Church of the Churchless

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.

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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. 

With the physical, we can't fool ourselves about the "spiritual"

So I was rolling along this afternoon in my Tai Chi class as we were doing the Yang Long Form, feeling good that I was in the flow, having left behind the garden chores and civic activism emailing that had occupied me for most of the day previously.

"I'm really in the moment," I thought to myself. 

At which point, unsurprisingly, I left the physical reality of the Long Form moment and entered a mental moment where I was praising myself for being in the moment. The effect wasn't horrible. Barely noticeable to others, in fact.

Instead of doing the next movement in the lengthy form, which I know well, I jumped into a movement from another similar form.

Noticing almost immediately that I had departed from the school of fish feeling where everybody in the class is in sync, moving in harmony, I quickly adjusted. Later in the form, though, pretty much the same thing happened again. 

Tai Chi often is called "meditation in motion."

I've done a lot of meditating not-in-motion. For thirty-five years, every morning I sat quietly in a darkened small room or closet for an hour or two, repeating a mantra for a while, then doing nothing except being aware of what was within my consciousness when I wasn't doing anything.

Or at least, not much of anything. 

It's easy to fool yourself when you're within your own mind. There's no external guideposts to gauge where you are, or what exactly is happening. You can think, "I'm communing with the Holy Spirit," and who will argue with you?

Likely not yourself, since you're pleased with your supposed spiritual experiencing. This is one reason I enjoy Tai Chi and other movement arts, such as ballroom dancing, so much. It's much more difficult to fool yourself.

Sure, I can imagine that I'm a better Tai Chi practitioner or dancer than I really am.

But then... there's the mirrors.

And the sight of other people doing the same form or dance, but looking better doing it. Plus, of course, the glitches such as what happened to me today -- the physical missteps or stumbles which are difficult to ignore, or interpret as some sort of positive progress.

I still enjoy my quiet morning meditation time, which now lasts only 20 minutes or so. However, I feel like I learn more about myself and how my mind works when I'm out and about doing something outwardly physical rather than inwardly mental. 

No fooling. That's a big benefit of "moving meditation," which can be experienced in many ways.

Daoist enlightenment: much ado about nothing

One of the things I like most about my Tai Chi practice is Wu Chi (or Wuji). Basically, it means doing nothing. It's the ready, relaxed stance you're in before you do something. 

Tai Chi, being Daoism (or Taoism) expressed in motion, reflects the more cosmic principles of Daoist philosophy. I wrote about Wu Chi in a 2005 "Wu chi, empty fullness" post about a year after I'd started practicing Tai Chi.

I’ve become a big fan of wu chi, a Taoist term for the emptiness from which fullness flows. It is the source of all that exists. Not being anything particular, wu chi is able to become everything. We could call it the One, but it is better not to name it at all.

...I first heard the term, wu chi, used by my martial arts instructor. Warren said that he had told his own Tai Chi teacher that, after several decades of training, he had finally realized that there is only one move in Tai Chi. “Oh, very interesting,” the teacher said. “What is it?” “Whatever flows from wu chi [the empty state of rest in Tai Chi].” “Ah, I think you’re on to something,” said Warren’s teacher.

There’s nothing quite like wu chi in Western philosophy or religion. By and large we in the West adore positivity. We want to be filled, not emptied. We want to acquire, not divest. We want to become more, not less. We want to be raised up, not driven down.

...Wu grammatically is a negative in Chinese, yet experientially it is a positive. It is said, “Wu and Tao are equally the mother of all things.” Wu wei in Taoism literally means “not doing.” But wu wei is how nature does everything: effortlessly and harmoniously. Nature isn’t filled with a sense itself; it is itself. One, not two.

Daoism certainly has its religious side, which I don't identify with. But there's something appealing to me about the naturalistic way Daoism and Tai Chi approach the subject of enlightenment. 

Here's some quotes from Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming's book, "Taijiquan Theory." 

Wuji is a state of emptiness or simply a single point in space. There is no discrimination and there are no polarities (or poles). According to Yi Jing (i.e. Book of Change), originally the universe was in a Wuji state. Later, due to the pivotal action of Taiji, Two Polarities (Liang Yi) (i.e. Yin and Yang) were discriminated.

...Taijiquan is an internal style of martial arts that was created in the Daoist monastery of the Wudang mountain, Hubei Province. Taijiquan's creation was based on the above philosophies of Taiji and Yin-Yang. It is believed that from understanding the theory of Taiji and Yin-Yang, we will be able to trace back the origin of our lives.

...Since Daoists are monks, the final goal of their spiritual cultivation is to reunite with the natural spirit (Tian Ren He Yi) (i.e. the state of Wuji).

...The Wuji state exists inside each of us. It is the state from which all creative impulses grow.

...Lao Zi states that the way of returning to the origin of our lives involves keeping our minds in the state of extreme emptiness and calmness.

...Those who would like to obtain health and longevity should learn Embryonic Breathing. For those who wish to reach the final goal of enlightenment, Embryonic Breathing is a necessary practice.

...In order to reach this stage, your mind must be in the center of your physical body (i.e. Real Dan Tian), which is located in the physical center of gravity. Since this physical center is also the residence of our original Qi, this is the state of Wuji. 

Sure, I realize all this may sound like spiritual gibberish. And maybe it is.

But after practicing Tai Chi for over ten years, I can assure you that as a physical embodiment of Daoist philosophy, Tai Chi works -- both as a marital art, and as "meditation in motion."

If we're going to talk about enlightenment at all, I must prefer a philosophy that looks upon enlightenment being aided by a calm focus on one's breathing, and not upon anything supernatural.

Why an experience of "pure consciousness" says little about reality

As I said in a previous post, I've dug David Loy's book, "Nonduality," out of a forgotten book bag and have gotten back to reading it after a several-year break. 

A few days ago I read his chapter, The Mind-Space Analogy. Pretty damn brilliant. Of course, this book is based on Loy's philosophy doctoral dissertation, so I guess the brilliance isn't surprising.

Below I've shared Loy's analogy in his own words, albeit condensed. I've left out F and G of his analogy, which are another form of Mahayana Buddhism and Theism. 

As you'll see, what Loy has done is imagine that something akin to "pure consciousness" actually exists.

This is more than an individual consciousness; it is an all-pervasive Mind-space that bears considerable resemblance to how the Absolute is viewed in the Eastern philosophies of Hindu Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Forms of theism, of course, view the Absolute or God as an entity that is distinct from everything in existence. So the inclusive emptiness of Mind-space doesn't fit well with theism (though they can be crammed together with a bit of effort).

What I like most about Loy's analogy is how it points to this: a supposed experience of the Absolute can be interpreted in various ways. Meaning, this experience isn't revelatory of The Way Things Are, though religious true believers imagine that it is.

In my college days, for example, I had numerous psychedelic experiences that gave me a profoundly different view of the world. But I just looked upon these as impossible-to-describe experiences, not a glimpse of an objectively true alternative reality. 

Everybody, repeat, everybody, has ineffable personal experiences. In fact, it can be argued that each and every experience is ineffable, since it is ours alone.

What Loy has done is point out how the same experience of his hypothetical Mind-space can be interpreted in various contradictory ways that correspond to how differing Eastern philosophical/religious perspectives view reality. 

In short, it may indeed be possible for people to have a "non-dual" experience of the world, but this tells us little or nothing about what the world is like.

Here's a shortened version of Loy's Mind-Space analogy.

Comparing the Absolute to empty space is a metaphor that naturally suggests itself when we want to describe "something" which in itself has no characteristics. 

...Thus space seems to be an excellent analogy for "empty nonduality." The analogy breaks down -- that is, we are reminded it is only an analogy -- in that our usual understanding of space conceives of it as an objectively existing medium that things are "in" and as having neither life nor awareness, whereas sunyata for Mahayana, Brahman for Vedanta and the Tao for Taoism are the ground of everything including all consciousness.

Of course, this is nothing other than the two sides of our familiar duality, the commonsense but problematical bifurcation between object (in this case, "material" space) and subject.

But let us use our imagination to eliminate this duality, by supposing that space is conscious. Let us suppose that as a result of some experience I realize that "my" consciousness is not mine at all but is an aspect of space itself.

...this experience of Mind-space seems to reveal "The Way Things Really Are." But if "I," having had this experience, were to be asked what I had realized, how would I answer? The point of this chapter is that this "Mind-space experience" lends itself to very different and contradictory descriptions.

In the following section I imagine some of the responses that might occur during a conversation among people who have had this experience and who have drawn metaphysical conclusions from it.

Speaker A [Sankkya-Yoga]: "There are two very different substances, both of which are uncaused and eternal and omnipresent, although they do not seem to interfere with each other or even interact. One is immutable and attributeless consciousness (Mind-space), which, I now realize, is what my mind always has been. The other is more difficult to characterize. I suppose we can call it an 'energy-stuff' or perhaps a fine 'matter-stuff'... now I realize that immutable consciousness and the constantly changing energy-stuff are quite different from each other and always have been."

Speaker B [Advaita Vedanta]: "Speaker A is mistaken. Only one thing is real: this immutable, attributeless Mind-space, which is what I and everything else really are. The constantly changing forms that arise within and from this Mind-space are simply illusions which delude us about what really is: they have no substance or reality of their own, for they are only phenomena that represent nothing but merely manifest the Mind-space... There is only this Mind-space, which is birthless and deathless and has no characteristics of its own."

Speaker C [Early Buddhism]: "What the others have called 'Mind-space' cannot really be said to exist, because it has no characteristics at all. It is so 'empty' that it is literally nothing, and how can nothing be 'real'? What 'I' have realized is that there is no 'I' and never was. All that does exist are those constantly changing phenomena -- or rather the 'attribute-elements' of which things are composed and which are now experienced clearly... However, it doesn't matter anymore what attributes arise or pass away, now that the sense of 'I' has evaporated and there is the deep peace of emptiness in its place."

Speaker D [Mahayana Buddhism]: "I agree with speaker C that speakers A and B, by referring to mind-space, have made something out of nothing -- that is, they have hypostatized emptiness into a substance. Yet I must also agree with speaker B that phenomena are not real, for they too are empty... Except for speaker A, we all agree that these appearances [of phenomena] do not represent any material substratum, but speaker C still tries to make these attributes into little substances of their own... Phenomena are illusory only if we are deluded into taking them as self-existing: now that we have realized they are empty appearances, we should accept them for what they are and be able to play with them freely. The dance may have no meaning, but there is still the empty dance."

Speaker E [ Taoism]: "I agree with speaker D, but he does not go far enough. He too is still one-sided. We have realized that the world is nondual, but we should not be so infatuated with this new way of experiencing that we become prejudiced against the more usual dualistic mode... Subject-object duality and the plurality of phenomena are also aspects of the world, and we should not dualistically reject one mode in favor of the other. Let us accept that there are these two ways of experiencing, without prejudice against either. Our aim should be to understand fully the relation between these two modes in order to be able to experience both."

Loy summarizes these perspectives by their answers to two questions: 

Is Mind-space real?
Are Phenomena real?

Here's the answers.

A. Sankhya-Yoga: Yes, both Mind-space and Phenomena are real.
B. Advaita Vedanta: Yes, Mind-space is real. No, Phenomena are unreal.
C. Early Buddhism: No, Mind-space is unreal. Yes, Phenomena are real.
D. Mahayana Buddhism: No, both Mind-space and Phenomena are unreal.
E. Taoism: duality and nonduality are both "Real"

So take your pick.

A "mystical" experience of nonduality or cosmic oneness can be interpreted in various ways. We can accept the validity of the experience, yet be no closer to knowing the nature of absoute reality.

Nothing special: lucid dreaming and mindfulness

I dream a lot, as we all do. Lucid dreaming, though -- very rarely. That's when you're aware that you're dreaming, while still in a dream.

Maybe I've had a couple of lucid dreams in my entire life. Three years ago I blogged about a semi-lucid dream experience in "I dreamed within a dream. Felt a lot like reality."

The title of that post points to a notion Evan Thompson talks about in his book, "Waking, Dreaming, Being." It's the familiar philosophical conundrum: how can we be sure that we're not dreaming in everyday life, since dreaming while we're asleep seems real while we're in that state of consciousness?

(See another post, "On waking up twice," for more along this line.)

Thompson writes about how being mindful while awake can be viewed as akin to lucid dreaming. In each case, a part of us becomes aware of what and how is being experienced.

How the world shows up for us depends on how we imaginatively perceive and conceptualize things. What we experience cannot be separated from how we experience. 

The thoughts, images, and emotions we bring to whatever we encounter, as well as the meanings we mentally impose, condition what "reality" can mean to us. In this way, the waking world is mind-involving and mind-dependent. 

Realizing this fact -- waking up to our participation in the creation of our world -- resembles becoming lucid in a dream. Dream yoga encourages us to cultivate this critical mindfulness in waking life and to carry  it into dreaming.

