.

One way it could go would be to get irritated at the person driving the car ahead of me. I'm late for my Tai Chi class, per usual, and I don't need a slow driver making me later. Irritation would be a form of reactivity that wouldn't change the objective situation, just my subjective feeling.

I could, though, simply observe, "That car is going quite slow."

I also could realize that the amount of time I'd save by driving a few miles at 55 mph rather than 35 mph is minimal. Coming to a bunch of red lights when I got to town, or not being able to find a parking space close to my Tai Chi class, would affect my arrival time much more.

Thus I could detach from a view that following a slow car is a bad thing.

Instead, it is just a thing, a happening, an event tossed up by a wide variety of circumstances that together, resulted in me ending up behind the car in front of me at this particular time, in this particular place. I wouldn't see this event as having any special significance.

This person driving the car ahead of me isn't trying to slow me down. They may not even be aware of me, if they fail to check their rear-view mirror. They're likely just driving as they typically do, slower than I like to drive. 

I could even try to imagine that I'm experiencing the vehicular version of a Taoist tale about a man rowing across a lake who becomes angry when he sees another boat coming right at him, as if he wasn't even there, forcing him to take evasive action to avoid a collision.

Then he sees that no one is in the other boat. It's drifting on its own. His anger subsides.

So I could envision that I and the driver of the other car are powerless to do anything than what we are actually doing. The universe has conjured up chains of causes and effects that have led each of us to be driving in a certain fashion on the stretch of road that leads to town.

Thus those six notions I listed above can lead me to a calm acceptance of the situation, rather than an irritated response. This may not seem like nirvana, but actually it is quite close to how Buddhists view this state of non-reactivity. 

Anyway, naturally there's more to say about my personal Theory of Everything. Being a wordy person, I'll probably be doing that saying before too long.

(By the way, even given what I said above, I could still calmly pass the slow-moving car when it was safe to do so. Which I do frequently, since my VW GTI is a joy to drive on hilly, twisty roads. And everywhere else, really.)

The Book of Chuang Tzu praises uselessness

There's religious, spiritual, philosophical, and mystical writings. Then there's The Book of Chuang Tzu. 

It stands apart, because there's nothing else like it. This Taoist classic is humorous, crazy, confusing, paradoxical, entertaining, wise, weird, and so much else besides. 

I've read it several times, in various translations. It's one of my favorite books, in large part because there's no way to pin down exactly what's being taught in the collection of, as the back cover says, "the stories, tales, jokes and anecdotes that have gathered around the figure of Chuang Tzu."

Since I'm feeling increasingly useless, the older I get, several parts of the book that praise uselessness have a special appeal to me. Enjoy. The first excerpt relates to a tree that doesn't get cut down because its wood just isn't good for much of anything.

When Master Shih was returning, the tree appeared to him in a dream, saying, "What exactly are you comparing me with? with ornamental fruit trees? Trees such as the hawthorne, pear trees, orange trees, citrus trees, gourds and other such fruit trees? Their fruits are knocked down when they are ripe and the trees suffer.

The big branches are damaged and the small ones are broken off. Because they are useful, they suffer, and they are unable to live out the years Heaven has given them. They have only their usefulness to blame for this destruction wrought by the people. 

It is the same with all things. I have spent a long time studying to be useless, though on a number of occasions I was nearly destroyed. However, now I have perfected the art of uselessness, and this is very useful to me. If I had been of use, could I have grown so vast?"

Not only trees benefit from being useless. People, also.

"Crippled Shu, now, is a man with his chin lost in his navel, his shoulders higher than the top of his head and his topknot pointing to Heaven, his five vital organs all crushed into the top of his body and his two thighs pressing into his ribs. By sharpening needles and washing clothes he earns enough to eat. By winnowing rice and cleansing it he was able to feed ten people.

When the officials called up the militia, he walked about freely, with no need to hide; when they are trying to raise a large work gang, because of his deformities, no one bothers him. Yet when the officials were handing out grain to the infirm, he received three great portions and ten bundles of firewood.

If a man like this, deformed in body, can make a living and live out the years Heaven sends him, how much more should a man who is only deformed in terms of his Virtue?"

Then there's the advantage one gains by, in modern vernacular, not giving a shit. Or, by doing the only thing that is possible to do.

A man whose feet have been chopped off casts aside fancy clothes, because his external appearance is incapable of being admired. A criminal condemned to death will scale the highest peaks, because he has no fear of life or death. If someone ignores the advances of friendship, he forgets about others and through forgetting others he is viewed as a man of Heaven.

Such a person can be treated with respect, which will not please him, or be treated with contempt, which will not make him angry. This is because he is part of the Heavenly unity.

Anybody who expressed anger but is not really angry will exhibit non-anger. Anyone who acts yet is not really acting, his actions will be non-action. If he wants to be still, he must be at peace. If he wants to be spiritual, he must calm his heart. When he wants to act, and to be successful, then he is moved by a force beyond him. 

That which one does because it is impossible to do other, that is the Tao of the sage. 

Wu wei and no free will work well together

Today I got this question via email:

Hey Brian, quick question.  But there might not be a quick answer.  LOL

Do the concept of  wu wei and the absence of free will work together? 

For some reason, I’m having trouble really understanding wu wei and how it works. Most of the time, I think I understand it from an intellectual stand point.  But then walking in it is a whole different animal.

Wu wei is a Taoist term that literally means non-doing. But "effortless effort" is how I think of wu wei. It's when things are going really smoothly, when we're in a state of flow, when this follows that in a pleasingly melodious fashion. 

Naturally I had a quick answer to the quick question.

Well, my understanding of wu wei is that it basically means effortless effort. So it seems to me that it meshes nicely with no free will. My reason for thinking this is that most of our problems arise from either believing that the past could have been different from what it was, or that we’ll make a mistake in some future decision. If we accept that both the past and future are determined, including our efforts to decide what to do, then this means that we can relax about what has happened or will happen, because what is to be, will be (as an old song says).

I mangled the words of Que Sera, Sera a bit, so here's how the actual lyrics start off.

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, What will I be?
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?
Here's what she said to me:

Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Que sera, sera
What will be, will be

Pretty damn simple philosophy of life. And an appealing one.

I've written a lot about free will, or rather the lack thereof, most recently here. But I'd never thought before about the relationship between wu wei and free will.

Now I've got another reason to embrace the almost certain reality that free will is an illusion. Determinism is the secular equivalent of God's will, fate, karma, destiny, and similar supernatural notions. 

We atheists can get the same peace of mind from accepting determinism, and hence our lack of free will, as religious believers get from those other ideas.

What will be, will be. The future's not ours to see.

I remember hearing this 1956 Doris Day song when I was just seven or eight. It rang true to my child brain then. It rings true to my senior citizen brain now.

Is God a Taoist? Sure. This dialogue about free will proves it.

My atheist mind goes back and forth between Taoism and Buddhism when I try to decide which secular version of these philosophies appeals the most to me.

Since I'm heavy into Tai Chi, which basically is Taoism expressed in human movement, I've got an inclination in that direction. Taoism also resonates with me because its writings often are considerably less serious than the Buddhist variety. 

In large part this is because Taoism really doesn't have anything comparable to Buddhism's enlightenment or satori. Nor does Taoism have dogmas akin to the Four Noble Truths. Its a lot more free-flowing, unstructured, and light-hearted. 

(Yes, I realize that Zen Buddhism has many humorous stories in its lexicon, but these often involve not-so-funny stuff like being hit over the head with a stick, and the fact that the point of the stories is Serious Enlightenment gives them a heavier tone than, say, those attributed to Chuang Tzu.)

This morning I picked up one of my favorite Taoist books, Raymond M. Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent." I've written about the book before here and here. 

In fact, I just noticed that the first "here" link deals with the same subject in Smullyan's book -- free will -- that enthralled me so much again today.

Oh, well. Since I just re-read the Is God a Taoist? chapter, I guess it is fitting that I'm re-writing a post about how free will is discussed in that chapter.

In short, marvelously. 

What I like the most about Smullyan's writing is that sometimes, like this time, it leaves me baffled. Meaning, I can follow him up to a point. Then he leaps over a conceptual edge that has me staring over the cliff, wondering where the hell he disappeared to. 

That was the feeling I had this morning after I read the excerpt below.

Which I thankfully was able to copy from someone who shared the entire Is God a Taoist? chapter on one of those wonderful web pages that look like they date from close to the dawn of the Internet. Since "The Tao is Silent" was published in 1977, that isn't surprising in this case.

What perplexed the logical side of my mind was Smullyan's final statement in this excerpt: "A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity."

I sort of get what he means. And I sort of dou't. 

Maybe he means that every conscious being is going to feel like it/he/she has free will. Or maybe he means that the freedom in free will arises from the fact, as Smullyan says before, that "you" and "nature" are a continuous whole, so the question of whether we control nature or nature controls us is moot.

(This makes me think of Janis Joplin's freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. However, since I actually have no idea what Joplin meant by this, it's difficult to use that lyric as an explanation for what Smullyan means by what he said.)

Anyway, here's the excerpt from Smullyan's book that I enjoyed re-reading so much. Again, I liked this not because I could completely comprehend what he meant, but because I couldn't. 

Mortal:
   I don't know. Do I have free will?

God:
   Yes.

Mortal:
   Then why did you say I shouldn't have taken it for granted?

God:
   Because you shouldn't. Just because something happens to be true, it does not follow that it should be taken for granted.

Mortal:
   Anyway, it is reassuring to know that my natural intuition about having free will is correct. Sometimes I have been worried that determinists are correct.

God:
   They are correct.

Mortal:
   Wait a minute now, do I have free will or don't I?

God:
   I already told you you do. But that does not mean that determinism is incorrect.

Mortal:
   Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or aren't they?

God:
   The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies. Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.

Mortal:
   What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!

God:
   You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, "In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!" Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.

Mortal:
   So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?

God:
   It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you.

But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you.

Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish. If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial.

Mortal:
   You said a short while ago that our whole discussion was based on a monstrous fallacy. You still have not told me what this fallacy is.

God:
   Why, the idea that I could possibly have created you without free will! You acted as if this were a genuine possibility, and wondered why I did not choose it! It never occurred to you that a sentient being without free will is no more conceivable than a physical object which exerts no gravitational attraction. (There is, incidentally, more analogy than you realize between a physical object exerting gravitational attraction and a sentient being exerting free will!)

Can you honestly even imagine a conscious being without free will? What on earth could it be like? I think that one thing in your life that has so misled you is your having been told that I gave man the gift of free will. As if I first created man, and then as an afterthought endowed him with the extra property of free will. Maybe you think I have some sort of "paint brush" with which I daub some creatures with free will and not others. No, free will is not an "extra"; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.

"Trying Not to Try" is a great book about wu-wei, spontaneous action

Has this ever happened to you?

You're going to bed a bit early because you have an important meeting in the morning and need to be well rested. Reclining your head on the pillow, you say to yourself "I need to get to sleep, so I'll make sure I'm relaxed." 

An hour later, you're still awake, even though usually you fall asleep in just a few minutes. It's dawning on you that trying to sleep is keeping you from sleeping. 