Well, I'm sure this approach works for some people. I'm just not one of them. Not so much because I feel that I can't be mindful while awake and learn how to dream lucidly; it's more that I don't want to.

Seems like too much work.

Also, habitually looking upon myself looking upon the world strikes me as unnatural, unnecessary, and unappealing. How about if I just experience things, and not worry about being aware of how I'm experiencing?

For me, I'm happiest when I lose myself in doing something.

This is the feeling of flow that's prized by athletes, musicians, dancers, and ordinary folks. Raking leaves here in leaf-strewn Oregon this time of year is much more pleasant when, as the saying goes, I just do it, rather than observing myself being the raker.

Taoism seems to have the edge over Buddhism in this regard. I resonate with the non-religious side of both philosophies. But Taoist writings urge naturalness and letting go, whereas Buddhist teachings usually strike me as being overly serious and disciplined.

Thus I was pleased when I got to a part in Thompson's Imagining: Are We Real? chapter where he says:

The view that lucid dreams are better than nonlucid dreams, however, isn't empirical; it's evaluative or normative. It places different values on different kinds of human experience. I find myself unable to accept this. It seem to diminish the worth of something natural in our experience; it seems to go against the grain.

He then relates the famous Butterfly Dream parable of the classical Taoist/Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi, also known as Chuang Tzu.

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt -- and then he was a butterfly, a fluttering butterfly, self-content and in accord with its intentions. The butterfly did not know about Zhou. Suddenly it awoke -- and then it was fully and completely Zhou.

One does not know whether there is a Zhou becoming a butterfly in a dream or whether there is a butterfly becoming a Zhou in a dream. There is a Zhou and there is a butterfly, so there is necessarily a distinction between them. This is called: the changing of things.

See, Taoists are fine with being one thing, then being another thing, without being continuously mindful or lucid about the transitions between the experiences of "one thing" and "another thing." 

Now I'm awake. Now I'm dreaming. Now I'm mindful of being awake. Now I'm lucidly dreaming. To a Taoist, there's no higher or lower here. It's just the changing of things. A Buddhist, though, would be inclined to look upon mindful awareness or lucid dreaming as a more elevated state of consciousness.

I like how Thompson puts it:

In this Daoist version, accepting each phase as equally real, along with accepting the natural distinction between waking and dreaming, is what enables one to be fully present in the here and now.

Being aware of the butterfly dream as only a dream would prevent its being an experience of being fully and completely a butterfly, "self-content and in accord with its intentions." Remembering the dream -- thinking back to it -- would prevent the waking state from being an experience of being fully and completely human.

The fullness of each experience requires not violating the natural borders between dreaming and waking, not supplanting forgetting with remembering. Transgressing these borders means fighting against change ("the change of things") -- a losing battle that detracts from reality rather than bringing about a higher reality.

Detracting from reality inevitably leads to suffering, not happiness. Thus the Daoist, in a gesture of radical acceptance, embraces dreaming and forgetfulness without judgment or qualification.

...Lucid dreaming belongs to human experience, so for the Daoist, it's something we should embrace too. Instead, the moral is that our experience necessarily includes forgetting as well as remembering, dreaming as well as lucid dreaming, and so we devalue our experience and distort our nature if we set one kind of experience above the other.

...We need to be able to let go of lucidity and release ourselves to the full presence of the dream. If we can't, then we deprive ourselves of certain natural and valuable experiences. The point isn't to make a forced choice between lucidity or nonlucidity according to some imposed standard; it's to be able to move flexibly between them without attachment.

The Daoist sage embodies this flexibility. The sage doesn't go against the grain and make distinctions between high and low; he responds fluidly and effortlessly according to the circumstances and what's appropriate.

Along this line...

My Tai Chi class is made up of people with a Taoist mentality. Tai Chi, after all, basically is Taoism in motion. This is a big reason why I've enjoyed Tai Chi so much during the ten years I've been practicing it: we don't take ourselves or Tai Chi seriously, neither the students nor our instructor.

Yesterday we were doing the Yang Long Form.

I was on the far left side, so when we headed to the left I couldn't see everyone else very well. Since I know the form quite well, I just assumed that I was doing the correct moves when the rest of the class was out of my vision, and they were doing the same -- per usual.

But when I got to an early three-kick sequence, I realized that "usual" had turned into "unusual." I was doing one thing; the rest of the class was following the instructor (who was behind me) and was doing a different thing.

No problem. This happens occasionally. I just gave up my idea of the Long Form and went with what everybody else was doing.

When we finished the form, our instructor light-heartedly said that he'd had a brain freeze at that point in the form and left out the sequence that I'd started doing. Again, no big deal. This led to a discussion about how there's no right or wrong in Tai Chi, and how doing a form differently can lead to fresh insights.

Meaning, the 108 moves in the Long Form weren't given by God on stone tablets.

They were made up by human beings. The moves can be changed, as we did yesterday via some forgetfulness. My instructor encourages us to play around with the traditional forms on our own -- adding new moves, leaving out old ones, since the goal of Tai Chi is flexibility, openness, flow.

There wasn't any sense that we'd done anything wrong by screwing up part of the Long Form. It was just something that happened, a new experience. A few minutes later we did the form again. Correctly this time. 

But it wasn't a better or higher form the second time around. Just a different form.   

Are you a spiritual wanderer, or traveler?

As I become more and more churchless, the notion of wandering seems more appealing than traveling. So I guess I could be called a spiritual wanderer, though I don't like the word "spiritual" any more.

So even though I put it in the title of this post, let's drop it. I'm a wanderer, not a traveler. 

Meaning, I used to believe in paths. For over thirty-five years I considered myself to be on a spiritual path. For most of that time I also thought I was on a career path. Ditto with a marriage and family path. 

I liked the idea of paths because they are well-defined. They start here, and end there. You can usually tell  whether you are on or off a path, even if it is conceptual or abstract.

For example, members of my India-based spiritual organization would gossip about a fellow member: "I hear he is off the path!"

In other words, he wasn't meditating as instructed, had started eating meat or drinking alcohol, or -- heaven forbid -- was having sex outside of marriage (a frequently broken rule, yet not usually admitted to others).

Now, I readily admit that sticking to a path makes sense when (1) there actually is one, (2) it can be discerned, and (3) it demonstrably leads to somewhere you're sure you want to go. 

When my wife and I go on a hike in one of Oregon's wilderness areas, we always stick to a path. It's the quickest and safest way of enjoying ourselves. We have a specific destination in mind, and there is a well defined way to get there.

Thus traveling is fine in certain circumstances.

I look on this as setting out to do something with both a path and outcome firmly in mind. You know what you want to do and/or where to go. So you pack a bag, literally or metaphorically, and start to travel. 

"Wanderer 10"

However, wandering is another option. Here, you are very much open to changing plans or direction. Because you don't have a firm destination or goal, no itinerary to follow, acceding to an impulse to head elsewhere doesn't involve much thought. 

You just do it. Here today. There tomorrow.

I guess this is akin to being a hitchhiker rather than a bus driver with a set route. You can get into any vehicle and go where you want, though you can also have a temporary destination in mind -- knowing you might well change your mind at any moment.

Philosophically, for me traveling implies either free will or (paradoxically) destiny of some sort.

I either freely choose a definite place I want to go, or that place is fated for me. The latter is how many religions and spiritual teachings look upon their "path" -- as leading to a goal that either must be freely chosen as an act of faith, or has been destined by God to be followed.

This used to appeal to me. Now it doesn't. There is rigidity in traveling, in being on a set path, in believing that getting from here to there is so important, failing to do so means your life is seriously lacking.

By contrast, wanderers are unpredictably blown by the world's myriad winds. They are part and parcel of their territory. That is, they aren't so much seeking to move through a location to get somewhere else, as to enjoy the movement that comes with being within a place.

To borrow a turn of phrase I recall Alan Watts using frequently, this is akin to the difference between dancing and hiking. When dancing, you enjoy movement for its own sake. Going around in circles is just fine. When hiking, though, you want to get somewhere, usually by following a path.

After pondering this wandering vs. traveling notion before meditating this morning, I found myself driving into town on our two lane rural road. As often happens, I came up behind a car that was moving more slowly than I had been going.

Generally this produces at least a mild sense of irritation in me. I'd been keeping my speedometer at 50 or 55. Now I had to slow down to 40. Bummer! It was going to take me longer than expected to get into Salem. 

Today, though, "wanderer" instantly popped into my mind when I put my foot on the brake to stay a safe distance behind the slower car. I'd been going at one speed; now I was going another speed. No big deal. The world had set me on a different course. No problem.

This probably sounds mundane, and it is. Which is partly my point. 

When you're wandering, there isn't a whole lot of concern about where you are, what you're doing, how the scenery appears. The wandering, the dance, is the thing, not the traveling, the hiking.

Different ways of moving. Different ways of living.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. That's something a traveler would do, not a wanderer. And I'm more attracted to wandering now. Of course, I suppose I might wander into a place where traveling looks appealing. 

That's what so great about wandering. You never know. Surprises abound. 

Without religion, no need to try to transcend the natural world

As I've observed before, for me churchlessness isn't an event but a process. Meaning, it isn't a sudden jump from being religious to being non-religious.

It is a lengthy path with many twists and turns. I keep recognizing shadows of my former religiosity where, at first glance, I thought there was only secular light now.

For example, I still have a tendency to believe in some transcendent truth. Not God. Not divinity. But a power or presence that stands apart from the natural world.

This may sound religious, yet really it isn't.

After all, Platonism and its philosophical offshoots consider that there are "forms" which undergird material reality. Most mathematicians, I've heard, go along with this view. They see mathematical truths as existing in some sort of abstract realm separate from the physical universe.

Somewhat similarly, it's hard for me to shake the notion that, as the X-Files put it, "The Truth is Out There." Not simply everyday truth, scientific truth, approximate truth.

Really Real Truth, Ultimate Truth, Objective Truth.

This belief manifests in various ways, some quite mundane.

I'll be musing about a subject that's been on the mind of me and my wife recently: whether we should move from our non-easy-care house on ten rural acres, now that we're in our mid-60's. I've started to notice that I tend to feel there is a Right Answer to this question.

Not just a good answer, an answer that feels right to us.

Rather, an objectively true best answer, the Answer That Transcends All Other Possible Answers, the answer we should be seeking if we want to optimize our chances for future happiness.

Yet where is there any evidence that a Right Answer like this exists? Everything I know about the world, and about myself, tells me that it doesn't exist. Still, the lure of "The Truth is Out There" in a transcendent sense persists.

I'm attracted to Taoism/Daoism because it provides a coherent philosophical antidote to this. In non-religious Daoism, the natural world is all there is. The goal is to flow with the everchanging waters of life, not to find a peak above them where one can stand above it all.

There's something peacefully reassuring about this Daoist perspective. The best I can do is be aware of what's happening around and within me, responding to external and internal events as I am drawn to do.

In Tai Chi, my instructor calls this sort of thing "sensing skills."

Feeling pushes, pulls, pressures, intentions, movement, stillness, and all that without being thrown off balance much. Spontaneously dancing with life rather than trying to choreograph it.

Here's some quotes from "Daoism Explained" by Hans-Georg Moeller.

Early "Western" prejudices about Daoism have been removed: the Dao is now rarely described in the "Godlike" fashion of an absolute origin or ultimate principle, but rather as the smooth way of nature, as the ongoing process of fertility and production, of living and dying.

...Still, I believe, the process of unearthing Daoist philosophy out of the metaphysical ballast from which it had been covered by earlier "Westernizations" (not only by Western interpreters) is not yet complete.

It is, for instance, still often held that the Dao is some profound idea that is almost beyond comprehension, or that it is something so mystical that it renders all language futile. But if the Dao is not a transcendent principle, if it is not beyond, but rather natural and simple and this-worldly -- why should it be such a complicated idea, why should it be an idea at all?

...The "observation" of nature is thus not the observation of something external -- it is the observation of the ongoing scenario of which the observer is a part. This observation does not lead -- as in modern science -- to the establishment of static rules or laws, but rather to the self-positioning of the observer within the dynamic scenario.

It resembles the observation of a dance in order to participate in it -- not in order to note down an analysis of its steps. 

Watts: wanting to clean up the messiness of life IS the mess

I don't believe life is a problem. Sure, there are problems in life, lots of them. Each of us is continually dealing with differences between the way we want something to be, and the way it is.

But this is much different from considering that there is something wrong with life itself or with ourselves as a whole. 

I've talked about this before.

Believing in problems may be our only problem
Is there anything wrong with life?
When did humans start making life itself into a problem?

A few days ago I discovered an Alan Watts book sitting on a shelf that, shock!, I realized I hadn't read. Here's some excerpts from "Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation." It consists of transcriptions from talks Watts gave in his later years.

After giving examples of life's problems, Watts says:

Over the years I have begun to wonder if there is another way around these problems. Perhaps instead of resolving these issues at the technical level, we could solve them at the psychological and spiritual levels by disciplining ourselves so that we wouldn't be afraid of them anymore. 