So now you try not to try to fall asleep. Which, of course, is still trying. That doesn't work either. Eventually you do get to sleep. But it isn't from trying. Nor is it from not-trying. It's from just doing what comes naturally: falling asleep.

I'm re-reading Edward Slingerland's marvelous book about the Chinese notion of wu-wei, which Slingerland says is best translated as "effortless action" or "spontaneous action." Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity is one of my favorite books about spirituality (using that word in a non-supernatural sense) now that I've given up religiosity. 

I've given away several copies to friends, which shows how much I love Slingerland's book. Reading it a second time, I'm gaining fresh insights about wu-wei -- what it is and how to achieve it. 

I'm pretty sure the only previous blog post I've written about Trying Not to Try was "The social value of getting wasted." Excerpt:

Slingerland, a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, clued me in to some aspects of both Asian and Western culture that had largely escaped me before.

For example, why getting wasted -- imbibing copious amounts of alcohol or some other intoxicating, mind-altering, inhibition-dampening substance -- is so important in closing business deals, as well as in other social contexts. 

The basic reason is that we admire and trust good-hearted people who act naturally, spontaneously, unselfconsciously. Schemers who always seem to be calculating what to do and how to act, not nearly so much, even if they proclaim their beneficent intentions.

Slingerland explains from both a philosophical and neuroscientific outlook that virtue (de, in Chinese) can be faked by what often is called "cold cognition."

That's the slower, more intellectual, thoughtful part of the brain's workings. This is contrasted with "hot cognition," which is faster, more emotional and intuitive. So, Slingerland says:

These techniques take advantage of the fact that deception is fundamentally a cold-cognition act and relies on cognitive control centers. This means that if we can impair the cognitive control abilities of people we're trying to judge, we'll do a better job of sussing them out: they will be less likely to confuse our cheater-control systems.

There's a lot more to Slingerland's book, of course. Here's some passages I liked in two chapters I read this morning.

The ridiculousness of splitting ourselves into parts.

Colloquially, we often speak of ourselves as if we were split in two: "I couldn't make myself get out of bed in the morning." "I had to force myself to be calm." "I had to hold my tongue." Although we use such phrases all the time, if you think about them they're a bit weird. 

Who is the self who doesn't want to get out of bed, and what is its relationship to me? Does my tongue really have a will of its own, and how do I go about holding it? (And who am I if not my tongue?) Since there is always only one "me" involved, this split-self talk is clearly metaphorical rather than literal.

We are one being with two functional systems. 

So although talk of "mind" and "body" is technically inaccurate, it does capture an important functional difference between two systems: a slow, cold conscious mind and a fast, hot unconscious set of bodily instincts, hunches, and skills. "We" tend to identify with the cold, slow system because it is the seat of our conscious awareness and our sense of self.

Beneath this conscious self, though, is another self -- much bigger and more powerful -- that we have no direct access to. It is this deeper, more evolutionarily ancient part of us that knows how to spit and move our legs around. It's also the part that we are struggling with when we try to resist that tiramisu or drag ourselves out of bed for an important meeting.

The goal of wu-wei.

The goal of wu-wei is to get these two selves working together smoothly and effectively. For a person in wu-wei, the mind is embodied and the body is mindful; the two systems -- hot and cold, fast and slow -- are completely integrated. The result is an intelligent spontaneity that is perfectly calibrated to the environment.

...For the early Chinese, being in wu-wei is not just about how one feels internally, or to what extent one's conscious brain is in charge. It is, at the end of the day, about being properly attuned in the cosmos. And this too has important implications for contemporary life.

Wu-wei is about giving yourself up to something bigger than you.

It's now easy to see why wu-wei is about more than isolated individuals incrementally improving their personal bests in the Ironman Triathlon or mastering a new level of Tetris. Wu-wei involves giving yourself up to something that, because it is bigger than you, can be shared by others.

For those of us who no longer embrace the early Chinese faith in the Way and Heaven, the precise nature of this "larger whole" -- the framework of values that gives shape and meaning to the wu-wei experience -- is going to vary from tribe to tribe, even person to person or moment to moment.

By its very nature, though, this framework needs to be something larger than just the self. An essential fact about wu-wei is that it's not just about the experience unfolding within the mind of an isolated individual but also about social connections between people.  

Tai Chi has taught me that flowing is way better than forcing

I've been learning Tai Chi for about thirteen years. That makes me a near-beginner in this oh-so-subtle "soft style" martial art. Before taking up Tai Chi I studied "hard style" martial arts for about the same length of time.

So I guess I've reached sort of a balance point.

My previous Tai Chi-related posts are here, on my other blog. For some reason I haven't written about Tai Chi for five years. This hasn't been from a lack of interest. It must be because Tai Chi is something I do and experience much more than I think about it. 

Well, lately I've been thinking about what I've learned about flow from my Tai Chi practice. Which is closely related to softness, another core Tai Chi principle. 

Probably the most frequent advice I get from my instructor, Warren Allen, is "relax," "softer," and "don't try so hard."

And this is after thirteen years! When I started learning Tai Chi after those karate-focused years of training, Warren said those things way more often. So... some progress.

It's so easy to try too hard. Forcing usually feels more natural than flowing, because we're used to trying to accomplish things through effort, energy, determination, strength. 

But what Tai Chi teaches -- this is basically Taoism expressed through physical movement -- is that flowing with someone's movement, even if that movement is a punch to your face, is a highly effective way of dealing with both bodily and psychological situations. 

Partly this is due to the weakness of strength and rigidity. 

When someone tightens up (again, either physically or mentally), this creates a lever that can be used against them. For example, if someone grabs your wrist with a tight grip, your moving forward, backward, or to the side will take that person in the same direction, since they've connected themselves to you. 

This principle is sort of akin to the adage, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall."

Redirecting a punch with a soft, flowing movement will have more of an effect on the person making that strike if it was done with a lot of force, because there is more energy in the punch. Hence, more energy in the redirection. 

So if someone is angry with you, responding softly and flowingly (albeit firmly, in a sense; Tai Chi doesn't advocate becoming a limp marshmallow) should result in a better outcome than responding in kind: harshly, strongly, emotionally. 

"Better" refers both to how the other person feels and, equally importantly, how you feel. 

Probably the most important thing I've learned from my Tai Chi practice is this:

My primary goal throughout my daily life shouldn't be to achieve this or that, because often that isn't under my control. Rather, I need to focus on feeling a sense of flow and softness in whatever I'm doing, rather than a sense of tightness and tension.

Of course, being relaxed often leads to a better outcome. But this is more of a side benefit.

I've learned that if I view flowing and softness as a means to an end, this produces rigidity in me, because now I've attached myself to that goal in much the same way someone grabs hold of a person with a strong grip. 

It's tough to flow when you're attached to something.

So what works better for me is to view flow as a good in and of itself. If I feel myself getting tight, anxious, upset, or tense, I try (but not too hard!) to relax, let go, flow -- trusting that whatever comes from this will be fine, and without worrying very much about what that whatever might be.

Hopefully I've said something here that can be understood. This is a difficult subject to write about. Like Tai Chi, it is subtle, personal, internal. Regardless, I've enjoyed this attempt to put into words what I've come to feel more than I've thought about it.

Indian and Greek thought are both dualistic. Chinese thought isn't.

Oneness has a lot of appeal.

It's simple. Nothing is simpler than one. (Well, maybe nothing is simpler, but since there is no way to know what nothing is like, since it doesn't exist, who knows?)

Also, oneness has a lot in common with love.

Love brings us together, which is a big step toward being one. Duality, on the other hand (a good phrase to use when talking about duality), posits two things that are inherently different.

Like most people, I've had the idea that Eastern forms of spirituality are more into oneness that Western forms are. The cartoon above captures the notion from a Buddhist perspective. It's difficult to imagine a Christian or Jewish version of the joke.

The Greeks were the source of Western dualism. Here's an excerpt from a book that I'm enjoying a lot, Jeremy Lent's "The Patterning Instinct."

The eternal soul, Plato explains, knew all about the immutable world of Ideas before it was incarnated. At birth, when the soul is forced to leave the world of Ideas and become fused with a mortal body, it forgets most of its previous knowledge. Thus, the goal of philosophy, in purifying the soul from the body's pollution, is not to learn new truths but to rediscover the Truth that was already known to the soul prior to its incarnation.

...Here, in Plato's cosmology, is the beginning of the cascade of dualism that would structure the European tradition of thought about the nature of humanity and the universe all the way to the present. In this constellation of ideas that would become endemic throughout Western civilization, the human capacity for abstract thought is linked with the soul, which, in turn, is linked with truth, and truth with immortality. The body, as part of the changeable material world, is associated with sensory appetite, ignorance, and death.

Soul and body. Heaven and earth. Truth and illusion. Spirit and matter. Good and evil. Eternity and time.

These are the sorts of dualisms that have split the Western mind for thousands of years. ("Mind," by the way, has largely replaced "soul" since Descartes. But many, if not most, Westerners still believe that mind has an immaterial basis, as does consciousness.)

So Eastern forms of thought and spirituality attract people who are turned off by the rigid dualism of Western religions. In my case, I embraced Indian philosophy because I believed it was markedly more into oneness than Christianity and Judaism. 

Well, over the years I changed my mind.

The form of meditation I learned from an Indian guru was intensely dualistic. It was aimed at leaving behind awareness of the body and senses in order to experience a form of "soul travel" that led to knowledge of realms beyond the physical. 

You can't get much more dualistic than that. 

In these passages Lent explains how ancient India embraced a form of dualism that differed in some respects from that of the Greeks, but still was based on the same sorts of splits found in Christianity. After quoting from the Maitri Upanishad, he writes:

The realization of oneness in breath, mind, and the senses seems a long way from the Platonic notion of the separation of mind and body. In fact, an influential school of classical Indian thought is known as advaita, which literally means "not two" and is frequently translated as "nondualism." 

Does this mean, then, that the principles of Yoga transcend the dualistic mind-body split that India civilizations inherited from its PIE [Proto-Indo-European] forebears? Further investigation shows that this is not in fact the case.

First, we need to consider what the term advaita refers to.

Is it saying that body and mind are not two, that they are really just different aspects of one entity? Not really. Its core teaching is based on the foundational idea that atman equals Brahman, that the world of maya is illusory, and that although things seem separate from each other, if you keep peeling the onion and look to the inner reality, you will see that everything is ultimately part of Brahman.

Rather than resolving the mind-body split, advaita teaches that relinquishing the body and all other conditions of existence is necessary to realize the true identity of atman and Brahman. 

So if someone is looking for oneness, it won't be found in either Greek or Indian thought, which are both thoroughly dualistic.

Pleasingly -- because I'm attracted to Chinese thought, especially in the guise of Taoism (and Tai Chi, basically Taoism expressed as movement, which I've been practicing for 13 years), Lent is big on the Chinese way of looking upon the world, which he admires as being in tune with modern scientific thought and a naturalistic approach to oneness.

Here's how he concludes his chapter on "Dualism and Divinity in Ancient India."

The belief in the divinity of everything in the universe ultimately differentiates Indian thought from that of the Greeks. In Greek dualism, only humans possess the faculty of reason that enables them to achieve the lofty heights of divinity. For the Greeks, the ultimate Truth attained by reason is to be found above the world, separate from the world, in a dimension of eternal abstraction.