And so, in accord with that motivation, we seek out spiritual and psychological teachers.

We wonder if we could somehow be made over so that we would not have to worry about our problems. But if you examine the desire to overcome this mess through a spiritual discipline, you will see that this wanting to overcome the mess and not to have it anymore is precisely the mess.

The thing that we object to about ourselves is precisely what we continue to do in our attempts to overcome it; in other words, the activity that we employ in overcoming the mess is the mess that we object to.

It is very important to realize this, and if you do realize it, it raises the question "Then what can I do? What can I do to transform this quaking mess into the state of mind of the true mystic?"

Now, if you are the mess, there is obviously nothing that you can do to transform yourself into the state of mind you idealize as that of a true mystic, a saint, or even the Christ. But by pursuing this line of thought you may realize that all your ideals are simply manifestations of the mess trying to get away from itself.

You are put in the position of feeling that it is absolutely necessary to be different from the way you are, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it because being the way you are, you can't be different from your self.

It's as if one were to say, "I know that I shouldn't be selfish, and I would very much like to be an unselfish person, but the reason why I want to be an unselfish person is that I am very selfish. And really, I would love myself far more and respect myself far more if I were unselfish."

...Sometimes life is telling you that the course you are on is not the way to go, and the message underlying all of this is that you cannot transform yourself. Life is giving you the message that the "you" that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself does not exist.

In other words, as an ego, I am separate from my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences. So the one who is supposed to be in control of them cannot control them because it isn't there. 

And as soon as you understand that, things will be greatly improved.

"Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen" -- great Alan Watts essay

Back in 1958 Alan Watts wrote a classic essay, "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen." Beat and square, back in the 50's, were words roughly equivalent to our "cool" and "lame." Or "hip" and "traditional."

A beatnik bore some resemblance to today's hipster. I was just ten years old in 1958, so wasn't able to embrace the beat generation thing. Had to wait until the 60's to dive into the next counter-cultural evolution: hippies.

A few days ago I came across Watts' essay in a compilation of three of his writings, "The Wisdom of Insecurity" (one of my all-time favorite books; see here and here), "The Way of Zen," and "Tao: The Watercourse Way."

It was a pleasure to rediscover it after a cursory reading years ago. The version of the essay I read is considerably expanded and amended from the original.

I've never done any formal Zen training (Square Zen), but from my college days on I've enjoyed paddling around the edges of the Beat Zen pond. This essay helped me realize the difference between the two, and what plain Zen is all about.

Here's some passages from the essay on interesting subjects:

Chinese humanism vs. Indian supernaturalism.
Here is a view of the world imparting a profoundly refreshing sense of wholeness to a culture in which the spiritual and the material, the conscious and the unconscious, have been cataclysmically split. For this reason the Chinese humanism and naturalism of Zen intrigue us much more strongly than Indian Buddhism or Vedanta.

These, too, have their students in the West, but their followers seem for the most part to be displaced Christians -- people in search of a more plausible philosophy than Christian supernaturalism to carry on the essentially Christian search for the miraculous.

The ideal man of Christian Buddhism is clearly a superman, a yogi with absolute mastery of his own nature, according perfectly with the science-fiction ideal of "men beyond mankind." But the Buddha or awakened man of Chinese Zen is "ordinary and nothing special"; he is humorously human like the Zen tramps portrayed by Mu-ch'i and Liang-k'ai. 

We like this because here, for the first time, is a conception of the holy man and sage who is not impossibly remote, not superhuman but fully human, and, above all, not a solemn and sexless ascetic... They are just like us, and yet much more at home in the world, floating much more easily upon the ocean of transience and insecurity.

Human life no different from great universe.
For there is a standpoint from which human affairs are as much beyond right and wrong as the stars, and from which our deeds, experiences, and feelings can no more be judged than the ups and downs of a range of mountains. 

Though beyond moral and social valuation, this level of human life may also be seen to be just as marvelous and uncanny as the great universe itself. This feeling may become particularly acute when the individual ego tries to fathom its own nature, to plumb the inner sources of its own actions and consciousness.

For here it discovers a part of itself -- the inmost and greatest part -- which is strange to itself and beyond its understanding and control. Odd as it may sound, the ego finds that its own center and nature is beyond itself. The more deeply I go into myself, the more I am not myself, and yet this is the very heart of me.

Here I find my own inner workings functioning of themselves, spontaneously, like the rotation of the heavenly bodies and the drifting of the clouds. Strange and foreign as this aspect of myself at first seems to be, I soon realize that it is me, and much more me than my superficial ego.

Beat Zen and Square Zen.
But the Westerner who is attracted to Zen and who would understand it deeply must have one indispensable qualification: he must understand his own culture so thoroughly that he is no longer swayed by its premises unconsciously.

He must really have come to terms with the Lord God Jehovah and with his Hebrew-Christian conscience so that he can take it or leave it without fear or rebellion. He must be free of the itch to justify himself

Lacking this, his Zen will be either "beat" or "square," either a revolt from the culture and social order or a new form of stuffiness and respectability. For Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other.

Living beyond anxiety.
At this level, human life is beyond anxiety, for it can never make a mistake. If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer.; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.

A Zen master was once asked, "It is terribly hot, and how shall we escape the heat?" "Why not," he answered, "go to the place where it is neither hot nor cold?" "Where is that place?" "In summer we sweat; in winter we shiver."

In Zen one does not feel guilty about dying, or being afraid, or disliking the heat. At the same time, Zen does not insist upon this point of view as something which one ought to adopt; it does not preach it as an ideal. 

For if you don't understand it, your very not-understanding is also IT. There would be no bright stars without dim stars, and, without the surrounding darkness, no stars at all.

Faults of Square Zen.
For square Zen is the Zen of established tradition in Japan with its clearly defined hierarchy, its rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori... it is still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approval and established authority.

...The faults of square Zen are the faults of any spiritual in-group with an esoteric discipline and degrees of initiation. Students in the lower ranks can get unpleasantly uppity about inside knowledge which they are not at liberty to divulge -- "and you wouldn't understand even if I could tell you" -- and are apt to dwell rather sickeningly on the immense difficulities and iron disciplines of their task. 

...Thus for beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is. But for square Zen there can be no true satori without years of meditation-practice under the stern supervision of a qualified master. 

...Foreign religions can be immensely attractive and highly overrated by those who know little of their own, and especially by those who have not worked through and grown out of their own. This is why the displaced or unconscious Christian can so easily use either beat or square Zen to justify himself.

The one wants a philosophy to justify him in doing what he pleases. The other wants a more plausible authoritative salvation than the Church or the psychiatrists seem to be able to provide.... But the true character of Zen remains almost incomprehensible to those who have not surpassed the immaturity of needing to be justified, whether before the Lord God or before a paternalistic society.

Zen without fuss.
The old Chinese Zen masters were steeped in Taoism. They saw nature in its total interrelatedness, and saw that every creature and every experience is in accord with the Tao of nature just as it is. This enabled them to accept themselves as they were, moment by moment, without the least need to justify anything.

They didn't do it to defend themselves or to find an excuse for getting away with murder. They didn't brag about it and set themselves apart as rather special. On the contrary, their Zen was wu-shih, which means approximately "nothing special" or "no fuss."

But Zen is "fuss" when it is mixed up with Bohemian affectations, and "fuss" when it is imagined that the only proper way to find it is to run off to a monastery in Japan or to do special exercises in the lotus posture for five hours a day. And I will admit that the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an essay as this, is also fuss -- but a little less so.

Having said that, I would like to say something for all Zen fussers, beat or square.

Fuss is all right, too. If you are hung on Zen, there's no need to pretend that you are not. If you really want to spend some years in a Japanese monastery, there is no earthly reason why you shouldn't. Or if you want to spend your time hopping freight cars and digging Charlie Parker, it's a free country.

In the landscape of Spring there is neither better nor worse;
The flowering branches grown naturally, some long, some short.

     -- Alan Watts

True cliche: live every moment as if it were your last

One of the benefits of growing older -- I'm 65 -- is that you acquire some Zennish enlightenment without having to meditate on hard cushions, figure out koans, or do any other of the Official Zen stuff.

Just seeing people you know about your age or younger die naturally leads to a realization that, as I said in another blog post on this subject three and a half years ago, This is it.

We live. And eventually we die.

What I knew on the dog walk, and still know, is that this moment, whatever it consists of, never will come again.

Standing on the road, leash in hand, I knew that so deeply I was almost afraid to embrace the realization wholeheartedly, because it seemed that if I ever fully fathomed the depths of what I can only call IT, I'd run the risk of never coming to the surface of my everyday life again.

Which could be a good thing. OK, it probably would be a good thing. I just didn't feel like a dog walk was the right time to dive deeper into IT -- the experience that arguably underlies all other experiences.

Namely, the existential in-your-gut realization of life's finitude, ephemeralness, and above all, preciousness.

Never again will I experience what I am right now. This moment will never come again. (A cliche, but cliches can be absolutely true.)

Today I had a similar, yet different, feeling. 

It was more a realization that, no matter what I am doing, one day there will be a last time that I do it. Problem is (and maybe this isn't a problem, but a good thing) likely I won't know which is the last time.

I was in an upstairs workout room at our athletic club. I go up there to do some Yoga and Tai Chi. Per usual, nobody but me was using the room. It's got a nice wood floor; floor to ceiling windows; a view of the south Salem hills covered with fir trees. 

Usually I only do one Tai Chi form, Liuhebafa, as it was taught to me by my instructor, who was taught it by his Chinese instructor, who was taught it... and so it goes. 

It's also called "water boxing." The form is long. Super long, compared to other Tai Chi forms, including even the Yang Long Form. It took me several years to learn it all. Now I'm hooked on it. Not saying I do it correctly or well, but I've got the basic moves down.

This afternoon I was looking at the window, about to begin the form, when a thought popped into my mind. "What if I knew this was the last time I'd ever do the form before I died? How would I feel doing it? How carefully and attentively would I perform the moves, knowing this is the last time I'd do them?"

It was more than a thought, of course. More like a whole body, whole mind Wow! sensation. It felt real because I knew this was absolutely true: there will come a time when I do Liuhebafa for the last time.

And this could be it.

Unlikely. But then, every time I do the form it will seem unlikely that this is the last time. Even if I'm gravely ill, barely able to move, my optimistic mind probably will think, "Tomorrow is another day." 

One day I'll be wrong. There won't be another day. For me. 

Today was one of my most enjoyable Liuhebafa playing of the form. (Tai Chi folks often speak of "playing" a form; fits with the light-hearted, unserious, flow-with-it Tai Chi philosophy.) It felt different, because I felt different -- having begun with that This could be the last time thought.

Uh, oh. I'm getting a junior year in high school flashback.

 

 

Sung: the only Tai Chi most people need to know

Relax. Relax. Relax. 

There. Really understand what "relax" means, and you've pretty much mastered the essence of Tai Chi. So said Cheng Man-ch'ing, one of the most eminent teachers of Tai Chi.

Relax (sung). My teacher must have repeated these words many times each day. 'Relax! Relax! Relax completely! The whole body should completely relax!' Otherwise he said, 'Not relaxed, then you are like a punching bag.' 

To comment on the single word sung is extremely difficult. If you can relax completely, then the rest is easy. Here I have written down what my teacher told me daily in order to make his teachings understandable to others.

Relax means to soften the tendons and blood vessels of the whole body. You cannot permit even a little tension. This is known as "A soft waist that can fold a hundred times as if it had no bones." If you had no bones and only ligaments, then the ligaments could relax and open up.

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.

Last week I saw a demonstration of how sung, relaxing, works in Tai Chi push hands. My instructor, Warren, was pushing hands with Eric, a fit, strong fellow Tai Chi student. 

Here's a video that shows what pushing hands looks like. It's much more of a collaborative dance than a competition. An opportunity to practice sung, relaxation. Which isn't limpness. Sung is tensionless energy.

 

Warren and Eric were pushing hands much like the two men were at the beginning of the video. Except maybe a bit more freestyle. Periodically Warren, the instructor, would take Eric's center -- moving him off balance.

After they finished, Warren asked Eric "How did that feel?" Eric replied, "Good. Except when you took my center." Warren said, "And when did that happen?" 

Eric thought for a few seconds. During that time a thought popped into my head. When Eric tried too hard. That was Eric's answer also.

Warren elaborated. "When I felt you tighten up, push too hard, I re-directed that tension back into you. This is the key to push hands. Wait until you feel tightness in the other person. Then connect to that tension and use it against them."

That was the gist of what he said, at least. Nothing really new to me. However, it also was.

Watching Warren and Eric, I better understood how self-defeating rigid reactions are, whether physical or psychological. Since, I've been doing some sung practice of my own without any physical Tai Chi involved.

Some common sayings (in the United States, at least) capture what the issue is. He yanked my chain. Or She pushed my buttons. 