In the Indian cosmos, dualism took a different form: the source of meaning is both above material things and hidden deep within then, and is glimpsed by piercing through both the reasoning faculty and the senses.

While looking in different directions for the ultimate source of meaning, both traditions agree that it's not to be found in the tangible world. It is in this sense that both are dualistic.

In the next chapter, we will explore an alternative understanding of the universe. In the ancient civilization of China, untouched by the migrations of Indo-European tribespeople, an unbroken tradition evolved from shamanic roots into a cosmology that demonstrated, by its very structure, how the human quest for meaning can take an altogether different approach. 

And I'd add, an exceedingly appealing approach for those, like me, who are tired of philosophies and spiritualities that divide, rather than unite, our world.

The spiritual implications of drink when thirsty, eat when hungry

I'm a firm believer in living naturally. Not unnaturally naturally. Just naturally naturally. 

Meaning, do what is natural. But don't make a fetish out of this, don't strive to do it, because trying too hard to be natural leads to artificiality. 

When it comes to drinking and eating, here's some good advice:

Drink when thirsty. Eat when hungry. 

This sounds very Zen. And it is. But it also makes a lot of scientific sense. For example, check out "Just drink water when you're thirsty like a normal person, study finds."

After much deliberation, a 17-member expert panel representing four countries and nine specialties, including sports medicine, body fluid homeostasis and exercise physiology, have come to the research-based consensus that people should really just, well, drink water when they’re thirsty, you know?

...Yep, after countless blog posts and huge amount of research, the truth is you should really just use your “innate thirst mechanism to guide fluid consumption.” As in, you should just take a sip of water when you want to take a sip of water, rather than loading up on ridiculous amounts of H20 before you go through a limits-testing workout.

Likewise, "Eating when you're hungry versus eating on schedule" says:

Retrain yourself to recognize feelings of hunger and respect them. Eat when you feel them and stop when they stop. Don’t eat when you’re not hungry. This approach starts with eating breakfast, planning snacks, or eating only part of your lunch and saving the rest for a snack later on in the afternoon. Eat regular meals but don’t eat by the clock.

We should trust our natural inclinations. Us humans have been around in our Homo sapiens form for about 250,000 years. For almost all of that time people weren't telling other people how to drink fluids and how to eat food. They just did what came naturally.

Of course, in prehistoric times there were moments when the right thing to do was gorge oneself when scarce food became available, and drink excessively when rarely-found water was discovered.

In these modern times, most of us have a steady supply of food and water. So we can actually live more naturally than our ancestors, since it is easier for us to follow the adage: Drink when thirsty. Eat when hungry. 

This works for me.

Rather than carry a gigantic water bottle around when I work out at an athletic club (as I see many other people doing for no good reason), I take a couple of sips of water from a drinking fountain when I feel thirsty. And I've found that I'm able to keep my weight where I want it to be if I pay attention to whether I'm really hungry, or if I just have the idea of wanting to eat something (out of boredom, habit, or some other non-hunger reason).

Now, thirst and hunger arise from physiological needs. We need water and food to survive. Too little isn't good for us; too much isn't good for us. Following our natural desire to drink and eat usually works out well for us. 

What about the drive to "gorge" on God, though? Where does this come from? 

Obviously a desire to pursue divinity isn't natural in the way seeking food and water is. Lots of people live a deeply fulfilling life without paying any attention to God or some other supernatural entity. There are no discernible ill effects from failing to fill one's mind with thoughts and emotions concerning God.

Further, there are no evident outward signs of God or any other transcendent divinity, in contrast to the obviousness of water and food. How does someone assuage their thirst or hunger for God when there is no demonstrable observable evidence of the entity being sought for?

Short answer: this is impossible. God doesn't exist in any objective fashion. God is only as real as the mental beliefs people have about this hypothesized divinity. 

So I don't see how it is possible to have a natural desire for God.

I can drink when thirsty. I can eat when hungry. However, there is no corresponding natural impulse to embrace God, because God only exists as a concept in human minds. There is no way to assuage a desire for a concept as there is for fulfilling a desire to drink or eat. 

Water and food are real. God isn't.

Again, only the idea of God possesses a limited subjective reality. Thus religious believers are in much the same position as someone who drinks and eats not because they have a natural need to do this, but because they have an artificial idea that it's the right thing to do. 

Understand: there's nothing wrong with ideas. Ideas are wonderful things. So are beliefs, one form ideas come in. We just shouldn't mistake mental creations that exist nowhere outside of  the  human mind for an objectively real entity. 

Like water and food. 

This is why some people spend a lifetime seeking God, and never succeed in their quest. They are pursuing an impossible dream: to quench a thirst for divinity when the object of their desire doesn't exist. 

Having attempted this quest myself for about thirty-five years, I understand how enticing the goal of God-realization can seem. However, I'm grateful that I came to realize how false and unnatural that goal was. 

Drinking when thirsty and eating when hungry make a lot more sense to me now. I can actually do these things. Not just in my own mind, as is the case with every person's attempt to find God. But in really real reality.

Experience of conscious will is an illusion

I don't believe in free will. But like most people, I have a feeling that my intention to do something is what causes that thing to happen. 

So we have two things going on:

(1) A scientific world view doesn't support a belief in free will. As I've written about a lot on this blog (type "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar to find the many posts), there is no evidence of an immaterial self/soul that somehow floats free of the material/physical goings-on in the human mind. So there's no entity within us which can function freely of causes and effects or the laws of nature.

(2) Yet we humans have a strong sense that our intentions lead to thoughts, actions, and everything else we're capable of doing. After all, I think type an example of a thought and the next thing I do is type "I need to finish writing this paragraph." Who the heck is controlling what I'm doing right now if it isn't my conscious intention?

Well, study carefully this photo I took of a fascinating figure in Daniel Wegner's book, "The Illusion of Conscious Will," and you'll get a very interesting explanation of why the experience of conscious will is indeed an illusion.

Note that there is an "actual" and "apparent" causal path leading to an action. 

The actual causal path flows from an unconscious cause of the action. Meaning, the human brain is doing things below the surface of awareness that cause us to do something.

At the same time, there also is an unconscious cause of thought. This takes an actual causal path in the brain that leads to a thought. 

So the brain is unconsciously causing both an action and a thought.

These two things are actually happening. However, our experience of conscious will -- the feeling that our thought or intention is what causes an action to occur -- is an illusion. This is shown in the "Apparent Causal Path" arrow leading from thought to action. 

Here's a few passages from Wegner's book that explain what is going on here. (Wegner is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.)

The experience of will, then, is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation. Because we have thoughts of what we will do, we can develop causal theories relating those thoughts to our actions on the basis of priority, consistency, and exclusivity.

We come to think of these prior thoughts as intentions, and we develop the sense that the intentions have causal force even though they are actually just previews of what we may do. 

Yet in an important sense, it must be the case that something in our minds plays a causal role in making our actions occur. That something is, in the theory of apparent mental causation, a set of unconscious mental processes that cause the action. At the same time, that something is very much like the thoughts we have prior to the action.

...We must remember that this analysis suggests that the real causal mechanisms underlying behavior are never present in consciousness. Rather, the engines of causation operate without revealing themselves to us and so may be unconscious mechanisms of mind.

...The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview your actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. 

In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of the action.

So while our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves.

This is brilliant. I'm only read about 1/4 of "The Illusion of Conscious Will," but I'm far enough into the book to have gotten a good feel for Wegner's thesis. He provides a lot of evidence to support it, both scientific and philosophical. 

Naturally spiritual (using that word broadly) implications of this illusion are easy to come by. For example, it can be argued that the so-called enlightenment of Zen, Taoism, and such simply is an intuitive seeing-through of the illusion of conscious will. 

Meaning, the illusion that "I" am determining what I do (and also by implication, what happens to me) is somehow experienced as the scientific falsity that it is. Of course, this is just a fact -- assuming Wegner's hypothesis is correct, as it seems to be -- not any sort of supernatural or mystical state of mind. 

It is just our actual state of mind, seen for what it is. It'll take another blog post to explain this more fully.

Flexible improvisation is a better way of living than rigid religion

Rules are fine. Except when they aren't. 

For me, one of the most enjoyable things about giving up on the ridiculousness of religion is no longer having to comply with rigid rules, dogmas, commandments, rituals, and such. 

Every religion has its own peculiar absurdities. Of course, what is absurd to an outsider will make sense to an insider. At least if the insider doesn't think about what's being required too much. 

Here's an example: the mystical meditation path I followed for about thirty years demanded that followers be vegetarians. This wasn't a problem for me, since I'd stopped eating meat before I learned about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an Indian spiritual organization led by a guru who was considered to be God in human form. 

At some point in the 1990s, I believe it was, the guru decided to raise the bar on vegetarianism. Now animal rennet, a frequent ingredient in cheese, was a no-no. So RSSB followers were supposed to make sure that cheese they ate didn't contain animal-derived rennet.

Now, even though I was a strong believer in not killing animals for food, it was a stretch for me to accept that eating a minuscule bit of forbidden rennet in a pizza, say, was going to be a big drag on my spiritual evolution.

But since at that time I was a devoted devotee of the guru, I did my best to eliminate cheese with animal rennet from my diet. RSSB followers put a lot of work into compiling lists of "good" and "bad" cheese brands. Eating out at a restaurant, though, often required some decidedly awkward encounters with serving staff.

"Does the cheese on this veggie pizza have animal rennet in it?" us rigidly obedient RSSB'ers would ask a hapless waiter. Not surprisingly he'd say, "I have no idea." "Please check," we'd say. 

The poor guy would be forced to disappear into a backroom and try to read the label on a cheese container. Or at least he'd pretend to do this before returning to our table with some sort of answer. Which often was "I couldn't tell for sure." 

We felt that we were acting in accord with God's will, since the guru's edict against eating animal rennet supposedly had a divine foundation, given his status as God in Human Form (akin to a living Jesus). I'm not sure what the waiters and waitresses who had to deal with our no animal rennet! demands thought about us. 

"Crazy religious fanatics" would have been a reasonable assessment, one which I now agree with.

Today I was browsing the online New York Times opinion page and came across a piece by Stephen Asma with a great title: "Was Bo Diddley a Buddha?"

If you don't know who Bo Diddley is, this probably means you're a lot younger than I am. Here's a video of him from 1965, when I was a junior or senior in high school. 

Asma relates how he used to play guitar with Bo Diddley, and what this taught him about improvisation. Asma now is a philosophy professor, so his piece has some depth to it. It's nicely written, so I invite you to read the whole thing. Here's some excerpts:

Before my first gig with Bo, I spent a full week of intense preparation, learning and rehearsing his songs. On the opening night, he arrived to the venue five minutes before showtime. As he walked onstage in front of 500 shouting fans, I tried to tell him all the songs I’d prepared.

He just looked at me blankly through his Coke-bottle glasses, plugged into his amp and launched into a loud, rhythmic riff on his trademark rectangular guitar. He never bothered to tell me what song we were playing, what chord changes were coming, what key we were in, or anything. But, as every blues and jazz musician knows, that’s how it goes.

After the first tune, he realized that I could follow him, and he cryptically shouted, “This monkey is tied, now let’s skin it!”

Bo and the other greats I played with often worked this way, and it was a hair-raising on-the-job education. These musicians never told me what was coming next, partly because they didn’t know themselves. They were masters of the art of improvisation.

...Improvising, in music, is the act of composing and performing simultaneously, and it is difficult to master. But it is also universal, and despite the powerful human impulse to plan and program, integral to nearly every aspect of our lives. No matter who you are — a welder, philosopher, a guitarist or a president — you are in some sense simultaneously making the map of your life and following it. It is not an exaggeration to say life itself is one long improvisation.

...In music, at least, improvisation sometimes gets a bad rap, usually from the precincts of classical or other formal Western styles that rely on notation. It is sometimes looked down upon with a “my kid could do that” kind of dismissive attitude. But the ability to improvise is not just “winging it.” It is built on foundations of study and practice that prepare the improviser for the moment of action.

“Wu-Wei” is a Chinese word that is often translated as “non-action” but more accurately means “natural action,” or action in accordance with nature. The idea, dominant in Taoism and Zen, is that one should try to find the natural way of doing something and then simulate, or align oneself to it, as opposed to forcing it.

For example, the butcher should carve the animal at its joints, not in arbitrary locations. A carpenter should work with the grain of wood, rather than against it. A martial arts master should find the most economic use of his energy, and turn his opponent’s own force to his advantage, and so on.

Finding this natural way is not effortless, but requires great practice. Once it has been mastered, however, it is possible to find a unique presence of mind in these activities. The mundane actions are turned into artistic and even spiritual expressions. Playing a musical instrument, boxing in a competition, and even folding your laundry can be Zen-like improvisations.

Zen Buddhism and Taoism focus more on the method of your life rather than the content of your life. It’s not so much who you are, or even what you do in life. Rather, it’s how you do it. Since, in these practices, the present moment is ultimate reality (albeit usually obscured and hidden in regular consciousness), all one needs to do is shut off the babble of discursive thought and sink into one’s present activity.

According to this view, the meaning of life is not found in rules, formulas, commandments, categorical imperatives and cultural norms.

For sure. 

Obsessing over eating a few specks of animal rennet that are part of the cheese in a vegetarian pizza is rigid religiosity. Laughing about whether the cheese has rennet -- who gives a shit! -- while taking a big bite would have been flexible improvisation.

But I didn't know that at the time.

So, accept my belated apology, all you waiters and waitresses who had to check cheese ingredients because my friends and I were in the grip of playing life as if every note on the guru's music sheet had to be followed exactly.

Which, as Bo Diddley and Stephen Asma knew, goes against the grain of an improvisational understanding of life. 

The truth of who we are lies without, not within

For about 35 years my daily meditation practice was aimed at "going within." This was the teaching of the Indian guru I followed, Charan Singh. 

The assumption was that there is an unchanging conscious essence within us that could be termed soul. By leaving aside both impressions of the outside world and mental images (thoughts, emotions, and such), what remained in closed-eye meditation would be revealed as Who We Truly Are.

Well, my ideas have changed. 

I now realize that this was a highly limiting view of what spirituality and self-knowledge is all about. It was a notion founded in traditional Hinduism and Sikhism, which is merely one way of looking upon the nature of reality.

A book I'm reading, "The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life," presents a much different approach to living. 

Often people speak glibly, and overly simplistically, of "Eastern philosophy" as if this was a monolithic thing. That's as crazy as looking upon "Western philosophy" as having a unified perspective.

Chinese philosophy is very different from Indian philosophy. Notions of soul, God, and higher realms of existence are largely absent in Chinese philosophy, while they play a large role in Indian philosophy. 

So Chinese philosophers such as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, and Zhuangzi (who I'm used to calling Chuang Tzu) are much more down to earth than their Indian counterparts -- even Buddha, who was a pretty earthy guy.

Here's an entire section from the first chapter of The Path.

It seems to provide a good overview of the book's central themes. (I'm about halfway through reading it, so there could be some surprises ahead.) I also included some passages from a later chapter that follow the ellipsis.

Myth: The Truth of Who We Are Lies Within Us

The breakdown of old aristocratic religious institutions left the people of the Axial Age in search of new sources of truth and meaning. Similarly, in our own age, we feel we have broken free of older, confining ways of thinking and are looking for new sources of meaning.

Increasingly, we have been told to seek that higher truth within. The goal of a self-actualized person is now to find himself and to live his life "authentically," according to an inner truth.

The danger of this lies in believing that we will all know our "truth" when we see it, and then limiting our lives according to that truth. With all this investment in our self-definition, we risk building our future on a very narrow sense of who we are -- what we see as our strengths and weaknesses, our likes and dislikes.

Many Chinese thinkers might say that in doing this, we are looking at such a small part of who we are potentially. We're taking a limited number of our emotional dispositions during a certain time and place and allowing them to define us forever. By thinking of human nature as monolithic, we instantly limit our potential. 

But many of the Chinese thinkers would argue that you are not and should not think of yourself as a single unified being. 

Let's say that you think of yourself as someone with a temper; someone who gets angry easily. The thinkers we are about to encounter would argue that you should not say, "Well, that's just the way I am," and embrace yourself for who you are. As we will see, perhaps you aren't inherently an angry person.

Perhaps you simply slipped into ruts -- patterns of behavior -- that you allowed to define who you thought you were. The truth is that you have as much potential to be, say, gentle or forgiving as you do to be angry.

These philosophers would urge us to recognize that we are all complex and changing constantly. Every person has many different and often contradictory emotional dispositions, desires, and ways of responding to the world. Our emotional dispositions develop by looking outward, not inward. 

They are not cultivated when you retreat from the world to meditate or go on a vacation. They are formed, in practice, through the things you do in your everyday life: the ways you interact with others and the activities you pursue. 

In other words, we aren't just who we are: we can actively make ourselves into better people all the time. Of course, this is no simple task. It requires us to change our mind-set about our own agency and about how real change happens.

Nor is it a quick process: change comes incrementally, through perseverance. It comes from training ourselves to broaden our perspective so that we can grasp the complicated tangle of factors (the relationships we're in, the company we keep, the jobs we hold, and other life circumstances) that shape any given situation and slowly transform our interactions with everything around us.

This broad perspective enables us to behave in ways that gradually bring about true change.

While we have been told that true freedom comes from discovering who we are at our core, that "discovery" is precisely what has trapped so many of us in the Age of Complacency. We are the ones standing in our own way.

...Being active consists of creating optimal conditions and responding to whatever various situations arise. It means laying the ground in which change can grow. Think of yourself as a farmer, rather than thinking about who you are and arranging your goals around that. Your goal then becomes laying the ground for various interests and sides of yourself to grow organically.

Most of us have hobbies and interests we pursue on the weekend or in our free time. We often don't think of these things as relevant to figuring out what we want to do with our life.

And yet laying the ground means something as simple as scheduling time to take part in activities that speak to the different sides of yourself that you are interested in developing: joining a wine tasting class, learning how to paint in watercolor, or brushing up your high school French once a week in a language swap.

By proactively building room in your life for all sorts of possibilities, and then remaining open and responsive, you are akin to a farmer preparing his field so that his crops can flourish. 

As you make room for interests, opportunities open up to you. You might learn that you love working with your hands, but would rather try woodworking than painting. Or you decide that French isn't for you, but you want to explore other cultures by offering to tutor immigrants at the public library instead, which could eventually lead to other things: new friends, a trip abroad, a change of career down the road.

By being responsive to how your interests change over time, you will not be locked in -- you will be more able to alter your life and your schedule to allow for growth.

Rather than going into all this thinking, I can be anything I want to be, the approach you're taking is I don't know yet what I can become. 

You don't know where any of this might take you; it's not possible to know that now. But what you learn about yourself and what excites you won't be abstract; it will be very concrete knowledge born of practical experience. Over time you open up paths that you could not have imagined, out of which emerge options that you never would have seen before.

Over time, you actually become a different person.

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.

"Incomplete Nature" shows how life is based on absence

Demonstrating some spousal exaggeration, my wife has been saying that she fears being crushed by a pile of books I've read that are awaiting my blogging attention.

(I made sure to include a chair in this photo for scale; unless Laurel shrinks to two feet tall, I think she has nothing to worry about. However, I will admit that there's another pile behind this one, so combined they could possibly be a risk to wifely health.)

The top light green book, 600 pages thick, seemed like a good place to start on reducing the pile. It is Terrence W. Deacon's densely written, yet provocative, "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter."

This is one of those books that makes me think, If I can read this sucker all of the way through, and understand a good share of it, that compensates for not doing other senior citizen brain exercises, like the New York Times crossword puzzle.

There were times (well, many times) when I felt like giving up on Incomplete Nature.

But I persevered, even when I'd read a chapter and be perplexed about what the heck Deacon was trying to say. Since he is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, obviously Deacon has impressive intellectual and academic qualifications. 

Bottom line: this book further convinced me that life and consciousness emerged from matter, not some divine or supernatural source. However, it is really difficult for me to summarize Deacon's thesis, because it was so difficult to understand Deacon's writing.

Here's an initial stab at relating what appealed to me the most -- his emphasis on absence. 

Now, this also is a fascination of mine. I've just written about it in a much different way than Deacon has. You'll find lots of posts about absence in the "Wu Project" category in the right sidebar of this blog. My first post on this theme was in 2006, "The Wu Project."

We’re talking here about the real Wu. Which, because it signifies nothing, is pretty darn hard to say anything about. Nonetheless, I’m drawn to try. And even more perhaps: to be.

It’s a dream of mine. To be Wu. Not the Chinese character. Not the various Wu-associations Wikipedia talks about. Something else. What remains when all the somethings that I’m not are negated and just the nothing that I may be remains.

“May be” is the operative word here. There are no guarantees with Wu. It’s the ultimate mystery. You can’t rely on it for anything, because there is no thing there. Or so they say. And I tend to believe them.

Early on in his book, Deacon writes:

Each of these sorts of phenomena -- a function, reference, purpose, or value -- is in some way incomplete. There is something not there there. Without this "something" missing, they would just be plain and simple physical objects or events, lacking these otherwise curious attributes. Longing, desire, passion, appetite, mourning, loss, aspiration -- all are based on an analogous incompleteness, an integral without-ness.

As I reflect on this odd state of things, I am struck by the fact that there is no single term that seems to refer to this elusive character of such things. So, at the risk of initiating this discussion with a clumsy neologism, I will refer to this as an absential feature, to denote phenomena whose existence is determined with respect to an essential absence. 

This could be a state of things not yet realized, a specific separate object of a representation, a general type of property that may or may not exist, an abstract quality, an experience, and so forth -- just not that which is actually present. This paradoxical intrinsic quality of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but it is a defining property of life and mind. 

A complete theory of the world that includes us, and our experience of the world, must make sense of the way that we are shaped by and emerge from such specific absences. What is absent matters, and yet our current understanding of the physical world suggests that it should not. A causal role for absence seems to be absent from the natural sciences.

This is brilliant. Deacon had me on pages 2 and 3. I was looking forward to him building on this theme, fleshing out the notion of absence being the key to understanding life, mind, and consciousness. 