Meaning, the other person got me upset, rattled, off balance. Why? Because of a lack of sung, relaxation, looseness.

If a chain isn't firmly fixed to something, it can't be yanked. If a button isn't tightly wired to an apparatus, it won't have any effect when pushed. 

It is much more difficult for someone or something to bother us if we soften up, just as it is much more difficult for someone or something to push us off balance physically if we relax. (This video shows how re-direction can work in Tai Chi from a marital arts perspective.)

So I've been paying more attention to that moment when something happens and I start to tighten up. Again, either psychologically or physically.

Immediately relaxing, softening, letting go of tension -- that helps a lot. Most disturbing happenings in life don't require an "all hands on deck" reaction. A driver who cuts me off. A comment that offends me. A news story that irks me.

Letting it go. Redirecting the incoming energy (which, of course, is mine, since almost always what I have to deal with is my own psychological response, not someone else's physical action).

I don't like the word "spirituality" any more. Doesn't mean much to me, since I no longer believe in spirit as a supernatural entity. Still...

There's good reason to say that sung, relaxation, not trying so hard, this is the key to being spiritual. After all, Cheng Man-ch'ing also says:

Sink (ch'en). If someone can relax completely, then this is ch'en. If the ligaments and blood vessels relax, then the whole body (of which they are a part) sinks down.

Basically, ch'en and sung are the same thing. Ch'en means not floating. Floating violates Tai Chi Chuan. If your body can sink, this already is good, but you must also make the chi sink. If the chi sinks, then the spirit (shen) gathers. That is very useful note: "When the shen is gathered the mind becomes clear."

Pink Panther and Alan Watts on nonduality

I'm reading a book about nonduality by David Loy that has a pleasingly appropriate title, "Nonduality." Loy is a Zen practitioner and a university professor. 

I like his style. He thinks. He analyzes. He studies the relationship between substance philosophies like Vedanta (Self is real) and flux philosophies like Buddhism (nothing is immutable).

Loy is helping me to realize that nonduality really isn't about oneness. It is about the rather obvious fact that this requires a that. And light requires dark. And self requires non-self. And life requires death. And so on and so on and so on.

Oneness is a bunch of crap. There is no such thing.

Rather, if there was, no one would know about it. Because if everything was one thing, there wouldn't be (1) a knower of that thing, and (2) that thing. There'd just be a blob of One, clueless about itself, since it couldn't be aware of itself, being all One'y.

So nonduality fanatics who make it into some sort of Oneness thing, while speaking from the perspective of their decidedly dualistic self -- they're irritating.

I've started reading nonduality books, then gotten nauseated by the bullshit being crapped out. Fodder for Amazon resale. Loy's book is different. He doesn't sound like the annoying nondualist in The Advaita Trap. (I could only watch a few minutes of the video; reminded me of the books I've hated.)

 

More and more, I think Alan Watts had, and still has, the best take on nonduality.

You can get a pretty damn good feel for his perspective in this video. Kudos to whoever had the genius inspiration to use a Pink Panther cartoon as a backdrop for his words. On You Tube the uploader says:

A while back, I was sitting in a waiting room listening to an Alan Watts lecture on my iPod. Bored, I glanced up at the TV screen fixed to the wall above me. It was showing the classic Pink Panther episode "The Pink Phink". At that moment, something amazing happened; Watts' words became perfectly juxtaposed with the visual. The storyline of the cartoon was flawlessly in sync with Watt's wisdom. 

So, here it is for your viewing pleasure: Pink Panther and his little friend teaching non-duality! 

 

 

Be like Keats: embrace your "negative capability"

The final chapter in Oliver Burkeman's marvelous book, "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking," is called Negative Capability. I liked it a lot. 

Get your negative on! You'll feel better. Here's some excerpts from the chapter.

That letter [by the poet John Keats] records what one Keats biographer has called a 'touchstone moment' in the history of literature:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously: I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...

...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.

...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 that we chronically undervalue negativity and the 'not-doing' skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly toward failure.

...You might choose, of course, to dedicate your life to Stoicism, like Keith Seddon in his wizard's cottage in Watford; you might undergo a completely life-transforming experience in the manner of Eckhart Tolle. 

But you can also treat these ideas as a toolkit, from which tools can be borrowed as necesssary. Anyone can become somewhat Stoic, or a bit more Buddhist, or practise memento mori a little more frequently; unlike far too many self-help schemes, which purport to be comprehensive guides to life, the negative path to happiness isn't an all-or-nothing affair.

...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 seeks 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 real revelation of the 'negative path' was not so much the path as the destination. Embracing negativity as a technique, in the end, really makes sense only if the happiness you're aiming for is one that can accomodate negative as well as positive emotions. 

...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 extraordinarily hard to put into words, and the spirit of negative capability surely dictates that we do not struggle too hard to do so.

'A good traveler 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.

Religions' search for security is self-defeating

My last post was about an over-zealous "security" volunteer at a meeting of a religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas. 

Coming across some quotes today from Alan Watts' marvelous book, "The Wisdom of Insecurity," in another excellent book -- "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking" -- made me realize that the problem with the irritating security volunteer was his attachment to a religious teaching which promises security in the form of god-realization, salvation, eternal life in a heavenly realm.

Security. This really isn't the solution to our problems, but the problem itself.

Watts cogently points out that we want to find changelessness, failing to understand that life is change. So the more we seek false security, the more we feel estranged from life, which makes us even more eager to find a sense of security that doesn't exist.

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something which endures through all the days and changes of life. 

We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being, which we call 'I.' For this we think to be the real man -- the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this 'I' does not exist.

...The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the 'I' out of the experience.

...Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate 'I' or mind can be found.

...[Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

Religious devotees like the volunteer cling to obedience as a life preserver. Obeying commandments, a holy book, a guru, practices enjoined by a spiritual teacher -- this is believed to be the path to some sort of lasting security that isn't evident in everyday life.

Nor, of course, is it evident in religious life. But beliefs don't have to be founded on reality. Mental concepts do just fine. 

A big reason for my being turned off by religiosity after spending several decades as a true believer was this: I got tired of believing that I was special. That's what religions offer: specialness.

Out of all the people in the world, you, lucky soul that you are, have been chosen by God, guru, or some other divine power to understand and experience Higher Truths that are unknown by the unchosen. I vividly remember how this was expressed on a Radha Soami Satsang Beas discussion group:

Disciples feel like they are technicolor people in a black and white world.

Exactly. This relates to the whole security thing. Religious people consider that they are humble servants of God who happen to be living life much more vividly than those who aren't so blessed.

In other words, their massive sense of egotistical specialness is thinly veiled under a hypocritical mask of "I'm nobody special." (Saying that, they feel really special.)

Look: I can understand why this happens, because I've been there and done that. When you're clutching onto a religious security blanket, it feels like the most natural thing in the world. You can't imagine living without it.

Until you do. Then the words of Oliver Burgeman, author of "The Antidote," ring true.

...[W]hat we are really doing when we attempt to achieve fixity in the midst of change, Watts argues, is trying to separate ourselves from all that change, trying to enforce a distinction between ourselves and the rest of the world. To seek security is to try to remove yourself from change, and thus from the thing that defines life.

'If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life,' Watts writes, 'I am wanting to be separate from life.'

Which brings us to the crux of the matter: it is because we want to feel secure that we build up the fortifications of ego, in order to defend ourselves, but it is those very fortifications that create the feeling of insecurity.

...We build castle walls to keep out the enemy, but it is the building of the walls that causes the enemy to spring into existence in the first place. It's only because there are castle walls that there is anything to attack. 

'The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing,' concludes Watts. 'To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath retention contest, in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.'

Other posts I've written about "The Wisdom of Insecurity" can be found here, here, here, and here. It's one of my all-time favorite books.

Wei Wu Wei (Terence Gray) on non-duality

Wei Wu Wei's "Open Secret" is a fascinating book. I took a stab at talking about this attempt to describe the indescribable here and here. 

I've been re-reading the first few chapters.

Though sometimes I get irritated by Wei Wu Wei's (pen name of Terence Gray) often-obscure way of writing, he draws me in with a feeling of There's something he's trying to say that is really interesting and important, but the truth of it is beyond the saying.

Every time I pick up "Open Secret," I get a different sort of glimpse of what that might be -- because I've changed; the words in the book haven't.

This time I'm realizing that non-duality, a prime focus of Wei Wu Wei, really isn't as complicated as a lot of New Age'y types make it. 

Religions, of course, are almost always thoroughly dualistic.

They posit soul distinct from body, heaven distinct from the world, mind distinct from matter, God distinct from creation, eternity distinct from time, spirit distinct from sensuality, and so on. 

So the notion of non-duality is pleasingly scientific. Reality isn't comprised of both natural and transcendent entities. There isn't another level to the cosmos. What there is, is seamlessly connected. 

Wei Wu Wei speaks of something that rings true to me: there aren't really "subjective" and "objective" aspects of reality. These too are interconnected. Well, even more: not so much connected, as two sides of the same coin.

There isn't any subjective "me" or "you" that is separate from an objective world outside of us. In fact, as modern neuroscience also posits, there isn't any "me" or "you" separate and distinct from the brain/body. 

Our perceiving and what is perceived is one thing. Our doing and what is done is one thing. Our thinking and what is thought is one thing. Our awareness and what we are aware of is one thing. Problems fall away with this understanding.

Not because there aren't difficulties that need to be dealt with; because there is no one separate and distinct from these difficulties. "I" no longer have a problem, since it is recognized that "I" am a fiction. 

Here's some quotes from Wei Wu Wei's book that I liked upon my second (or third) reading.

There is no cogniser apart from the "thing" cognised; there is no "thing" cognised apart from the cogniser of it. But the "cogniser" is only an act of cognition (a cognising), of which the "thing" cognised is the counterpart.

Therefore the "cogniser" and the "cognised" are not different, "not two": they can only be the "function of congnising..."

...All is am is "seeing" when I see,
All I am is "hearing" when I hear,
All I am is "sentience" when I feel,
All I am is "understanding" when I know.

True seeing is non-seeing -- no one looking.
True hearing is non-hearing -- no one listening.
True action is non-action -- no one doing.
True thinking is non-thinking -- no one thinking.
Spontaneity alone is non-volitional -- and there is no I.

...The apparent universe neither arises via, nor independently of, sentient beings. The apparent aspect of sentient beings arises with that of the universe, and the universe becomes apparent concurrently. 

...All things considered,
Bondage is wholly the notion of "I,"
And liberation is liberation from the idea of liberation.
Is there any one to be bound, any one to be free?
So what?

...Whatever you may be, you are being "lived." You are not travelling, as you think: you are being "travelled."

Remember: you are in a train. Stop trying to carry your baggage yourself. It will come along with you anyhow. 

A New Age'y slogan that doesn't make much sense

Browsing through my Facebook feed today, I came across this post that someone had passed on:

If you are depressed you are living in the past...
If you are anxious you are living in the future...
If you are at peace you are living in the present...
       ~Lao Tzu~

At first read, I liked it. Made sense. But I was pretty sure that Lao Tzu never said such a thing.

For one thing, Lao Tzu may not have ever existed. And even if a person by that name actually was the source of the Tao Te Ching (or Dao De Jing), there is nothing like that quote in the many different translations I've read.

Whatever...

I still liked the quote. Until I starting thinking about it. Then I started to see the flaws in this way of thinking. 

Aren't we always living in the present? What else is there to live in? We're not time travellers, able to journey into the past or future. When I remember the past or visualize the future, I'm doing this in the present.

Then there was the strong implication that being "at peace" is the mark of an elevated soul, enlightened being, wise sage -- however you want to refer to a non-depressed, non-anxious person "living in the present."

That seemed judgmental. And unrealistic. Who is able to control their emotions so they are always at peace? Further: who would want to do that? Being always at peace sounds a lot like being dead. Or at least semi-comatose.

I'm driving along and suddenly see an oncoming car veer into my lane. Is the fear/anxiety I feel really "living in the future"?

Sure seems like it is an entirely appropriate instinctual reaction to an impending life-threatening event. Yet the quotation implies that I should be "at peace" in the present. Until the car hits me head on. After which I'd be at peace for eternity, being dead.

There is a time for feeling at peace, and a time for feeling anxious. There is a time for feeling happy, and a time for feeling sad. Taoist writings make this clear. Life is made up of opposites, yin and yang, ever changing and blending into each other.

That said, I do think there is something true this saying points to.

We humans do indeed often feel bad about the past when this isn't warranted; we do indeed often feel anxious about the future in an unproductive way. However, worrying about whether we should be more "at peace" obviously isn't going to make us more peaceful.

Accepting that sometimes we will be at peace, and sometimes we won't -- that strikes me as much more genuinely Taoist than this made-up Lao Tzu saying.

I found a web page that had a similar attitude toward this saying, "Wisdom and Foolishness in Social Media."

But occasionally I see a supposedly wise saying that rubs me the wrong way. Here's one such saying, picked up on Facebook, and then I'll explain why it bothers me on several levels.

"If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present." -- Lao Tsu

First -- I assume "Lao Tsu" is an alternative spelling for Laozi or Lao Tzu. I'm very familiar with the Tao Teh Ching (or Daode Jing), the only text attributed to the probably mythical Laozi. I've read several different translations of it, and I am certain nothing resembling that quote appears in the Tao Teh Ching. Maybe some other well-known sage said it, but not Laozi.

Second -- I don't think it's true, or at least not true for everybody, all the time. I was particularly irritated by use of the word depressed. Depression is a common emotion, but it's also the name of a crippling mood disorder that requires careful medical management. And I can say from my own hard experience that clinical depression is not merely the result of "living in the past." It's not like that at all, actually.

Glib little sayings like this are not helpful to people struggling with a real mood disorder. It's saying that if you were just more disciplined and could think the right thoughts, you wouldn't be so messed up. It's an unskillful thing to say to someone who is actually depressed, and for whom the present is a cruel and terrifying place.

From a Buddhist perspective, the focus on "you" pulls the quote even further out of whack. Brad Warner has a post critiquing a tweet by Deepak Chopra that deals with the same issue. The tweet:

When you reach pure awareness you will have no problems, therefore there will be no need for solutions.

Sounds profound, huh? But Brad Warner says,

"Pure awareness, whatever that is, or God (my preferred term), cannot be the object of you, cannot be the possession of you, it isn't in your future, it isn't something you can ever possibly reach. It will not solve all of your problems. It couldn't even if it wanted to. It's a fantastic dream that can never come true.

"This doesn't mean everything is bleak and horrible and hopeless. It just means that approaching it in terms of you and the things you want to get cannot possibly work. It can't work precisely because thinking of things in terms of you and what you want to get is exactly the thing that blocks it."

By the same token, as long as it's you living in the present moment, you're unlikely to be completely at peace. The Buddha taught that serenity comes with realizing the ephemeral nature of the self. As Dogen said,

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening. [Genjokoan]

Beautiful concentration: expressed in words and an amazing video

This morning I picked up a slender book I hadn't looked at for a while, "Practical Taoism" (translated by Thomas Cleary). 

I liked how the translator's preface started out.

Taoism, the original wisdom tradition of ancient China, may be rendered in English as "Wayfaring." In this manner of usage, the Way is classically defined in these terms: "Humanity follows earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows the Way, the Way follows Nature." In the final sense, therefore, Taoism, or Wayfaring, refers to the pursuit of natural laws.

These natural laws are reflected in the body (earth), the mind (heaven), and in the order of the universe (the Way of Nature). The practice of Taoism, therefore, takes place in the cultivation and refinement of the natural capacities of the human body-mind continuum and its relationship with the social milieu and the natural world.

Then I read:

When there is something to strive for, don't give rise to ideas of gain and loss. Whether there is something to do, or nothing to do, let the mind always be at rest.

...When there is no intention to concentrate and yet one is never unconcentrated, that is called stable concentration. 

Control without obsession, relaxation without indulgence, no aversion in the midst of clamor, no vexation in the midst of events -- this is true concentration.

...Since ancient times, those who forgot the concrete have been many, while those who forgot the abstract have been few. To be insightful but not exploit it is forgetting the abstract.

...The Way of absolute nonresistance has power that may be shallow or deep. When it is deep, its effect includes the physical body; when shallow, it only extends to the mind. Those whose bodies are affected are spiritual people.

...Just go on responding to what is most immediately urgent, peacefully and calmly, without agitation or ignorance. This is what is called always being responsive while always being serene.

After reading those words I watched an amazing, inspiring, beautiful You Tube video called "The Incredible Power of Concentration -- Miyoko Shida." I came across it somehow or other: Facebook or Twitter's naturalistic grace.

Wow. This woman has true concentration. She is spiritual, because her Way is bodily. Also of the mind; I loved a scene near the end where she looks calmly and concentratedly directly into the camera. 

Keep your scriptures. Keep your holy places. Keep your godly saints. I'll take whatever Miyoko Shida has. Here's the inpiring video.

 

Here I learned that her performance was on a Spanish television program called "Tú Sí Que Vales" ("You Can Do It"). 

For sure. She can do it. 

Whatever "it" is. Seems like we all have it. It just shines more evidently in some people, places, and things than others. And within each of us, it waxes and wanes mysteriously.

The Taoism book I read this morning says:

But even though you cannot see it when you look, never are you not seeing it; even though you cannot hear it when you listen for it, never are you not hearing it. 

It is like the wind shaking trees and raising waves -- you can hardly call it nonexistent, but when you look at it you cannot see it, and when you grasp for it you cannot apprehend it, so you can hardly call it existent.

Aimless wanderers, here's a Taoist essay aimed at you

Admirer of philosophical Taoism (especially Chuang Tzu) that I am, I enjoyed these reflections by Hakim Bey. Hope you do also. 

Aimless wanderers of the world, disunite! We never could get organized enough to agree on uniting, anyway.

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

Aimless Wandering: Chuang Tzu's Chaos Linguistics
by Hakim Bey 

The bait is the means to get the fish where you want it, catch the fish and you forget the bait. The snare is the means to get the rabbit where you want it, catch the rabbit and forget the snare. Words are the means to get the idea where you want it, catch on to the idea and you forget about the words. Where shall I find a man who forgets about words, and have a word with him?
      -- Chuang Tzu

Does Taoism have a "metaphysics"?

Certainly later Taoism, influenced by Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, developed elaborate cosmology, ontology, theology, teleology, and eschatology - but can these "medieval accretions" be read back into the classic texts, the Tao Te Ching, the Chuang Tzu, or the Lieh Tzu?

Well, yes and no. Religious Taoism certainly established such a back-reading. But, as J. Needham pointed out, the Maoists of our century were able to evolve a Marxist reading of Taoism, or at least of the Tao Te Ching. No doubt any reading of a "spiritual" text may have some validity (since the spirit is by definition indefinable); the Tao Te Ching has proved especially malleable.

But Chuang Tzu not only has no metaphysics, he actually condemns and derides metaphysics. Supernaturalism and materialism both appear equally funny to him. His only cosmogonic principle is "chaos". Oddly enough the only philosophical tool he uses is logic - although it is the logic of dream. He makes no mention of divine principle, of the purpose of being, or personal immortality. He is beyond Good and Evil, sneers at ethics, and even makes fun of yoga.

The Chuang Tzu must surely be unique amongst all religious scripture for its remarkable ANTI-metaphysics. It qualifies as "revelation" not because it unveils hidden knowledge from "outside" the self - as other scriptures claim to do - but because it transmits a sure way to "spiritual realization", SELF-realization, in this lifetime, in this body, in this daily life. If this way or method can be summed up in one word, one might say spontaneity; and if this term were to be "defined", one might mention the phrase wei wu wei, "action/non-action".

The universe comes into being spontaneously; as Kuo Hsiang points out, the search for a "lord" (or agens) of this creation is an exercise in infinite regress toward emptiness. The Tao is not "God", as some Christian translators still believe. The Tao just happens. On the human scale misery arises solely from the uniquely human ability to fall out of harmony with this Tao - to not be spontaneous.

Chuang Tzu has no interest in why humans are so inept (no concept of "sin"); his only concern is to reverse the process and "return" to the flow. The "return" is an action; the flow itself is not an action but a state - hence the paradox "action/non-action". The concept wu wei plays such a central role in Taoism that it survives even in modern religious Taoism as the truth BEHIND all metaphysics and ritual.

In the great expianatory and communal rites of cultic Taoism as practiced in Taiwan or Honolulu today, at least one person - the priest - must attain union with the Tao, and must do so by a process of voiding his consciousness of all "deities", all metaphysical principles. As for so-called ancient "philosophical" Taoism, we might say that it has wu wei instead of a metaphysics.

Lao Tzu's goal seems to have been the conversion of the Emperor to Taoism, on the assumption that if the ruler does nothing (wu wei) the empire will run itself spontaneously. Chuang Tzu however shows almost no interest in advising rulers (except to leave him alone!), and his examples of "real humans" are almost always workmen (butchers, cobblers, cooks), or drop-out hermits, or bandits. If Chuang Tzu can be said to advocate a social program - and I'm not sure he does - it certainly has nothing to do with any imperial/bureaucratic/Confucian values or structures.

His "program" could be summed up in the phrase AIMLESS WANDERING.

[Read on...]

Don't tame your wild horse nature. Let it run wild.

It's simplistic to divide spiritually-inclined people into two types. But I love to do it! So I will!

There, I embraced my wild horse nature. I thought of a rule that seemed to make sense. I considered throttling my inclination to do something. Then...

Screw it. I'll do what I feel like doing. 

I don't want to be a well-trained horse. That's a familiar image in some spiritual, religious, meditation, and philosophical circles.

The horse is our untamed sensous, craving, lustful, thought-obsessed self. The trainer or the rider is...

Well, that's a good question. If the wild horse is one part of me, who is the part that controls the wild horse? How many of me are there, anyway?

And why do I want to be controlled, if I'm the one who is both the controlled and the controller? Seems like this introduces more confusing complexity to my psyche than I need, or want.

Such is the quandary nicely talked about by Will Buckingham in a post on his blog, The Myriad Things. I liked "Two Tales of Horse-Training" a lot. 

Read Will's essay in its entirety. Probably one of the two horse-training approaches (one being the lack thereof) will appeal to you more than the other.

Which will tell you quite a bit about yourself. (And if what I just said makes sense, it probably shouldn't, because who are you to tell yourself about something anyway!?)

Here's some Buddhism vs. Taoism morsels to whet your appetite for a full devouring of the essay.

The moral is clear: the Buddha goes on to liken the well-trained horse to the well-trained monk, who is “worthy of gifts, worthy of hospitality, worthy of offerings, worthy of reverential salutation, an unsurpassed field of merit for the world.” If you want to have those kingly qualities, if you want to prance and gallop, then you have to suffer a bit of contortion and writhing and vacillation. Bhaddāli is convinced by this argument, and goes away “satisfied and delighted in the Blessed One’s words.”

In many ways, this rings true. Certainly when I first learned to practice Buddhist meditation, I writhed and vacillated and contorted myself a whole load; but—having said this—over time found that I became “peaceful in that action.” And many of the things I have done in my life that have required a degree of training, or that have involved learning new things, have sometimes felt rather like this, involving a measure of writhing or vacillation or contortion in the process of learning to prance and gallop and charge with the highest fleetness and highest gentleness.

But I also can’t help wondering: are writhing, contortion and vacillation always necessary or desirable? Can one do pretty much the same thing, but without all this writhing about? Or—to go further—is this obsession with kingly heritage and fleetness something that should be resisted, precisely because of the writhing and vacillation that it involves? Let me try a counter-thought, moving from India to China, which I rediscovered the other day as I was rambling through the Zhuangzi. 

...Then along comes the sage, huffing and puffing after benevolence, reaching on tiptoe for righteousness, and the world for the first time has doubts; mooning and mouthing over his music, snipping and stitching away at his rites, and the world for the first time is divided… When horses live on the plain, they eat grass and drink from the streams. Pleased, they twine their necks together and rub; angry, they turn back to back and kick. This is all horses know how to do. But if you pile poles and yokes on them and line them up in crossbars and shafts, then they will learn to snap the crossbars, break the yoke, rip the carriage top, champ the bit, and chew the reins. Thus horses learn how to commit the worst kinds of mischief. This is the crime of Bo Le.

I love this passage from the Zhuangzi. I love the image of the sage “huffing and puffing after benevolence, reaching on tiptoe for righteousness”, because it is both funny and, I think, insightful. And whilst I recognise some truth in the Buddhist story, at the same time I can’t help thinking that when it is held up to scrutiny in the light of the Daoist story, there is a case to answer here. Indeed, I can’t help reflecting that I, too, have been guilty of “huffing and puffing after benevolence”, and that the results of this huffing and puffing have not always been very pretty.

...I don’t have any firm conclusion to offer here; but I wonder if, between the two stories, it might be possible to navigate a path in which training and education become matters of delight and fascination rather than the burden of the pole, yoke, crossbar and shaft. I wonder if it might be possible to think about a form of learning that harnesses our proclivities and tendencies, rather than one that attempts to supersede them. I wonder if we are too in love with the habit of difficulty when it comes to learning.

And here—because it might seem that the Buddhists are coming off somewhat for the worse in this tale of two conflicting tales—let me finish with another story. Back when I was attending classes on elementary Pāli language, I studied with a monk in Birmingham. A small group of us would meet every week to get our heads around Pāli grammar. We’d practice our conjugation of Pāli verbs out loud, reciting together. And before we started our recitations, the monk in question would give a grin and say, ‘OK, let’s play…’

Integrating reason and intuition in Tai Chi (plus rest of life)

I'm a churchless non-soul. I love reason, science, demonstrable proofs.