When I got to the end of his 600 pages, I felt a lack.

Which I guess is appropriate, given his emphasis on absence. I never fully grasped his argument for absential features being the foundation of living beings. But here's a simple, and decidedly incomplete, way of explaining Deacon's creative, detailed, rigorous, yet excessively abstruse take on the world.

Constraint is a concept that runs through his book. It is key to understanding thermodynamic processes. When water boils, steam is released. Without any constraints, steam just bubbles up into the air from a pot of boiling water, like when I make spaghetti. 

But when steam is constrained in certain ways, it can be used to power things, like a locomotive. Or to heat things, like an apartment building. Putting bounds on where the steam goes, restricting its freedom, so to speak, allows people to do useful things with boiling water.

Deacon writes:

But although the specific absences that constitute a constraint do not suffer the epiphenomenality of descriptive notions of organization, they are nevertheless explicitly not anything that is present. This requires that we show how what is absent is responsible for the causal power of organization and the asymmetric dynamics of a physical or living process. 

...The presence of constraint -- the absence of certain potential states -- is a critical factor in the capacity to perform work. Thus, it is only because of a restriction or constraint imposed on the release of energy (e.g, the one-directional expansion of an exploding gas in a cylinder) that a change of state can be imposed by one system on another. 

It is precisely by virtue of what is not enabled, but could otherwise have occurred, that a change can be forced.

A brilliant observation. Also, an obvious one, now that Deacon has pointed it out.

Even though I've read all of his book, I still don't grasp what he says below very well. Others may find the following even more mysterious. Or, perhaps, less so. In another blog post I'll try to explain how his absential outlook relates to mind and consciousness. 

The core insight that guides this book can be grasped by taking the Taoist metaphysics quoted at the beginning of this chapter seriously. We simply need to pay attention to the holes. As rhetorically ironic as this sounds, the thesis of this book is that the answer to the age-old riddle of teleology is not provided in terms of "nothing but..." or "something more..." but rather "something less..." This is the essence of what I am calling absentialism. 

This is the Tao Te Ching passage Deacon alludes to:

Thirty spokes converge at the wheel's hub, to a hole
   that allows it to turn.
Clay is shaped into a vessel, to enclose an emptiness
   that can be filled.
Doors and windows are cut into walls, to provide
   access to their protection.
Though we can only work with what is there, use
   comes from what is not there.
    -- LAO TSU

Lessons for living from a fictional assassin: the "Gray Man"

Here's how far down the churchless rabbit hole I've burrowed: I'm able to find existential "spiritual" meaning in a book series about an unstoppable assassin, the Gray Man, a.k.a. Court Gentry. 

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man – a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness.

Now, he is going to prove that for him, there is no gray area between killing for a living– and killing to stay alive.

I've devoured the first two books in the Gray Man series, "The Gray Man" and "On Target." Well, I've devoured them slowly, because I enjoy reading about the Gray Man's exploits so much, I don't want the books (and the series) to end.

This is unusual for me. I'm a fast reader. Typically, when I get engrossed in a gripping spy/ killer/ espionage book I read it as quickly as I can, because I want to find out how the ending of the plot turns out.

But something about the Gray Man appeals to me on a deeper philosophical level. Again, this is weird, because the fictional Court Gentry seemingly isn't much like the real person Me. 

Seemingly. 

This excerpt from "The Gray Man" points to the main thing I like about Court Gentry. He goes through life largely clueless about why stuff is happening to him, but he manages to carry on just fine anyway.

The fight was on. The fact that Court didn't have a clue what they were fighting over was a nonissue. He did not waste a single brain cell pondering this turn of events.

Court Gentry was a killer of men.

These were men.

And that's all there was to it.

...Court rolled left, emerged from behind the pallet with his M4 raised, and fired a long burst at McVee. The man's goggled face slammed back against the wall, and his H&K dropped away from his fingertips.

The black-clad operator fell back on the bench, dead.

Gentry had killed him, and he had no idea why.

Beautiful! Not the killing, really, but the Gray Man's realization that the most reliable understanding about reality is that it isn't understandable. 

Sure, Court Gentry knows a lot about the shadowy world he inhabits after being betrayed by his CIA handlers. But in his day-to-day efforts to complete a mission for hire, and stay alive while doing so, he often has no idea what is going on. Yet this doesn't stop him from dealing in a marvelously spontaneous way with whatever is happening without an evident why.

Gentry is the Wandering Taoist Sage of world-class assassins.

Frequently he unexpectedly falls off (or is pushed off) cliffs. Bloodied, bruised, bewildered, he gets up, assesses the situation, and draws a new course of action out of his almost infinitely large bag of survival tricks. I liked this passage from "On Target."

Maurice had another saying that popped into Court's mind right then. "A plan is just a big list of shit that's not going to happen." Court had found this to be the one constant in his missions, in his life. Plans were good. Plans were necessary, but ultimately, most plans were bullshit.

Most people would consider that, at best, the Gray Man occupies a realm of moral ambiguity. However, the way I see Court Gentry, he is an intensely ethical person who doesn't care if anyone else can read his moral compass. 

Here is the Gray Man engaged in a conversation with a high-minded female International Criminal Court staffer whose life he is trying to save in Sudan. She calls him by his code name, Six.

    "Six, I think a lot of very bad people started out as good people, don't you?"
    "I don't know."
    "Be careful you don't become that which you hate."
    "I have no idea what you are talking about."
    "Yes, you do. I believe you. I believe that you believe you are here for the right reasons. Maybe in your head you are. But this place needs people who are saving lives, not taking lives."
    Court stopped her from stumbling over an anthill in the dark. He led her around it by the arm, and then immediately let go. "Saving a life and taking a life are not opposites. Sometimes they are two sides of the same coin. I may take lives from time to time, but I wouldn't do it unless I felt I was saving some, too."
    "Sounds like you're trying to justify it to yourself."
    "I have to justify it to myself. But I don't have to justify anything to you. People like you will never understand. Waste of time to try to convince you."

Today I was driving into town, idly musing about some issues related to my civic activism efforts here in Salem, Oregon. I was feeling a bit anxious about how other people would look upon my actions, worrying what they'd think about me, concerned that what I was doing would be viewed negatively.

Then the Gray Man popped into my consciousness. I instantly felt way better.

Court Gentry does what needs doing. He is motivated by what he feels to be right, not by anyone else's conception of rightness and wrongness. Sure, he makes mistakes. But the Gray Man learns from what goes wrong and keeps on doing what is right. With boundless confidence.

Not a bad philosophy of life, not bad at all.

    "American, I know the Janjaweed; they destroyed my village, they raped my two sisters, killed one, let the other live,  but she crazy now after what they did. They killed my father, too. Only my mother and I left, and she at the camp at Dirra. If the Janjaweed come, nothing we can do. They have guns, camels, horses. If they come, we are all gonna die."
    Court shook his head. "We can do this. These Janjaweed are killers, but they are cowards. They don't come to fight; they come to slaughter. We make it tough for them, bloody some noses, kill a couple of them even, and they will break and run. They aren't looking for a battle, believe me. These guys kill women and children for fun. We can do this."
    "It doesn't matter if they're not real soldiers, they have guns! We don't have anything to stop them with."
    "Yes, we do."
    "We have me."
    The kid's eyes grew wide. "You crazy, man," he said, a little smile growing on his face.
    Smiling at a time like this meant Bishara was a bit crazy himself. Court could tell immediately that he'd be able to work with this kid.

Tai Chi "sensing skills" -- a good guide to harmonious living

I'm a dozen years into learning Tai Chi. Which just means, I'm not a beginner. Tai Chi, an internal-style martial art, is so exquisitely subtle, most practitioners never feel like they have come close to fathoming it. 

But every class I take, I get further insights into what Tai Chi is all about. Which really is what life is all about. (Links to my previous posts about Tai Chi can be found in "Me and Tai Chi -- eight blog posts about 'Taoism in motion.'"

Last Thursday I experienced a better understanding of the key notion of sensing skills. Robin Gamble writes:

Genuine Tai Chi Chuan is very efficient at growing this ability to understand others because one of the primary training tools in the art is something called “push hands”, which requires you to give up your own motives and just listen and follow your partners moves, at least in the beginning stages.

It’s an exercise where your hands and wrists are in flowing contact with your partners, and in the initial stages, no force is used. All you have to do is flow in a circular fashion and listen to your partner’s force, or intention. You may even close your eyes to enhance the benefit of sensing.

This method was originally developed so as to be able to sense the intentions of your opponent in combat and to then exploit their intentions with a suitable counter attack. However, Tai Chi Chuan is adaptable and now the same skills can be used to develop listening skills for interpersonal applications.

Agreed. One of the reasons I like Tai Chi so much is that it embodies some great philosophical principles about how to get along with other people, and deal effectively with our everchanging world. 

Consider someone being pushy towards you.

It may feel like they're on the other side of a door, leaning hard on it, trying to get into your personal space. You can hear them yelling and banging on the door, wanting to be let in.

OK, says Tai Chi. Unlock the door. Turn the door handle. 

As you stand to one side, their inward-leaning intensity causes them to stumble past you as the door swings open. Helpfully, you aid them on their way by guiding their body forward with your hands. But now they've realized they've gone too far. So they try to stop their momentum and reverse direction to get back to you.

Again, you move in accord with their own intention. Facing their back, you grab their shoulders with your hands, helping them move toward the door they'd just rushed through. 

So helpfully, their reversed energy leads them out the door. You close it. Lock it. Go back to drinking your tea. Harmony restored.

"Push hands" exercises (which really aren't about pushing, nor about hands) are used in Tai Chi to develop sensing skills along the lines of the door-opening/closing analogy I just shared. Feeling the intention of someone else, you harmonize with them, redirecting their energy as necessary rather than forcefully opposing it.

Thursday Eric and I were engaged in an exercise that started out in a ward-off posture akin to that in the photo above: our right arms were connected as we stood facing each other, right legs also forward. 

The purpose of the exercise was to learn how to deal with someone who wants to push into you, such as with a elbow into the chest (not pleasant; elbows are hard and bony). If you merely push back with your own arm, there's a good chance you'll still get an elbow in the chest. 

They could be stronger than you. They could be using their entire body weight to push forward against your arm. Strength against strength is a Tai Chi no-no. 

What Eric and I practiced was a double sort of redirection, a small circle followed by a larger circle, basically. 

When I felt him begin to push inward against my arm, I shifted back into more of an empty stance, my front leg/foot being mostly unweighted. Simultaneously, I used my own right hand and arm to move Eric's arm in a small circle forward and down -- the direction he was moving in with his own energy. 

This interrupted his inward push in a hard-to-describe, but easy-to feel, way. It wasn't exactly like the "through the door" analogy, but pretty close. By aiding his intention, I altered Eric's ability to push into me with his right arm. 

That small circle, me briefly rotating his hand/arm/shoulder forward and down, made it possible for me to then rotate Eric's arm in a larger circle, ending in a arm-bar. 

The more general self-defense lesson is that the Tai Chi A-B-C mantra of Accept - Blend - Control applies in most potentially contentious interpersonal relationships. Usually it is more effective than a Resist - Push Back - Battle sort of approach.