Yet I enjoy practicing Tai Chi, with all its talk of qi, meridians, subtle energy flows, and such, most of which isn't within the realm of proven fact.

No contradiction. When talk in my Tai Chi class turns to a word I can't readily grasp with my hand of reason, such as qi, I mentally translate it into a more accessible term for me, such as "internal energy."

I feel that energy. I'm not sure if I feel qi. Maybe they are the same thing. Maybe not.

Regardless, I've never considered that it was necessary to be sure of the truthfulness of everything Tai Chi teaches in order to practice this art, which has been called meditation-in-motion. I can set aside my skeptical scientific side and still embrace Tai Chi to the extent I'm able to grasp it.

A few days ago Amazon sent me the newly released "The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi," by Peter M. Wayne. I learned about it from my Tai Chi instructor, who, like Wayne, teaches about integrative medicine at the college level.

Wayne is both a researcher and a practitioner of Tai Chi. I'm not far into his book, but already I'm impressed with how he is able to reflect the together-yet-apart nature of Tai Chi, as expressed in the familiar Taoism symbol (several hang on the walls of our Tai Chi studio).

Here's what Wayne has to say about blending scientific reason and spiritual intuition in Tai Chi.

Working by day as a medical researcher objectively studying the science of Tai Chi and at night as a community-based Tai Chi instructor, for many years I have walked the metaphorical S-shaped line dividing the more rational and intuitive halves of the Tai Chi yin and yang symbol.

Both as a scientist and a teacher/practitioner, I have explored how best to bridge the wisdom underlying my two vocations, or in the lingo of Tai Chi, how the yin and yang can inform one another.

...In my own Tai Chi practice and when teaching Tai Chi classes, my research informs my experience and teaching, but sometimes I need to abandon the framework of science. Part of the practice of Tai Chi and other meditative arts requires turning off rational thinking and tapping into other, less developed processes, like intuition and imagination.

For example, Tai Chi classics say, "Belief or mind moves internal energy (Qi) and Qi moves the body." At this point in my Tai Chi training, on a good day, this idea is very clear to me. I can readily shift into a meditative Tai Chi flow.

But the scientific community is still far from defining or quantifying Qi, or knowing all the neurophysiological pathways involved in mind-body-energy connections.

My primary goal as a teacher is to use whatever tools I can to help students have meaningful experiences, so to teach only from pure science would be inefficient and unethical. The practitioner half of me remains skeptical of science and thinks maybe science can never address some issues.

Nevertheless, my two jobs, one as a daytime researcher and the other as an evening Tai Chi teacher, involve a delicate dance between yin and yang, both informing one another and incubating rich thoughts, and they have led to my unique style of teaching and practicing Tai Chi. 

Throughout this book, I will be clear which half of me is talking. When scientific evidence exists, I will provide the link to published research. I will distinguish this evidence from my personal experiences or experiences my students share, or principles that Tai Chi classics purport or my teachers and other masters espouse.

Refreshing. Illuminating. Nice model for anyone who wants to blend science and spirituality, reason and intuition, explanation and mystery.

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. 

We limit ourselves by failing to embrace both the yin and yang of life. Tai Chi and Taoism can help us remember that white and black can blend, and also remain apart.

I still have my "There are no rules" t-shirt. It's getting faded, but I don't want to stop wearing it. I like the message. There are no rules is a rule. Yet it is sort of a ruleless rule. Neither a rule nor not a rule. My sort of rule.

Why Taoism beats Zen on being non-religious

I can understand why someone who isn't religious wouldn't feel any need at all to embrace a philosophy that has some churchy aspects -- such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism. 

However, I enjoy reading books in both genres, and am heavy into Tai Chi, which expresses Taoist principles in movment.

It seems to me, along with others much more knowledgeable about Eastern philosophy than I am, that Zen minus Buddhism equals Taoism. 

(More or less, at least. We're not talking mathematical precision here.)

Buddhism adds in a bunch of religiosity to Zen, which would be more closely related to Taoism if it didn't have all those revered masters uttering supposedly profound commentaries on the sutras, etc. etc. 

Hans-Georg Moeller does a nice job of describing why Taoism/Daoism is less annoyingly religious than Zen in his book, "Daoism Explained." 

Daoism is much more into the body.

Daoist philosophy takes the body very seriously. Although Buddhism, especially in its early Indian forms, also cares about the body and even includes yogic practices, it focuses much more on the mind and its "spirituality." 

...Early Daoism did not react to a Buddhist philosophical background, and it did not develop into a philosophical discourse in which consciousness was a central issue.

...In Daoism, the "mind' is more or less understood in bodily terms. It is integrated into the functioning of the body and is not a separate force or constructive power. I believe that this constitutes one of the main differences between early Daoist philosophy and later Chan [Zen] Buddhism.

Daoism more strongly affirms the reality of the real.

Daoist philosophy, as I hoped to show, generally affirms the world of "presence" (you), that is all the "ten thousand things," life and death, even action and speech. The nonpresence (wu) in the midst of presence -- the emptiness that is neither dead nor alive and neither acts nor speaks -- does not expose any "relativity" of the present. Daoist emptiness and nonpresence do not diminish but rather confirm the authenticity of the present.

In comparison with Daoism, Chan has a more ambiguous concept of the reality of the real. Like Daoism, Chan also affirms the autheticity of the here and now, but it also affirms its inauthenticity. The Chan Buddhist ambivalence in regard to the reality of the real is evident in its well-known "rule of three." A mountain is a mountain. A mountain is not a mountain. A mountain is a mountain.

...In the end, the inauthentic is also accepted as authentic, and this is represented by the final statement that again sees the mountain as the mountain. This third level of reality is not to be equated with the first; it is more complex and has integrated or "superceded" its own negation.

...Ancient pre-Buddhist Daoism affirms the full reality of the real.

Daoism has a less religious institutional character.

Even though both Laozi and Zhuangzi are portrayed as masters who answer the questions of disciples, the sources do not indicate that they were revered as religious leaders by "monks." Even though Chan Buddhists were extremely critical of Buddhist religious institutions, many of them lived in monasteries. 

...The more religious character of Chan Buddhism is also demonstrated by the nature of its most important writings. The Laozi is a colllection of philosophical poetry, and the Zhuangzi is a book that includes allegories, dialogues, and short philosophical treatises.

In contrast, Chan Buddhist scriptures are often sermonlike speeches (like the famous "Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch") or records of the sayings and deeds of important priests (the so-called yulu) as noted down by the monks in the monasteries.

Naturally l like both Zen and Taoism a whole lot better, than, say, fundamentalist Catholicism (is there any other kind?).

But when I need some non-religious inspiration, more and more I tend to turn to Taoist writings of the philosophical variety. Taoism does have its own religious, supernatural side, which doesn't appeal to me. I enjoy the lighter, looser, more laughable vibe of Taoism, as compared to Zen.

Zen Buddhism also enjoys a joke, but only if one's sense of humor comports with what a Zen master dude considers is funny. If you laugh at the wrong time, or in the wrong way, he'll hit you over the head with a stick.

Philosophical Taoism doesn't have that sort of hierarchical, patriarchal stuff. Everybody is just wandering on their own path in the misty mountains, enjoying nature, doing their own thing. 

Taoism's small and great awakenings

Wake up! 

We here in the United States will say that to someone who is figuratively sleeping. Meaning, if they don't understand something obvious, something they're clueless about but should be clued in to, waking up is what we want them to do.

Taoism also talks about awakening. In a way that is both similar and different. Hans-Georg Moeller explains Taoism's (or Daoism's) small and great awakenings in his book, "Daoism Explained." 

It's one of my favorite Taoist books.

Moeller has a fresh way of looking upon Taoism's way of looking upon things. He argues convincingly that many Western interpreters of Taoism overlay Christian or Platonic sorts of concepts upon Chinese notions of what reality is all about.

For example, Moeller says the small and great awakenings can be understood in terms of a familiar Taoist image: that of a spoked wheel and its hub.

The wheel is you (in Chinese), something, a presence. The hub is wu, nothing, an absence.

Yet the nothing of the empty hub is the key to the wheel doing what it does: revolve. So presence and absence are co-equals in Taoism, whereas by and large Western philosophies and religions abhor nothingness.

Also, Western minds like to feel that there could be a spoke on the wheel that is more true than the others. Each of our lives is made up of many time-revolutions. Most of us consider that somewhere in all that spinning is the real me. 

Maybe in the past. Maybe right now. Maybe in the future. Whatever, some changings, some perspectives, some spoke being higher or lower must be the "me" that is preferred, the person I really am.

A small awakening consists of the realization that this isn't the case. 

Within each phase, within each small dream and small waking, it is important to be fully absorbed within the phase, and each small segment is fully real. Life and death are such small segments of change and each step between the segments is a small awakening -- or a small sleep.

To really awaken means to newly accept another stage in the process, to begin another life or death. The small awakening takes place in the "periphery" of change, and while in the periphery of change, while taking an "active" part in the process, it is best to be fully awake in one's presence. A small awakening is the full acceptance and integration of oneself in the present circumstances.

So the small awakening mostly involves a sense of you, presence in Chinese. I was fully this before. I am fully this now. Unmarried/ married. Religious/ unbeliever. Conservative/ liberal. Child/ adult. Alive/ dead. Dreaming/ awake.

Instead of looking for some transcendent or ultimate something-or-other that isn't whatever I am now, I realize that whichever spoke of the wheel of life I am now, that is the presence I fully embrace.

I can't tell you how many times someone has left a comment on this blog along the lines of, "Brian, you used to believe in God so strongly. How is it possible for you to be such an avid unbeliever now? You must have been deceiving yourself before. Or maybe you are now?"

People who say stuff like that obviously haven't had a Taoist small awakening. They don't understand that everything, including people, changes. Who we are today isn't who we were yesterday. Who we will be tomorrow is somebody else again.

It'd be crazy to ask me, "Brian, you used to be six years old. How is it possible for you to be sixty-four now?" I'd reply with a bemused smirk, "Because change happens, dude. Once I was fully a believer; now I'm fully an unbeliever. Once I was fully six. Now I'm fully sixty-four."

Taoism is right in line with modern neuroscience in this respect: neither finds any enduring self or soul to be part of human nature. We are wise to consider that whoever we are now, is who we really are. When there's another now, there will another really.

But for Taoism, a great awakening is even more awake'y than a small awakening. Here's how Moeller describes it.

The great awakening is the awakening of the Daoist sage -- it is his/her "enlightenment." It is the "ultimate" change from the present Zhuang Zhou to the nonpresent Master Zhuang. This awakening does not lead beyond life and death, but rather right to their center.

A Daoist sage identifies him/herself not with the turning spokes of a wheel but with its unmoving hub. To be the pivot or center of change means to be identified with the whole process of change. This "zero-perspective" on the process of change is the Daoist sage's perspective on life and death, and the great awakening is the awakening to this perspective.

As opposed to the small awakened who totally identifies him/herself with the present segment of change, with life or death, the sage identifies him/herself with neither of the specific segments, but with the whole process as such.

...From the zero-perspective of the hub, the wheel always looks the same, no matter where the spokes are. Since the sage has no present "self" and no present identity or function, his/her own present body is his/her present periphery or environment.

Which sounds like a fancy way of saying pretty much what the Beatles sang in "I Am The Walrus." 

I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together

Cool. Or I guess I should say, Goo goo goo joob goo goo goo joob.

Update: Just read a letter to the editor in New Scientist. Seems on the same wavelength.

From Wolf Kirchmeir
I think what is wrong with the metaphors Jan Westerhoff gives for the self is that both a string of pearls and a rope are objects, but the self is a process.

A better metaphor would be a fountain. The fountain's shape exists as long as there is water flowing, and ceases when it stops. The self is the shape, not the water. The water represents the operations in the brain.

This idea is not mine, but I cannot recall where I first encountered it.
Blind River, Ontario, Canada 

It's wrong to say "those who know, say not." There, I said it.

I really liked my response to something a commenter on a recent post said.

This isn't terribly surprising, since I usually like what I say. After all, there's not much point to saying stuff that makes me feel "I shouldn't have said that." Occasionally that happens. Usually, though, what I say is something I want to say.

So like most people, I've got no problem with saying. There's a time to say. And a time not to say. Thus I replied to the commenter this way:

david r, how can you be sure that "Those who know, say not. Those that say, know not. This is what experiencing God in reality is all about."

I assume you got that idea from somewhere. It isn't original. The Tao Te Ching says something very similar. So someone said "those who know, don't say." Yet they said that. I guess we shouldn't believe them, since if they said it, this shows they don't know what God is all about.

I don't understand how "those who know" and "those who say" are related in the fashion you seem to believe in.

For example: dancing is something you do, something you experience, something that can't be described in words. I know this. I'm just an average dancer, but I've done a lot of ballroom dancing, in a lot of styles. I've seen a lot of excellent dancers much better than me.

And I've heard them say lots of things about how to dance. There isn't any conflict between them (1) knowing how to dance really well, and (2) being able how to talk about dancing, including instructing people in how to dance better.

Every dancer knows the difference between talking about dancing and dancing. I assume you believe that every God-seeker knows the difference between talking about knowing God and knowing God. Why is it that you believe you can't do both?

Not at the same time. At different times.

Again, this is not an astounding idea. Every dancer, like every skier or every skateboarder, knows that you can't talk and think about what you're doing while you're doing it -- if you want to really do it. Doing requires an immersion in the activity that talking and thinking interfere with.

But this is the case with every activity.

So why is knowing God any different? Why can't someone have an experience of knowing God, and then later talk as best he/she can about that experience? Everyone knows the difference between direct experience and talking about experiences. Again, dancers sure do. Skateboarders sure do.

So what reason do you have for believing that only when it comes to God, is it impossible to both experience God and later say something about that experience?

I wasn't implying that it is truly possible to experience God.

Maybe it is. More likely, it isn't. I was just arguing that if it is possible, I don't agree with the oft-heard assumption that anyone who says something about their experience didn't really come to know what God (or ultimate reality, for the nontheistic) is all about.

Picking up my well-worn copy of the Tao Te Ching translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, I found that the first few lines speak about this saying/naming/knowing issue.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name. 

Okay. This is totally consistent with my point.

There's a difference between what we say about Tao or God, and what Tao or God is in itself. Pretty obvious, really.

Such is the case with everything. I can guarantee that no matter how many wonderful things someone says about me -- and feel free to do this -- the sum total of all those sayings won't add up to the feeling I have of being "me." 

After all, I know myself subjectively from the inside.

All the words that can be used to describe me are attempts to name discrete features of me that are evident from the outside. Another "philosophical translation" of the first lines of the Tao Te Ching by Roger Ames and David Hall seems to reflect this notion.

Way-making (dao) that can be put into words is not really way-making.
And naming (ming) that can assign fixed reference to things is not really naming. 

Interestingly, both translations make clear that the named and the nameless are essentially co-equal. 

These two [named and nameless] spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

These two -- the nameless and what is named -- emerge from the same source yet are referred to differently.
Together they are called obscure.
The obscurest of the obscure,
They are the swinging gateway of the manifold mysteries. 

Now, the Tao Te Ching is just words.

I'm a big admirer of Taoism, and an avid Tai Chi practitioner (Taoism expressed in motion, some call it). But I'm not about to claim that the Tao Te Ching expresses any sort of unique understanding of reality.

I'm just arguing there's no way the Tao Te Ching can be used to bolster a belief that "Those who know, say not. Those that say, know not." Saying and not saying in Taoism are just two different things. Both valid. Both real. Both expressions of the same source.

Which is mysterious. 

I pretty much agree with what Alan Watts says in "Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking."

So the Taoist, in common with the Hindus and the Buddhists, is a great advocate of intellectual silence. Mind you, one doesn't say that the intellect is a bad thing, or that one should be an anti-intellectual. Not at all.

Thnking is just as much a part of the process of nature as a web woven by a spider is. The spider weaves the web to make a net for flies, and the mind weaves a net for catching the universe. And that is fine, but there is something more to the universe than the net made for catching it.

But in order to find this something else, you must temporarily stop using the net, just as, if you want to hear what other people have to say, you have to stop talking. And if you want to talk, you must also know what you are talking about.

In other words, if words represent the real world, then you must be open to the real world in order to translate it effectively into words. But we are not taught to do that. Most of us think compulsively all the time.

That is to say, we carry on a perpetual interior conversation, because we are afraid that if that conversation were to cease, we too would cease. And, in a way, we would.

So, the Taoists speak constantly of being thoughtless, of having an empty mind, so that one can communicate with the real world without distortion. 

The self: a trick your mind plays on not-you

Here's some good news, and some even better news, from the current special issue of New Scientist: "The Great Illusion of the Self."

You're being tricked by an expert! And who doesn't like amazing tricks? Even better, the trickster is your own mind! You're your own magician. 

Well, you would be if you existed. But almost certainly you don't. At least, not in any way close to how you feel that you do.

In 10 pages, several New Scientist stories -- "Who Are You?," What Are You?," "When Are You?," "Where Are You?," "Why Are You?" -- persuasively present evidence that an enduring detached self isn't who we are, even though this is how it seems to us.

Here's an excerpt from Jan Westerhoff's What Are You?

THERE appear to be few things more certain to us than the existence of our selves. We might be sceptical about the existence of the world around us, but how could we be in doubt about the existence of us? Isn't doubt made impossible by the fact that there is somebody who is doubting something? Who, if not us, would this somebody be?

While it seems irrefutable that we must exist in some sense, things get a lot more puzzling once we try to get a better grip of what having a self actually amounts to.

Three beliefs about the self are absolutely fundamental for our belief of who we are. First, we regard ourselves as unchanging and continuous. This is not to say that we remain forever the same, but that among all this change there is something that remains constant and that makes the "me" today the same person I was five years ago and will be five years in the future.

Second, we see our self as the unifier that brings it all together. The world presents itself to us as a cacophony of sights, sounds, smells, mental images, recollections and so forth. In the self, these are all integrated and an image of a single, unified world emerges.

Finally, the self is an agent. It is the thinker of our thoughts and the doer of our deeds. It is where the representation of the world, unified into one coherent whole, is used so we can act on this world.

All of these beliefs appear to be blindingly obvious and as certain as can be. But as we look at them more closely, they become less and less self-evident.

It would seem obvious that we exist continuously from our first moments in our mother's womb up to our death. Yet during the time that our self exists, it undergoes substantial changes in beliefs, abilities, desires and moods. The happy self of yesterday cannot be exactly the same as the grief-stricken self of today, for example. But we surely still have the same self today that we had yesterday.

There are two different models of the self we can use to explore this issue: a string of pearls and a rope. According to the first model, our self is something constant that has all the changing properties but remains itself unchanged. Like a thread running through every pearl on a string, our self runs through every single moment of our lives, providing a core and a unity for them. The difficulty with this view of the self is that it cannot be most of the things we usually think define us. Being happy or sad, being able to speak Chinese, preferring cherries to strawberries, even being conscious – all these are changeable states, the disappearance of which should not affect the self, as a disappearance of individual pearls should not affect the thread. But it then becomes unclear why such a minimal self should have the central status in our lives that we usually accord to it.

The second model is based on the fact that a rope holds together even though there is no single fibre running through the entire rope, just a sequence of overlapping shorter fibres. Similarly, our self might just be the continuity of overlapping mental events. While this view has a certain plausibility, it has problems of its own. We usually assume that when we think of something or make a decision, it is the whole of us doing it, not just some specific part. Yet, according to the rope view, our self is never completely present at any point, just like a rope's threads do not run its entire length.

It seems then as if we are left with the unattractive choice between a continuous self so far removed from everything constituting us that its absence would scarcely be noticeable, and a self that actually consists of components of our mental life, but contains no constant part we could identify with. The empirical evidence we have so far points towards the rope view, but it is by no means settled.

Here's the introduction to the special issue:

As you wake up each morning, hazy and disoriented, you gradually become aware of the rustling of the sheets, sense their texture and squint at the light. One aspect of your self has reassembled: the first-person observer of reality, inhabiting a human body.

As wakefulness grows, so does your sense of having a past, a personality and motivations. Your self is complete, as both witness of the world and bearer of your consciousness and identity. You.

This intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience. But it is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel. Some thinkers even go so far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self.

Not only neuroscientific thinkers. Philosophical and spiritual thinkers also. Psychologist Susan Blackmore does a good job of presenting this selfless perspective in her book, "Ten Zen Questions." I'm fine with it. Actually, more than fine.

I love the notion that "I" don't exist. Takes the pressure off me to know that I'm an illusion. Like Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Like salvation. Life after death. Hell or heaven.

Blackmore writes:

But what about me and my conscious experiences? Where do I fit into this integrated system of inputs, outputs and multiple parallel processing systems? 

The strange thing is that I feel as if I am in the middle of all this activity, experiencing what comes in through the senses, and deciding what to do in response, when in fact the brain seems to have no need of me.

There is no central place or process where I could be, and the brain seems capable of doing everything it does without any supervisor, decider or inner experiencer. 

...The temptation to fall into dualism is so strong that escaping from it, and from the popular idea that we have a spirit or soul, has been a rare insight in human history. This insight is not confined to modern science and philosophy, but can be found at the heart of Christian mysticism, Sufism, Advaita, Taoism, and Buddhism.

All these traditions claim that the apparent duality of the world is an illusion, and that underlying the illusion everything is one. 

Along with this often goes the idea that there is no separate self who acts, so that realizing nonduality also means giving up the sense of personal action or of being the "doer" of what happens. This is rather hard to accept, which is probably why such traditions are so much less popular than the great theistic religions, or those that promise heaven and hell to reward the actions of individual souls.

...There's some stupid bastard doing a U-turn in the middle of the road right in front of my bike. I am angry and want to shout "You idiot -- what do you think you're doing? You nearly knocked me off!" Can the sight of that idiotic man be me?

Yes. Of course.

If I stop, calm down, and search for the me who is looking at him I will find only him, and his car, and the road. If I search for the me who is angry with him I will find only the anger bubbling up. It's the same with everything I experience; there is not a separate me as well as the experience.

It is hard to accept that I am all those people walking down the street; that I am, at least in this fleeting moment, that Muslim woman with her stupid veil, that annoying child with the ice cream, that crowd of giggling school girls. 

Yet somehow or other this way of looking makes it easier to be kind.

Meandering is the path; uselessness is the purpose

The older I get, the less I care. Must be getting close to my Ultimate Enlightenment.

Except, I care so little, I've lost interest in trying to figure out whether I'm closer to or further from something or other... God, spiritual truth, Buddha-nature, enlightenment, Tantric ecstacy, whatever.

For a long time the notion of a spiritual path made sense to me. Now, it doesn't. A path leads to somewhere I want to go. And which I know exists. What the hell is a spiritual path? Can anybody point to it? Are there signs of the destination?

Devotees of religions, forms of spirituality, mystical practices -- they're seeking something they don't have.

I can heartily identify with that. I don't have a Retina Macbook Pro laptop. And I want one! Difference is, I've seen and touched a Retina Macbook Pro laptop. I haven't seen or touched God, spirit, soul, ultimate reality, heaven, or anything else spiritual paths supposedly lead to.

So meandering aimlessly appeals to me now. I still have things on my to-do list, of course. (I'm married, after all.) I just feel much more comfortable not-knowing what life is going to bring me. Or what I'll bring to life.

Yesterday I woke up with a plan for the day in mind. Finding that our wi-fi router, Apple's Airport Extreme, wasn't working dumped that plan in my psyche's garbage heap. I spent much of the day figuring out what was going on with some recalcitrant pieces of technology, a modem and router, which had their own ideas about how I should spend the day.

Which was fine.

A few years ago, in January 2008, I talked about this sort of meandering in "Meditation is useless." I can't believe how wise I was in that post. That's the thing about me: I find it so easy to agree with myself! 

I've meditated daily for almost forty years. I've read Zen literature for even longer. I've never actually practiced Zen. But maybe I have. Heck, I surely have.

We all have. We're alive. And once in a while, either by accident or on purpose, or with purposeless purpose, we see what life seemingly is all about. A glimpse at least.

It's cold here in Oregon right now. Freezing cold at night, which is fairly rare in the temperate Willamette Valley. This morning I got up and looked at our indoor thermometer, which also shows the outdoor temperature.

"27.2 degrees," I said to myself. At that moment I had a flash of it's so absolutely right. That was the temperature! Absolutely marvelous! In a little while it'd be different. And that too, absolutely right.

It might snow later in the week. Which could make it tough to drive around. Still, absolutely right. There's always only one thing going on: what's going on.

Any attempt to convince oneself of that – completely useless. Yet this is what religion is all about. As is Zen and Taoism.

The only difference, and it's a big one, is that religions take themselves seriously. Zen and Taoism don't. From what I've read, the ultimate Zen experience is throwing a pie in the face of your most revered Master.

Whereupon he laughs uproariously. So do you. What a joke!

True. But the humor can be related to serious neuroscience. 

This morning I was reading another chapter in my new favorite book, Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World." Divided refers to the left and right hemispheres, which look upon the world in markedly different ways.

Thus it is almost as if we're two different people. McGilchrist says that in people where the connection between the hemispheres has been severed, they can still function mostly normally. 

So the two hemispheres can be viewed as each being conscious, since this is explicit in a "split brain" patient and implicit in our own everyday divided sense of self. At the end of McGilchrist's The Nature of the Two Worlds chapter, I learned about a central difference between the left and right hemispheres.

The left is purposeful. The right is caring... about what is, not what could be.

The nature of language in the left hemisphere and its relationship with grasp imply the overriding value to it of use. The left hemisphere is aways engaged in a purpose: it always has an end in view, and downgrades whatever has no instrumental purpose in sight.

The right hemisphere, by contrast, has no designs on anything. It is vigilant for whatever is, without preconceptions, without a predefined purpose. The right hemisphere has a relationship of concern or care (what Heidegger calls Sorge) with whatever happens to be.

...The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.

The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known -- and to this world it exists in a relationship of care.

If "spirituality" is a word that means anything, and increasingly I feel that it doesn't, it points to the world of the brain's right hemisphere. There's no path here, no perfection, no eternal truth, no disembodied reality. There's uncertainty, awe, being present caringly with what is here and now.

Where the left hemisphere's relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use, it, the right hemisphere's appears to be one of reaching out -- just that. Without purpose.

Remember one of the unsacred teachings of useless Duhism: 

The Universe hears your every wish, and wonders why you can't hear it replying, "Uhhh… no."

How humans perceive the cosmos isn't how it really is

Really. A great word. It can be used, or said, so many ways. 

Put a question mark on the end; add a note of sarcasm; and you've got an ironic Really? Or... Finish with an exclamation mark; make your tone confident; and you've got a declarative Really!

I find it easy to swing both ways.

To me, the scientific method is our best way of defending a Really! However, this only applies what can really be known by us humans. And what we can know is determined/limited by how we know -- using the human brain and sense organs.

So when it comes to defending how the 21st century version of Homo sapiens (that inhabits one of 100 billion or so star systems in a single galaxy among 100 billion or so other galaxies) looks upon the cosmos, I'm inclined to a Really?

Meaning, it seems to be extremely likely, if not virtually certain, that beings with other forms of consciousness exist elsewhere in the universe. Also, that these beings would perceive reality in a considerably different way from how humans do.

In part, I base that conclusion on countless dog walks where I observe our dog (now, dogs) experiencing the world with sense organs and cognition that vary a lot from mine. If I extrapolate to a being from an advanced alien civilization whose consciousness is as different from mine as mine is from our dog's, I can imagine how limited (or at least different) our understanding of the cosmos could appear to this being.

This is one of the points that frequent Church of the Churchless visitor Jon made in some interesting comments on a recent post, "Taoism isn't mystical. It is natural."

Jon engaged in a comment conversation with George, who raised some valid questions about the nature of consciousness and how science is the best approach to understanding objective reality. Below I've shared some of Jon's comments. They make sense as is, but you might want to read additional comments on the post from George and others (including me) that stimulated these thoughts from Jon.

As noted above, along with Jon I believe in science's ability to know objective reality. With the caveat, though, that what is known is human knowledge. Beyond the bounds of what we Homo sapiens are capable of knowing... there lies what ancient cartographers termed Terra Incognita, unmapped regions of reality.

Here are Jon's comments:

I too do not find the notion of consciousness preceding matter in any way coherent. But I also find that the materialist version of events as it stands, sorely lacking. I'm not alone in this view, the mind-body problem has been raging for over 2000 years and doesn't look as if it is about to be solved any time soon.

That a solution has evaded the best minds for centuries points to the probability that it's not solvable by the cognitive capabilities of humans (at least at this stage of evolution.) Just as the comprehension of Shakespeare is cognitively closed to a rat, there may be problems that are out of the reach of the biology of humans.

What is plainly evident is that something is going on - there is a momentum that is disclosed at all points and at all scales of the cosmos. Again, this momentum is quite mysterious to human cognition - not because there is anything supernatural about it - it's all wholly natural, it's just that its deepest nature is beyond human comprehension.

It seems that there is a form of power, order and intelligence* at work. We could just call this nature - or to distinguish its scale from what we ordinarily think of nature, we could call it cosmic nature. This cosmic nature that produces black holes, effortlessly repairs cells and DNA, coverts photons into sugars, creates the orbital energy of the electron and so on... this momentum or nature is what I understand as Tao.

*Our problem is that when we think of intelligence we posit a supernatural designer - this is part of our ignorance due to our cognitive limitations.

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

I completely agree that the evolution of a brain and nervous system is absolutely necessary for consciousness *as we know it* to arise.

Whether there is a basic form of proto-consciousness or proto-presence in subatomic activity (and therefore all matter/energy) is debatable - although credible minds such as David Chalmers and Galen Strawson do not completely rule this out.

Of course Tao - or Nature or the Cosmos for that matter - is vague or ill-defined. That was the point of my comment. I believe that we don't - and possibly CAN'T - have a total grasp on these things. When we (sensibly) reject religion we naturally look to science for our answers. And science successfully provides us with a map of the known. It's as if we are looking through a keyhole and science more or less explains (or describes) what's on view. But it's more than reasonable to deduce that the view through the keyhole is not the full extent of reality itself.

The keyhole view represents the frequencies of reality available to the evolved biology of the human organism. There is no evolutionary necessity to have a view that goes beyond these frequencies. Science does a fine job at accounting for what is available. But it might become clear that it would be a wholly anthropocentric conceit to assume that this represents the full (and to some degree, accurate) picture.

If the spiritual traditions have any value, it's that they intuit this vaster potential. It's just that their science is dismal - primitive, magical and thoroughly anthropomorphic.

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

As it stands, the universe can be viewed naturally or supernaturally. Science favors the former and religion is quite partial to the latter.

There is a third possibility. Due to evolutionary limitations, the natural world (the natural cosmos) is only partially (fractionally) comprehended and understood.

And this might always be the case since evolution may have no 'reason' to advance our comprehension to frequencies that have no fitness value. Or it may simply be the case that Homo sapiens or the planet will be wiped out before our biology is equipped to understand certain things.

This undisclosed naturalism is not the supernatural - although it may be lazily taken to be so.

You use the word metaphysical often. Metaphysical can mean speculative/theoretical or it could mean supernatural. I'm arguing that there is nothing supernatural about the undisclosed cosmos - its hidden nature is due to OUR limitations. Of course by its very nature, there has to be a theoretical element to an undisclosed cosmos.

And hey, the edges of the disclosed cosmos are INCREASINGLY dependent on theory and speculation. No one has evidence of dark matter for instance - dark matter 'exists' only by virtue of mathematics.

Science might show us that angels don't exist, that mediums are fakes, that gurus and sages are embellishing simple, natural truths. But it can't fully account for the undisclosed cosmos for the reasons argued above.

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

I wouldn't call it [Taoism] a middle way, I'd say that it's a more encompassing outlook. It accords totally with science - without compromise. And yet it takes into account the 'impulse' at the core of spirituality.

I'm not sure that my characterisation of science is a 'bit off'. The reason I mentioned those particular things was to highlight a difference between the supernatural and what I referred to as the undisclosed. And of course you are right, we shouldn't try to impose limits on science, but we might recognize that science is ultimately limited by biology.

Imagine a monkey. It's wearing blinkers. And tinted sunglasses that only let in certain frequencies. It has a hearing aid that picks up a limited band of frequencies. The monkey is wearing thick gloves that limit its tactile perception. The capacities of its brain have been determined by genes and adaption to its specific environment... and so on.

It thinks that it more or less has a grasp or overview of reality.

1. What it actually has a grasp on, is the perception of reality that is AVAILABLE to it.

2. The monkey's comprehension of reality (and all else) is determined therefore by principles or 'forces' that must ultimately lie outside of its grasp.

They are mysterious not because they are supernatural/metaphysical, but because of the limitations of the monkey's predicament.

And so our knowledge of the undisclosed is simply that it IS. Knowledge ABOUT the unknown would be an oxymoron - and you are quite right to demand evidence for this sort of (insider knowledge) claim.

Zhuangzi's (Chuang Tzu's) delicious weightlessness

I like the idea of floating free, weightless, able to move here, there, in any direction, with little or no effort, unbound.

Even better... for this not to be an idea, but experience.

Which helps explain, as I blogged about before, why Daoism/Taoism resonates with me.

There's a freedom, a playfulness, a whatever in Daoist philosophy that mirrors the difference between relaxed Tai Chi and the hard-edged traditional Shotokan karate I spent nine years training in before I switched to what can be called Daoism-in-motion.

Daoism is difficult to put a conceptual finger on. I've been reading and re-reading various translations of the Daode Jing since my college days, many moons and suns ago.

What the Daode Jing means, and even whether it was written by somebody we know as Laozi/Lao Tzu, are open questions. Both for me and scholars.

Chad Hansen is a professor of Chinese Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. In his book, "A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought," Hansen says that to grasp Daoism, it isn't enough to study Laozi. Zhuangzi/Chuang Tzu is the ancient Chinese man with a more mature grasp of what we have come to call Daoism.

(Hansen starts his Zhuangzi chapter with a quote from Angus Graham: "Chuang Tzu never knew he was a 'Taoist.'" True. Just as Christ never knew he was a Christian, and Buddha never knew he was a Buddhist.)

The motto of this churchless blog is preaching the gospel of spiritual independence. Zhuangzi, explains Hansen, has a wonderful image of what supports the marvelous variety of philosophies of life, religious beliefs, spiritual predelictions, life goals, and such which we humans pursue.

Absolutism is a no-no for Zhuangzi.

Let us talk, he [Zhuangzi] says, about talking about something, and about not talking about anything. Zhuangzi invites us to consider an Ur-perspective, a view from nowhere. That is the perspective from which shi [this] and bi [other] do not contrast and complement each other. 

He calls it the hinge of daos (dao-shu). This is a hypothetical, unbiased, purely nonpurposive perspective that is prior to any system of language. Each pattern of prescriptive shiing [right'ing] and feiing [wrong'ing] starts from the center of a circle of infinite possibilities. 

The view from the axis of daos [ways] is not where nothing can be said. It is rather the point from which anything can be said with equal warrant. Once we say something, we step off the axis onto a particular dao/path. From the axis, we can go out at any angle.

...Zhuangzi's metaperspective does not lead to nonperspectival knowledge of things. It is not a window on the thing in itself, but on the bewildering range of possibilities. It leads us to a conception of the limits of knowing.

...The skeptic can say nothing about reality because we cannot prove it. THe mystic can say nothing in principle about incommensurable reality. They thus say the same no-thing. One smiles more and has an awestruck look in his eyes. The other furrows his brow a lot.

I'm with the smiling Daoists. 

There's way too much seriousness in the world, much of it produced by religious fundamentalists who believe they, and only they, know what is right and wrong, good and bad, God's will and the Devil's tempting.

Following the passage above, Hansen nicely illustrates the pleasure of a Daoist outlook on life.

A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangzi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose).

Nietzche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abysss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness.

Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of the cliff as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangzi are both floating free. 

Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness -- free flight -- not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangzi's reaction is not "Oh no!" but "Whee!"

Beautiful.

That "Whee!" reminded me of something. Dimly. A blog post I'd written... where I said Whee... about???... probably Daoism. The Great God Google quickly confirmed my intuition.

Ah, I love to quote myself.

We do our best to understand what can be understood. But some things can't be understood. Especially things that aren't a thing, as noted above.

We could follow Wittgenstein's advice: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." That isn't much fun, though. We're social, communicative creatures. So we use our imagination to detour around the roadblock of what can't be spoken of, because it can't be understood.

Whee! We're still driving on the understanding road!

As fast as we want. Even going offroad... then onroad... wherever. No problem. After all, it's an imaginary road, and we're not getting anywhere in really real reality. Just our imaginary reality.

Taoists do a lot of laughing. At themselves. At the world. At the Tao. They don't take themselves very seriously. This came through in Qiguang's entertaining talk.

Near the end of his presentation he told a story, showing an illustration from his book that he'd drawn himself in a Taoist style: people small, nature large.

A Chinese man is driving a cart pulled by a horse. There's a jug of wine sitting behind his seat. No luggage. No other belongings. Just a large jug of wine. What else does he need?

A boy is walking in back of the cart. He's carrying a hoe. Qiguang said that the man hired the boy to follow him. When the man dies and falls off the cart (too much wine?) the boy's job is to bury him where he lies with the hoe.

Confucianism, Qiguang said, has rules about how a person is supposed to be buried. The Taoist attitude is, whatever. So the man is flaunting Confucian rigidity and pretentiousness.

If we feel like imagining what reality is like, no problem. Whatever. We just shouldn't take our imagining very seriously, or expect other people to share in it.

Religious myths can be entertaining. Fun. Comforting. Inspiring. If we don't feel like remaining silent regarding what can't be spoken about, why not imagine away?

Knowing what we're doing. With a smile on our face.

Weightlessly. Realizing that there isn't a single Dao/Tao, that Dao isn't like a God who insists on One Virtuous Way of doing things. There are many ways, many paths, many daos.

Ours is ours; other people have their own.

Except ours and own aren't really the right words, since ways arise from the presence of everything, not just us. How could we follow a path through a forest if there weren't any trees?