What I found is that the first step, accept, is key. I needed to be aware of what Eric was actually doing and intending, not what I thought he might do. 

Often we overreact when there isn't a real threat. Someone "pushes our button" and we think they're about to harm us. Probably not physically, but emotionally or psychologically. So we push back, needlessly escalating the situation. When Eric and I simply were gently resting our arms together, there was no need for me to do anything.

Tai Chi is almost entirely reactive, in contrast to hard style martial arts, which have a more assertive, attacking approach. If nobody is acting in a genuinely threatening way towards us, there is no need to get out our metaphoric Big Guns.

In fact, I learned that if I anticipated Eric's inward push, pressing on his arm to deflect it before he started to move, then now I was the one at risk of being on the other end of A-B-C, Accept - Blend - Control. Meaning, if I initiated a defensive movement before there was any offensive intent, Eric could then turn the tables on me, redirecting my energy to his advantage.

Simply put, it's almost always better to relax, while being exquisitely sensitive to the intentions of those around you. Don't over-react. Embrace mild threats, whether psychological or physical, with good humor. Do your best to either laugh them off or deflect them as gently as possible.

If someone truly is out to get you, though, act to defend yourself. Wait for them to make the first move. Then respond by recognizing their energy, redirecting it, and controlling them so they don't hurt you or anyone else. 

This applies equally to what usually is the most common form of self-defense: defending ourselves against our own self. 

We imagine unseen enemies when no one is actually threatening us. We worry about being attacked when the only danger is in our own over-active mind. Religions, of course, are notorious for fostering paranoia, with all their fantasies of the Devil, Evil, Hell, Negative Powers, Satan, and such.

And even if we aren't overtly religious, our tendency to over-react to threats that aren't really there can make us fearful about opposing political views, cultures different from ours, people who see the world from a varying perspective than we do. 

It isn't necessary to learn Tai Chi to develop sensing skills.

Do your best to sort out real and present dangers from false and distant dangers. Feel what is actually there before you, not what your anxious, worrisome mind imagines could be there. Yes, there are genuine things we need to be concerned about and deal with. 

The trick is seeing them for what they are, and not mistaking our own internally-generated fear and trembling for the tremors of an actual approaching threat. 

My new affirmation: softer, slower, smaller

I've been practicing Tai Chi for about eleven years. Before, I was into hard style martial arts -- traditional Japanese Shotokan karate at first, then a mixed style focused on Korean karate. 

Soft-style martial arts like Tai Chi (a.k.a. internal styles) take considerably more time to learn and, perhaps, master.

External styles are centered on punching, kicking, blocking, and such. What you're supposed to learn is pretty much open to view. Sure, there's a mental side to karate, but by and large the emphasis in training is on what your body is doing, not your psyche.

With Tai Chi, there's much more of a balance between body and mind. Intention is key. Where the mind goes, the body will follow. This makes the internal martial arts styles much more subtle than the external styles. 

After more than a decade, I'm still barely more than a Tai Chi beginner. During every class, I learn something new about myself and Tai Chi. 

The hardest habit to break -- and this applies to just about everybody who learns Tai Chi, not just people like me who migrated to it from a hard style martial art -- stems from that word, hard. Usually the natural human inclination is to try hard, to work harder, to be a hard person to defeat. 

In Tai Chi, though, you learn that being soft is more important than being hard. Also, that being slow is more important than being fast, and being small is more important than being large. 

This may sound paradoxical.

For a long time it didn't make sense to me. But gradually, bit by bit, lesson by lesson, seeing how the Daoist principles of Tai Chi play out physically has helped me understand that the same principles apply in everyday life. 

Including my mental life.

So the past few days I've been experimenting with a three word affirmation before I meditate every morning: softer, slower, smaller. It's easy to try too hard in meditation, just as it is in Tai Chi.

Doing less often is more productive than doing more. Relaxing and letting go often leads to a more pleasant outcome than striving to achieve a goal.

Again, for me this has been easiest to understand through physical movement, because outcomes are difficult to ignore -- whereas when we're in our mind, we can pretend we're something other than what is real. In Tai Chi, using too much force and power usually is counter-productive. Getting tight and rigid just gives another person a lever to use against you.

Don't get me wrong: there's a time and place for harder, faster, and larger. But when this is our only recipe for getting through life, our sole repertoire for dealing with problems, our capabilities will be limited. 

One of the fascinating aspects of Tai Chi is the emphasis on yin and yang. The familiar symbol contains a lot of wisdom. 

At an extreme lies an opposite. Which isn't so much opposed, as a complement. When white reaches a maximum, black begins to grow. When softness is expressed completely, hardness manifests. Thus Tai Chi is continually alternating between yin and yang, soft and hard, rest and motion, slow and fast. 

This can be difficult to observe from the outside, since Tai Chi typically appears to be quite gentle and slow-moving. But internally, and also externally in the case of some more martially-oriented forms, the alternation of yin and yang is evident.

Everybody is different.

People often go to extremes in different ways. Some are habitually too passive, others too aggressive. Some are habitually too easy-going, others too hard-driving. For me, I've found it helpful to focus on the above-mentioned affirmation: softer, slower, smaller. 

This helps balance me, since I tend toward the opposite direction. As my Tai Chi instructor is fond of saying, there's no right or wrong here. There's just what works, what feels right, what helps me sleep soundly. 

Fighting fire with fire, or force with force, sometimes makes sense. Usually, though, it doesn't. Just as with flying across the world, a great circle can get you where you want to go more readily than a straight line.

What is seva in the RSSB organization?

Here's a provocative piece by Osho Robbins, a frequent commenter on this blog who emailed it to me.

He writes about a recent experience where volunteers ("sevadars") acted in a high-handed manner at a large gathering of RSSB (Radha Soami Satsang Beas) followers -- an India-based group that I was a member of for many years.

What is seva? What is selfless service? Great questions.

What is seva in RSSB? 
by Osho Robbins

This is an interesting question for an RSSB follower to contemplate.

It is just (a) following orders given from those above you?

Or is it (b) using your own discretion to be HELPFUL to another.

Conceptually the idea of seva is to be of service to others. In fact the word actually means service.

So you would think that if you are a ‘sevadar’ at some event, like a national satsang meeting, then the purpose of doing seva would be to make the life of those attending the event easier, not harder. I completely understand that the sevadars have a set of rules to adhere to.

However, is service simply the act of getting compliance? Or is it about helping things to go more smoothly?

At the end of the national satsang meeting, the logical thing to do would be to open many of the tent exits to allow the people to leave the the satsang easily. Why would you want them all to squeeze through a few exits? And if anyone tries to leave another way – stop them. How exactly is that considered to be seva? 

I attended the national satsang at Haynes park in the UK a week ago.

At the end of the satsang, when they are announcing that nobody should leave yet, I stood up and made a sharp exit. Why? Because I don’t want to be in the stampede of people who are going to be getting up in about 30 seconds time.

So I exit the tent by the closest exit which is to my right. It turns out that this is only for those who want to use the toilets and washrooms. So when I try to exit towards the car parking area, I am stopped and told there is no exit this way. Well, I can clearly see there is an exit, but what they mean is that I am not allowed to exit this way.

Anyways I turn to go back towards the tent and then start to wonder what the purpose of these stupid rules is. So I walked straight past the sevadar who tried to stop me from taking the forbidden exit. He asked me to stop and I said I need to get back to my car as I am in a hurry. Well, he called for backup. I love these situations because it tests who the sevadars are and what they are all about. 

The one sevadar starts to push me back as I am walking peacefully towards the car park area. I ask him calmly to stop pushing me otherwise I will sue him for assault. This seems to do the trick and he stops pushing me.  Then five more highly trained sevadars turn up. They tell me to turn around and go the other way. One folds his hands saying it’s a humble request. So then I stopped to talk to them and this is what I said.

“Can anyone explain to me why I cannot exit this way?” Of course nobody had an answer other than “It’s not allowed, please go the long way around.”

So then I said, “I am going to turn around and go the long way around, so there’s no issue about that. However, if this is not an exit, can you tell me why it was not announced in the satsang hall. How was I supposed to know this is not an exit?”

And more than that, I said to them “What you are doing is not seva. You can call it by some other name, like following orders, but it is definitely not seva because seva should make life easier for the sangat, not harder. What is the logical reason for closing this exit? All I want to do is go back to my car and leave the site. Why exactly do I need to go back into the tent and exit that way? What is the purpose and who made this rule? And if you can’t tell me, then why are you blindly enforcing these rules that are pointless?”

This does raise a lot of questions. If seva is simply following orders, then who is making the rules? If you ask the Guru, he says he doesn’t get involved in these small details. In which case, someone else is making these rules. Why? And why is no other sevadar questioning them? 

I do of course know the answer.

In RSSB, there is an hierarchy. The people at the top give orders to those below them and they in turn command those below them. To question the person above you is considered insubordination and nobody dares to do it. If they did, they would immediately be asked to leave their seva. So, out of fear of losing their seva everyone obeys. And they see other sevadars doing the same, so this becomes the natural thing to do.

So seva becomes OBEDIENCE. It becomes an unspoken rule that to question the person giving you an order is akin to questioning the guru, which of course is a big no-no. 

Now this explains a lot. It explains why the sevadars have no individuality and are just order followers. They cannot think for themselves. They are zombies. This is a far cry from true spirituality. No sevadar is allowed to think or voice their opinion. A friend of mine once accompanied me to a seva day and observed that is was just like a concentration camp because everyone simply followed orders. 

The statements I made to those sevadars fell on deaf ears.

I said to them that this is not seva because they are making my life difficult for no logical reason. Those sevadars are too far gone to even hear a thing I say. They are too conditioned to follow orders. As far as they are concerned they have just done their duty and will feel good about it.

The other big questions this raises is about MEANS and ENDS. The seva is meant to help in the spiritual progress of the disciple. However, I would suggest that it hinders. Why? Let’s see.

Firstly the sevadar becomes totally distracted from the whole reason why he first became initiated. He did not become initiated to BE A RADHA SOAMI. He took initiation on the basis that it might lead to spiritual enlightenment. He might traverse spiritual regions and reach the goal of sant mat. 

Secondly, the act of doing seva creates ego in the sevadar, not humility. It also becomes like the rat race. Instead of chasing money the sevadar is chasing power and position. This is blatantly obvious as sevadars who do seva more regularly move up the chain of command. If they decide to give their seva less time they are warned that they will lose their position and will have to start at the bottom.

This also happened to me when I was a satsang speaker.

When the powers that be stopped me from doing satsang they said I could start again but would have to start at the bottom of the chain as a local speaker first and work my way up to national status. This of course is all nonsense and just to prove it I applied to be a speaker again. As soon as they realized it was me – they stopped me from being a local speaker because this is a power game. 

My point is that this is a far cry from the original reason for getting initiation. 

In the same national satsang – I went to the mike and made a statement. I said “Rabi ik gunjaldar, Rabi ik gurakh dhanda. Phid is diya paunda pagal ho jai banda” This translates as:

“God is a mysterious puzzle. Trying to solve it – you will go mad”

I then spoke about Kabir and said “Kabir says that I tried in every way but failed to find God. He says as long as I was looking for him, I did not find him. Then in the second stanza he says that in the end I still did not find him. What happened instead was that kabir disappeared and God appeared. Which means the meeting never happened.”

I simply made this statement and let the guru make his own comments. He said that he agreed. The ego has to disappear first. He said this happened through meditation. 

Now Kabir is making a very important point in his verse.

He is saying that God will not become a decoration for your ego. You cannot hang God on your ego. You cannot claim to have found God, as your disappearance is the appearance of God. Meaning that YOU go then GOD comes. GOD already is and you are overshadowing him. You are like the wave in the ocean. You want to survive. You want the guru to come at your death and save you. Impossible.

No wave ever survives because the wave is unreal. Only the ocean survives because it is real. The waves come and go and the ocean remains. In the same way souls come and go. However we are told that we are a soul and the soul is eternal . Therefore we will survive death. That now becomes a worry because we want to make sure that we go to Sach Khand and the guru will come and save our soul. 

However, Kabir is saying that there is no separate soul. You are not real. You just think you are real. Your ego created the illusion that there is a YOU. There is no You. There is only the ONENESS. You do not exist as a separate entity. If you did exist – then the ONENESS would be an illusion because there is more than one. ONENESS means that there is only the ONE and there is no other. 

Paltu says “Paltu there is only the ONE there is no other.” The scripture cannot be any clearer, but the reader creates his own meaning to make it fit in with his own beliefs.

That is all we do in life. We make sure that we are right and we make everything fit. 

A man phones his mother and says “Mum, I am a zombie”. She says “Son, you are not a zombie”.

He insists he is, so she asks him to call his father. “Dad, I’m a zombie”.

“Son, you are not a zombie” says his father. Again he insists he is. So his father says, “Do zombies bleed?” “No” says the son. “Great” says the father, “Now take a pin and stick it in your finger”.

A few minutes later, the son says “WOW – zombies DO bleed!”

Me and Tai Chi -- eight blog posts about "Taoism in motion"

Today a friend expressed some interest in Tai Chi, so I sent him info about where I've been taking classes for the past eleven years. 

I included links to eight blog posts I've written about Tai Chi.

After finding them via a Google search, I thought (not surprisingly), Hey, these are really interesting! I'd forgotten about most of them and was pleased to be reacquainted with my own creations. 

Tai Chi is an intriguing blend of Taoist philosophy and martial arts practicality. The posts cover both bases, and then some. I've shared an excerpt from each.

-------------------------

Ten reasons for guys to like Tai Chi

But I'm three years into thrice weekly Tai Chi classes at Warren Allen's Pacific Martial Arts studio here in Salem. So I'm qualified to talk to guys like me who might have qualms about taking up Tai Chi.

By "guys like me," I mean more than 58 year old men with previous martial arts experience who are aging halfway gracefully, but want to help assure this trend continues. Maybe even more than halfway – 75%, say.

I'm using guys in the modern generic sense, just as the waitress does who comes to take our order, looks at my wife and me, and says "So what do you guys want for dinner?" (I suspect she says the same thing to a table full of women.)

So here, in no particular order, are ten macho and not-so-macho reasons for guys to like Tai Chi.

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Tai Chi as a kick-ass martial art

Still, Tai Chi is a martial art, as this guy discovered during a walk in the park. And as I've learned after taking up Tai Chi three years ago after thirteen years of hard style martial arts experience.

It's more difficult to apply than a hard style like karate. Tai chi is classed as an internal, rather than external, martial art. The distinction isn't absolute, of course, since every martial art is a blend of external moves and internal intentions.

Tai Chi, though, stresses emptiness, flexibility, and fluidly adjusting to an opponent's movements. Tension is a big no-no, along with relying on power and strength.

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Sung: the only Tai Chi most people need to know

But most people aren't interested in learning Tai Chi as a movement art. The forms take a long time to learn. Even longer to feel comfortable doing. Longer still to practice (or "play") proficiently. 

I've been learning Tai Chi for about nine years. I'm still a beginner. Nonetheless, I'm starting to appreciate the importance of sung, relaxation, physical and psychological movement without tension.

Everybody can benefit by letting go, relaxing, becoming like flowing water instead of rigid ice.

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Integrating reason and intuition in Tai Chi (plus rest of life)

Taoism, the philosophical foundation of Tai Chi, doesn't see things in black and white. 

The yin-yang symbol has a bit of white in the black area, and a bit of black in the white area. Yin and yang seamlessly flow into and out of each other. 

Rigid dichotomies are mostly an invention of the human mind. Nature doesn't work that way. Neither should we, as natural beings. 

Are you scientific or spiritual? How about both.
Are you reasonable or intuitive? How about both. 
Are you mechanical or artistic? How about both.
Are you a lover or a fighter? How about both.
Are you cautious or a risk taker? How about both.
Are you generous or selfish? How about both. 

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David Leung shows the subtle side of Tai Chi

Intensity, concentration, mindfulness.

These qualities shone forth in everything Leung did, whether talking or moving. Along with relaxation, flowingness, and humility. His Wing Chun is blindingly fast. Humbly, he said that he used to be a martial artist "hot stuff," but now is just "warm stuff."

Well, I can tell you that no bad guy would want to meet up with this 5' 2" slender man in a dark alley. After his presentation, Eric and I stayed to ask some questions. Eric's involved a "needle at sea bottom" application that involved a Chin Na (joint lock) move if someone grabs your wrist.

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A Tai Chi teacher: someone who doesn't know the way

Here's one of the reasons I enjoy Tai Chi (and it's associated philosophy, Taoism) so much: a Tai Chi teacher isn't looked upon with special reverence, just respect. 

After having experienced a spiritual path that places the master, or guru, up on a pedestal, it's refreshing to practice Tai Chi -- where the teacher is looked upon quite differently.

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Tai Chi shows how to handle aggression

I love how Tai Chi demonstrates a hugely practical philosophy of life through physical movement. Other activities do this also -- ballroom dancing comes to mind -- but Tai Chi is unique in that it explicitly embodies philosophical Taoist principles.

Tonight, I was paired up with my Tai Chi instructor, Warren, as his class practiced the self-defense application of the Fair Lady movements (with a follow step).

Warren and I have a lot of marital arts experience -- he more than me, naturally. And his Tai Chi background is much deeper than mine. Yet both of us were surprised at what we learned after only a few practice punches that were countered by Fair Lady deflections.

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Best self-defense technique: run away!

After more than twenty years of martial arts training, I can confidently say that I've learned some highly effective self-defense techniques. 

My favorite: run away from trouble. Second best: walk away from trouble. Third choice: defuse trouble from where you are.

These approaches, of course, aren't what most people are looking for when they join a martial arts class. Punching, kicking, grappling, throwing, submission holds -- that's what sells in the worlds of karate, aikido, judo, tae kwon do, jui-jitsu, boxing, and such.

Between theism and atheism... Taoism?

Since I'm now a regular contributor of essays to the Spiritual Naturalist Society, I've been perusing the posts of other people who share their writings on the group's web site.

Thomas Schenk's "Fertile Ground Between Theism and Atheism" is an interesting take on Taoism. Here's how the piece starts out.

The two concepts, “God” and “Tao,” have much in common and significant differences. The concepts “Tao” and “Atheism” also have much in common and significant differences. By examining these commonalities and differences I hope to show that there is a fertile ground between theism and atheism.   

In this fertile ground, there are forms of spirituality of great depth that are free from untenable, supernatural beliefs and the mindsets such beliefs engender. Here we highlight one of those forms, philosophical Taoism, and compare and contrast it with theism and atheism.

I agree with Schenk that, as usually is the case, a binary division such as "theism" and "atheism" doesn't capture the richness of how things actually are. The Taoism symbol, of course, reflects this.

In yin there is yang; in yang there is yin. Each blends into each other.

On the whole, I'd say that Taoism is closer to atheism than theism, since there is no personal God in Taoism, nor any sense that something external to the universe created, directs, and sustains it.

Schenk probably would agree, but his emphasis is on how Taoism lives in the large middle ground between theism and atheism, without specifying where in that conceptual space philosophical Taoism lies. He writes:

It is around the concept of agency, that the two ideas are most divergent. The theistic concept of “God” generally includes the idea of a being that has agency in much the same way that we think of ourselves as having agency. 

If we imagine God as the creator of the world, we imagine him (for convenience I’ll stick with the convention of using the masculine pronoun) creating it in somewhat the same manner as a human architect creates a building. 

First he has an idea and from this idea he creates the material world. For the theist, the world is the realization of God’s idea of the world. There is a master plan and purportedly we humans fit into that plan in some way. Specific theist religions specify various ways in which we fit, and how we are to behave in this life based on how we fit.

...Taoism has a diametrically different idea of agency. The Tao is neither an agent nor a plan. Nature arises from the Tao and sustains itself spontaneously. There is no master plan, no governing agent.  For Taoism, Nature left to itself tends toward organization. 

The celestial orbs follow their path through the sky and the seasons follow each other in due succession.  And again, what is true for the great cosmos is true for the microcosm.

I'd never thought of how a Taoist version of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program might operate. Schenk has. He thinks it is possible to turn oneself over to the Tao in somewhat the same way as a theist would surrender to God.

Maybe. I'm not sure about this.

I tend to view the Tao as all-encompassing naturalistic processes rather than as a thing. So if there is nothing other than nature, and we're part and parcel of nature's doings, this portion of Schenk's essay seems a bit off-base to me.

For the purposes of this step both God and Tao can represent a “higher power” to which we can turn over our will and our lives. This is a recognition that there are limits to human agency and beyond the ego’s agency there are “forces” beyond that ego that can lead to spiritual transformation. 

The theist sees this “force” as an at least partially external deity.  Taoism simply accepts it as part of the mystery.  The important thing for the Taoist is the efficacy of this presence, not the how or why of it.

Read the whole essay. I think you'll find it worth your time -- thought-provoking and original.

Directionless, I feel like I've found my way

Nice title of this post, if I do say so myself.

Which I did about a week ago -- choosing to use those words, "Directionless, I'm feel like I've found my way," as the name for my first essay written for the Spiritual Naturalist Society, where I'm now a contributing writer.

You can check it out on a Society page. Or read it below.

Directionless, I feel like I’ve found my way

For thirty-five years I was on a spiritual path. 

I felt like I knew where I was going: back to God. I felt like I knew how to get there: meditate every day, have faith in the guru, follow certain moral vows. I felt like I knew what the milestones along the path were: mystical sights and sounds, along with other inner experiences.

There’s a lot of satisfaction in being on a path. 

You don’t have to think about where to go or what to do. Just take one step at a time in a well-marked direction. Associating with other people who are traveling the same way brings a sense of community.

Once my wife and I went cross-country skiing after heavy snowfalls had come to the Oregon Cascades. Starting off from a ski resort, at first the trail was easy to follow.

But when we got further around the loop some of the trail markers were covered by deep snow. Tracks were minimal. We were alone in the woods. For the first time in my life I thought, “We might be lost. The sun is setting. 

My wordless feeling… near-panic. I realized that we could be heading into a wilderness area, rather than back to the resort parking lot. All we could do was keep trekking along through mounds of pathless snow. 

When I saw two people coming towards us, I wanted to hug them. “Is the resort that way?” “Yes,” they told us, “just a little ways further.”

I’ve never forgotten the horrible feeling of being lost in dangerous territory. 

It was like having a nightmare intrude into waking consciousness. The stability of everyday life that I counted on — knowing where I was, knowing where I wanted to go, knowing how to get from here to there — had vanished.

Scary. Super-scary. 

Which emotionally wasn’t far afield from an intense fear of non-existence that has popped into my psyche at unpredictable moments. Dying is a lot like being lost. Permanently. 

Unless you have faith in a Way, a Path to a hoped-for supernatural place of eternal rest: heaven, paradise, ultimate reality, god. 

Thus just as being physically lost leads us to long for a well-marked path, so does a sense of being spiritually lost. When I decided to leave the religious group I’d belonged to for so long, those still devoted to it would say, “Brian, you’ve lost your way. You’re off The Path.”

(Yes, both in print and in tone of voice, members of this organization viewed their way as the only genuine way back to God, hence the capitalization.) 

Well, a simple realization led me to commit the supposed heresy of rejecting the spiritual course I was on: we humans create paths, nature doesn’t. 

I’m not saying that mammals, birds, fish, insects and other creatures fail to travel on well-defined routes. They do. However, only us Homo sapiens conceptualize our paths. 

More broadly speaking, we mentally embody our physical experiences. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote a book about this, “Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and It’s Challenge to Western Thought.”

Conceptual structure arises from our sensorimotor experience and the neural structures that give rise to it. The very notion of “structure” in our conceptual system is characterized by such things as image schemas and motor schemas. 

This applies to Eastern thought also. My Indian guru would speak of “going within,” “ascending to higher regions,” “treading the spiritual path,” “dragged down by karmas,” and such.

As Lakoff and Johnson point out in their book, these sorts of spatial metaphors are taken to represent mental or non-physical realities. Our bodily experience leads us to see paths, higher and lower places, ascents and descents. This is how we come to understand the world philosophically: as a metaphor of embodied life.

Imagine a concept of love without physical force — that is, without attraction, electricity, magnetism — and without union, madness, illness, magic, nurturance, journeys, closeness, heat, or giving of oneself. Take away all those metaphorical ways of conceptualizing love, and there’s not a whole lot left.

What’s left is the mere literal skeleton: a lover, a beloved, feelings of love, and a relationship which has an onset and an end point. Without the conventional metaphors for love, we are left only with the skeleton, bereft of the richness of the concept. 

True enough. However, in the case of supernatural entities that almost certainly don’t exist — God, heaven, soul, and so on — removing the embodied metaphors does more than leave us with only a skeleton.

We’re down to nothing, really. Nothing, at least, that isn’t brain-based and physical. Emotions, thoughts, perceptions, imaginings, hopes, desires.

When I came to realize this, how I’d taken the very real experience of following a path in this world and accepted it as a metaphor for a theorized supernatural way-finding, the foundation of my faith started to slip away.

With a great sense of relief.

I didn’t need to worry about being lost, because I wasn’t. I didn’t need to fear being off The Path, because such didn’t exist. These notions weren’t part of objective reality, just the subjective theology I’d accepted. 

As trite as this may sound, in my current churchless state of mind I’ve become enamored of the saying, “It is what it is.” While this is a clichéd oft-heard response by members of a losing sports team after a tough loss, there’s a lot to like about the phrase. 

It reminds us that however we try to categorize, analyze, deconstruct, and systematize the universe, there’s no way of knowing if our all-too-human descriptions come close to capturing its ultimate nature.

I used to believe that it was possible to get much closer to the “truth that passeth all understanding,” if not stand spiritually right on top of it. This presumed, though, that close and far are meaningful concepts in regard to the cosmos as a whole.

Now I resonate with what Alan Watts says in his book, “Nature, Man, and Woman.”

The harsh divisions of spirit and nature, mind and body, subject and object, controller and controlled are seen more and more to be awkward conventions of language. 

These are misleading and clumsy terms for describing a world in which all events seem to be mutually interdependent — an immense complexity of subtly balanced relationships which, like an endless knot, has no loose end from which it can be untangled and put in supposed order.

No longer feeling like I need to escape the tangled web of materiality, I’m content with meandering along the intricately woven threads of existence. One moment I’m here, the next, there. 

I don’t know where I’m going until I get there. Having arrived, I’m content with not staying very long. Moving on, the absence of a path doesn’t bother me. 

I’m not even sure there is a “me” who is doing the going, the staying, the moving on. Alan Watts doesn’t think so.

The Taoist idea of naturalness… is the concrete realization that all our experiences and actions are movements of the Tao, the way of nature, the endless knot, including the very experience of being an individual, a knowing subject.

…Every movement in the endless knot is a movement of the knot, acting as a total organism, though the parts, or loops, of the knot are not looked upon as passive entities moved by the whole.

For they are parts only figuratively divided from the whole for purposes of recognition and discussion; in reality, the loops are the knot, differences within identity like the two sides of a coin, neither of which can be removed without removing the other.

Check out "You might be a Taoist"

Of all the "ism's" in the world, I consider Taoism (or Daoism) to be one of the most appealing. Partly this is because I've studied Tai Chi for about eleven years, which can be viewed as Taoism in motion.

Not the religious sort of Taoism. The philosophical sort. 

Back in 2013 I mentioned the You Might Be a Taoist site in a blog post comment. Today I saw that another commenter left a link to that site, which got me to looking at it again.

The "you might be a Taoist if..." statements are pretty accurate, in my view (the only one i have, obviously).

I do consider myself a philosophical Taoist, and almost completely agree with most of those statements. Such as:

If you have a hard time reconciling proven historic and scientific facts with contradictory stories passed down by uneducated superstitious desert dwellers, edited and re-edited by generations of religious and government leaders for their own benefit, constantly quoted out of context by followers with their own agendas, about a god who's described as jealous, petty, indecisive, and ruthless, having murdered millions, including admittedly innocent victims... you might be a Taoist.

Oh, no! Claiming Taoist enlightenment, I'm asked to define it

Damn!

Somebody has made an entirely reasonable request of me -- to define the naturalistic Taoist/Daoist enlightenment that I talked about in "Daoist enlightenment: much ado about nothing," and indirectly claimed to be attaining in "How our non-easy-care yard enlightens me."

In a comment on the first-linked post, Appreciative Reader said:

What exactly is Daoist enlightenment, Brian? It may be no more than just a wild story with no basis in fact, but what exactly is the story?

Daoism is something I know little enough about. Mostly what I’ve read in your blog here.

I do know by now, I think, what enlightenment is supposed to be, per most major traditions. At least the outline of it. Also the means by which one seeks such enlightenment per these traditions. At least the outline of such means. (And I’m just talking about the “narratives” that those traditions follow, without going right now into the validity of such narratives.)

You’ve studied Daoism and written about it extensively enough, but as far as I remember you’ve never actually spelt this part of it clearly. Could you tell us now? (a) What exactly (in concrete terms) is Daoist enlightenment? (b) How exactly does one attain to it? And (c) What is the point of it, why do it?

You know, like Catholic Christian salvation is getting awoken after a long sleep by Jesus and his friends, and taken up to his palace in the skies, there to have the mother of all holidays. In perpetuity. And how you do this is by believing in Jesus, through “works” (like the Jesuits, for example), by kowtowing to the Church and its clergy, by paying a tenth of your income to fund the Pope’s palace, et cetera.

And why you do it, is because lolling on a cloud in heaven and listening to angels playing the lute is in every way preferable to the alternative, which is being roasted by the devil and being subjected to other similar torture. Like Theravadin Buddhist Nirvana is total cessation : and such cessation does not happen automatically on death, but is to be consciously sought by the eight-fold path and by methodically removing all desire and all identification with the self through a fairly structured process of meditation, et cetera.

And why you do it, is because this is the only way to escape suffering that otherwise has no end. Even Zen, vague though it is, shares that definition of Nirvana, and that basic rationale, and also does have a fairly structured means (non-processes/non-practices like Zazen and Koans, as well as the occasional blow to the head, et cetera) of approaching it.

What about Taoism?

Yikes. I have no idea what Taoist enlightenment is.

Like I said, I just really enjoy the notion that I'm enlightened, or at least well on the road to this state of being. It seems like a cool thing to be able to put on my bio. Achieved enlightenment at the age of 66. 

Which, of course, happens to be my current age. So if I want my bio to have any credibility, I need to be able to defend my claim of impending, if not actual, Taoist enlightenment.

Fortunately, in the course of re-reading Raymond M. Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent," I came across some passages that indicate both what Taoist enlightenment is, thereby answering the commenter's question, and some pretty damn persuasive proof that I am Taoistically enlightened. 

Also, that you might well be. Along with countless other people. Here's some of what Smullyan had to say on the subject.

As I see it, the completely unenlightened man believes there is such a thing as death and that death is tragic. The slightly more enlightened man believes there is an afterlife. The still more enlightened man believes there is no afterlife, but that death is not tragic.

The man more enlightened yet does not believe in death at all (except, of course, in the trivial biological sense), not does he necessarily believe in an afterlife. The next stage of enlightenment is to realize that life and death are both purely illusory; they have existence in the phenomenal but not in the noumenal world.

At a still higher stage, one realizes that all talk of life and death totally misses the mark.

...Thus, as I have said, at a certain high stage of enlightenment, one realizes that all thoughts of life and death are futile. Finally, the completely enlightened man even transcends the above realization, and simply ceases to think about life and death at all.

Therefore I say that the truly enlightened man hearing the tolling of a bell would simply enjoy the experience for what it is, and have no such foolish and "arty" thoughts about its connection with life and death.

In this respect he is like my dogs who, upon hearing a bell, would not in a million years have any such ridiculous idea as that it is "tolling their lives away." My attitude is very much like that of the poet Basho when he wrote:

Admirable is he, who when he
see lightning, does not say
"Life goes by like a flash"

I've seen a lot of lightning in my life. I'm pretty sure that I've never thought Life goes by like a flash after seeing a lightning strike. Ergo, I am enlightened.

Case closed! Enlightenment diploma, please!

Great Taoist view of free will and determinism

Free will fascinates me. I don't believe it exists. Yet it sure seems like I have it.

Of course, if the cosmos has determined that I shall believe in free will, even though it is an illusion, I have no choice but to feel like I have free will.

(Type "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar to find my many blog posts on this subject that I couldn't help but write.)

Today I was re-reading a chapter in one of my favorite books, Raymond Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent."

Below are some excerpts from Is God a Taoist? Smullyan's take on free will and determinism from a Taoist perspective is pretty damn brilliant.

Reminds me of Alan Watts. But Smullyan is a mathematical logician (so says the back of his book), so he has a unique way of writing about this stuff.

HIs chapter consists of a dialogue between God and a Mortal.

MORTAL: Anyway, it is reassuring to know that my natural intuition about having free will is correct. Sometimes I have been worried that determinists are correct.

GOD: They are correct.

MORTAL: Wait a minute, now, do I have free will or don't I?

GOD: I already told you you do. But that does not mean determinism is incorrect.

MORTAL: Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature, or aren't they?

GOD: The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies.

Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.

...MORTAL: So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?

GOD: It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear.

Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you."

Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin?

Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish.

If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial.