Church of the Churchless

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?

Taoism isn't mystical. It is natural.

Life is a mystery. Such, for me, is a given. Don't try to argue me out of it. Hopeless task.

For about forty years I believed this meant the cosmos must have mystical underpinnings, some transcendental Absoluteness which, though hidden from everyday experience, held clues -- if not the answer -- to what life, the cosmos, birth and death, heck, everything, was all about.

Now, I'm not into that belief very much. In fact, very little. Mysticism has come to strike me as just another way of saying "life is a mystery." 

Question is: can the mystery be unraveled, understood, fathomed?

Or perhaps the best approach to living life to simply live it, accepting that us limited human beings never are going to grasp a 14 billion year old universe, made up of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, governed by laws of nature which are, and may always be, imperfectly understood.

Taoism appeals to me.

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

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

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

Last month I blogged about how I was enjoying "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism," by Chad Hansen and Brandon Toporov. The book is filled with pithy gems that are backed up by Hansen's indepth understanding of Chinese philosophy in general, and Taoism in particular. 

I really like this passage.

Every situation, in the Taoist view, provides an opportunity for some kind of harmonious interaction with the Tao. When one has mastered the ultimate skill -- the skill of living itself -- there is no fretting or stumbling about whether or not one has the "proper" skill. One simply responds authentically at all times. But this is the skill of the sage!

For one who follows the Tao, skill expresses itself effortlessly and appropriately. Baseball star Mickey Rivers captured something of this open, trusting attitude toward all experience when he said, "Ain't no use worrying about things you control, because if you've got control over them, ain't no use worrying. Ain't no use worrying about things you can't control, because if you can't control them, ain't no use worrying."

When you think about it, you realize that each and every situation we face in life, at each and every moment, asks for some kind of response from us -- even if that response is, like Walter Cronkite's [at moment of first moon landing], an admission that we have no formal response at the moment, only ourselves.

The real question is not whether we have "mastered" all possible contingencies in advance, but whether we are wasting time and energy worrying about whether we have control over a given moment. A better course, a Taoist would argue, would be simply to do what we are naturally inspired to do, time and time and time and time again. From this kind of daily commitment, sages may emerge.

Yes. Simply to do what we are naturally inspired to do, time and time and time and time again. 

Not that we have a choice. So I understand, having been one of these people, why some are naturally inspired to seek a transcendental, mystical, heaven-ward, divine reality which is theorized to be a vast expansion (or alternative) of what physical Nature is known to be.

Since I'm liking "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism" so much, I dove into deeper Chad Hansen-writing waters and bought his "A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought." It's also highly enjoyable, though some would find it too scholarly. 

Here's a passage that resonated with my increasing skepticism toward mysticism. Hansen disagrees with those who consider philosophical Taoism to be mystical in the same way Hindu or Buddhist philosophy is. The last part is terrific.

I have challenged here the accepted view of what Daoism is. That accepted view treats Daoism as a metaphysical mysticism. The interpreters allow that what they see in the text is incoherent gibberish, but they seek to explain it by calling it deep and profound mysticism. Of course, anything they say will be incoherent, but somehow the interpreter divines that behind this screen lies a theory of reality and language.

The interpreter does not tell us how he managed to extract meaning from gibberish. But he confidently tells us that like all mystics, the Daoist absolutely claims the existence of a single dao and holds a theory of language such that language can't... something or other... the dao.

What do interpreters divine in the unspoken theory of reality and language that justifies writing this mass of contradictions? I cannot claim to know. I have tried without success to follow a number of accounts. I shall only try to mimic what I take to be what I am hearing so the reader can understand my frustration.

The most common version asserts the unity of mysticism. If we can use the word, there must be something in common among all mystics. So Daoist theory must be like that of the mystics of India and the West. That theory of language starts with the assumptions of Platonic semantics. Every term is meaningful if and only if it points to an unchanging reality.

Interpreters place that theory of language alongside a metaphysical assumption that reality consists of objects. But the objects we see are constantly changing. So language can't refer to any of these. Mysticism gets its paradoxical character, then, from claiming, again as Plato does, that there is some unchanging object.

The mystic, unlike Plato however, incoherently claims this is an object of experience -- albeit a mystical experience, which since it is unlike ordinary experience must not be an experience -- but never mind.

Now that we have this monistic and unchanging object, however we got it, one would expect that the conclusion should be relief. Language must be about that unchanging object. But no. They now conclude that language cannot pick out that object. It can only point to the ordinary objects which the theory had earlier denied that language can properly refer to. 

Now they turn the tables and insist that language can only distort the only real unchanging object there is -- the dao, Buddha Nature, Brahman, Absolute, or God.

This reminded me of what I usually say when someone leaves a comment on this blog, saying, in effect, "Brian, you think too much! You're too wordy! You're missing the divine reality that can only be known through submission, silence, surrender. Meditate. All this analyzing is keeping you from reaching God."

My response:

"Dude, you did a lot of thinking in order to tell me to stop thinking. You used a bunch of words in your advice to give up words. You weren't meditating when you got on the Internet and posted your comment. You were analyzing me, which is what you criticized me for doing. But, hey, good for you. We're the same -- human beings acting naturally, simply doing what we're drawn to do."

I'm loving "Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism"

Taoism is a way of life for fools. So when I bought The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism, I expected a good match between the usually informatively entertaining Idiot's Guide series, and my favorite philosophical approach.

(I'm such a fool, I read the entire book through once, and now am re-reading it with a different colored highlighter in hand.)

I was right.

Brandon Toporov, writer, and Chad Hansen, Chinese scholar, teamed up to produce an overview of Taoism that is easy to read, inspiring, and practical, while also possessing intellectual rigor.

I'm confident of that last assertion, since I searched out what else Hansen has written and came across his A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation. It's the graduate school version of the Taoism Idiot's Guide. 

Same conclusions. Same philosophical foundation. Way more explanations and reasoning. Yet fascinating in its own right. (I bought a used copy of the book; have just started to read it.)

One of Hansen's central themes is that Greek and Indian thought are similar in that they posit two realms, natural and supernatural. Taoism, though (and Chinese thought in general), doesn't look upon reality that way. 

Nature is it. Which makes Taoism highly compatible with modern science.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Taoism that I resonated with.

Do Taoists Believe in God?

To the extent that the word God refers to a creator of nature, or a supernatural person with a "plan" for humans in particular, or a supernatural ruler or judge, the best answer is probably "no."

To the extent that the word God refers to some unknown meaning or purpose of nature, or the guide that operates in natural and human action, then the best answer is probably "yes."

If one's conception of God does not preclude God from being everywhere, all at once, then religious Taoism is likely to complement that conception. In a sense, Taoist religiosity expresses itself in awe of nature itself, rather than in awe of an imagined creator or author of nature.

Is There a Single, Big Idea to Taoism?

We'll examine a number of big ideas in later chapters of this book, but as a starting point, awe of nature will do. The natural beauty and complexity that inspires Western religion to postulate God also inspires Taoists.

Nature has an awesome richness and complexity of process that seems to guide everything in a splendid balance. Grass doesn't need lectures to grow properly; rivers don't have to be bullied into finding the sea. Humans, a Taoist would hold, are an integral part of this nature, not a separate agent to exploit or act on it.

The Taoist ideal of human behavior, then, is one in which forceful striving, grasping, artificiality, social posturing, and short-sighted manipulation of one's environment have passed away. In the place of these things, there is a relaxed acceptance of our nature and our unity with it. This inspires a view of human action as an elegant expression of natural spontaneity.

Taoism wisdom: life is change, so flow with it

Today my Tai Chi instructor talked about change. That's what life -- and Tai Chi -- is all about. When we stop changing, that's called death.

The yin/yang symbol beautifully embodies this truth. White (yang) flows into black (yin). There's yang in yin, and yin in yang. To exist, lightness and darkness need each other. Where one ends, the other begins.

Taoist philosophy finds a concrete expression in the physical movements of Tai Chi. My instructor likes to emphasize how transitions are central in Tai Chi, as in life. How you move between movements is as important as the movements themselves.

Meaning, there's no wasted space in Tai Chi, as in life. There's no Big Important Movement that you frantically rush to, because every movement is equally important.

In a Tai Chi class, you feel this as the practitioners move together much like a school of fish or a flock of birds do. There's a harmony, but not a lockstep. People are sensitive to how those around them are moving, yet everyone has their own individual style and mannerisms.

Rigidity is a no-no (yet even that rule isn't an absolute). Flexibility, softness, acceptance, blending -- these are key Tai Chi principles.

Life isn't predictable. Neither is the next movement in a Tai Chi form. You might lose your balance. You might forget what you're supposed to do. You might be impeded by the motion of someone else.

It isn't possible to accurately anticipate what hasn't happened yet. All you can do is be aware of what is happening now. And respond to that now as spontaneously, harmoniously, and appropriately as possible.

There are no rules. Yet, there are principles. A rule demands that we do X rather than Y. A principle invites us to look upon X and Y in a certain fashion, then decide which is the preferable way to go.

We can wish that life would flow along in a different fashion than it is, just as I often wish that I wouldn't lose my balance when doing a Tai Chi kick.

I've learned, though, that thinking about a past loss of balance does absolutely nothing to help me stay centered when the next kick comes around. In fact, dwelling on the past distracts me from doing what needs to be done now.

As in Tai Chi, so in life.

Most of us are addicted to our attempts at controlling. We try to control the past by composing stories about what happened to us. These have an appealing plot line, where we're the hero/heroine, or at least the lead character.

We also try to control the future by visualizing what might happen, what should happen, what is expected to happen. Only problem is, neither the past nor the future can be controlled -- not in the rigid fashion we attempt.

So we often miss the only moment when everything freshly happens, the only moment when anything new can be done, the only moment when life reveals itself in all its living glory: this present moment.

It's always changing into another moment.

Reiigions speak of eternity, changelessness, absolute this-or-that, purity with no trace of contamination. But that's just talk. Life is lived in a concrete reality where imagined religious abstractions are just frothy dream-stuff.

I've never met anyone who didn't change. I've never heard of anyone who stood apart from the flow of life. Indeed, who would want this? While we're alive, let's live.

Independence is impossible

So here we are in the United States, celebrating Independence Day this July 4, and my philosophical mind is thinking independence is impossible. And who would want it, anyway?

But lest my fellow citizens accuse me of wishing that the colonies had never broken away from Britain (ugh! what a horrible idea; I'd have to watch boring soccer rather than exciting football), I'm talking about a much more cosmic level of reality than political.

Religions are big on independence, though the concept almost always is expressed using different terms, such as salvation and liberation. Whether Eastern or Western, dualistic sorts of faiths consider that humans are trapped: by sin, karmas, maya, illusion, ignorance, the Devil, and other imprisoning forces.

I used to belong to an Indian spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which published a book called "Liberation of the Soul." Christians and HIndus differ a lot theologically, but this title reflects a point of agreement -- people are spiritually enchained and need freeing.

Jesus is the key to liberation or salvation in Christianity. A guru performs this role in Radha Soami Satsang Beas and other Eastern belief systems.

When I embraced churchlessness, quite a few people told me that I'd given up on the spiritual search, on finding meaning in life, on delving into the essence of what reality is all about.

Hearing those accusations, my reaction was "What the hell are they talking about?" I didn't feel that way at all. I'd simply headed in a different truth-seeking direction, one which made a lot more sense to me.

There's another way of looking at independence: as an impossibility.

We can't be liberated from the world, because we're a part of it. We can't float free in some ethereal realm, because we're embodied beings. We can't detach ourselves from emotions, desires, memories, and thoughts, because these are integral aspects of our humanity.

I used to believe that my spiritual goal was to rise above this world. Now, I consider that to have a meaningful life I need to fully embrace my interconnectedness with other people, nature, and the rest of reality.

I, you, every person alive and every person who has ever lived: we breathe, we eat, we drink, we urinate, we defecate, we sense, we experience, we communicate. Each of these activities involves interchanges, sharings, givings and takings between us and what is other than us.

Who wants to be independent of all this? Who wants to be a drop isolated from reality's ocean? How lonely this would be, how depressing.

Yes, I'm fully familiar with the spiritual/religious platitudes about oneness, merging, and all that. Supposedly if we detach ourselves from this world, we'll gain a better one. However, that other world is nowhere in evidence, while this world is.

Heaven is imaginary. Earth is here, now.

Today, Independence Day, I went for a walk with our dog in central Oregon. We ambled along the banks of the Metolius River. I'm not saying that nature, especially wild and scenic rivers like the Metolius, is a cure for religious believers who are afflicted with a urge to free themselves from the confines of material existence.

But I sure feel much more satisfied with simply being who and what I am when I'm embraced by the natural world.


Stretched out on a log, keeping my toes out of the frigid water of the spring-fed Metolius, I saw lots of bees and butterflies doing their thing around these flowers. They live. They die. Just like us. What's the problem?

Our dog, Serena, sure doesn't have a problem with diving into the physical world. Especially when a watery aspect of it is wet and cold on a hot July day. Is this unreal, illusory, maya? Not to me, not when I got off the log and waded back to shore in my Teva sandals.

I understand the appeal of philosophies and religions which view this world as a pale reflection of more vibrant higher planes of reality. But look! Look! Don't miss what's right in front of you because you're in love with a concept.

There's amazing beauty and wonder everywhere on Earth, in small things and large, in crowded cities and unspoiled countryside, in the living faces of people and inanimate scenes of nature.

Yes, some places are more striking than others, the Metolius being where I regularly get struck with a big reality stick that bonks this realization into my psyche: there's nothing I need to be liberated from; what I need is to be freed from is the notion that independence from the world is desirable.


Eventually each of us will reach the end of life's path. We'll be swept up by the river of death. No one knows where it leads. Somewhere. Nowhere. No one knows. Why not walk on the path as happily, joyfully, meaningfully, and productively as possible? Until... it ends.

Life is pretty damn simple. When we don't make it complicated. How does water know where to go? Stupid question. There's no knowing required.

I'm not our dog. I don't want to be our dog. Anyway, I can't be our dog. Still, when I look at her, I often feel like she naturally understands something that most humans don't: the virtue of not trying to understand what doesn't need to be understood.

Sun. River. Walk. Stuff to smell. Cold water to lay in. Who wants to be independent of all that good stuff?

I dreamed within a dream. Felt a lot like reality.

Usually I don't pay much attention to my dreams.

They seem to be the brain's way of processing waking life events, albeit in a often disconnected and bizarre fashion. But last night I experienced a dream that was coherent enough to be philosophically quite interesting.

I suspect some of the content had to do with my going through some old files yesterday, keeping some folders and discarding others. I also drove my Mini Cooper to town and back, taking turns on our rural road the way I usually do: vigorously.

My dream started out with me driving on what seemed like a freeway, or at least a wide two-lane road. I saw a sweeping turn ahead and glanced at the speedometer: 55 or 60. I knew that I was going plenty slow enough to easily make the turn.

However, when my car (which seemed to be a BMW, the owner of Mini) started into the turn, the steering wheel wouldn't respond correctly. I kept trying to turn it left, while the car kept drifting right. Speed wasn't the problem; I was simply being inexorably swept up in a dream accident.

Suddenly my car was high up on a very steep embankment. I was looking almost straight down at the road below from an exceedingly unstable height. The car was about to tip over and roll down the slope.

The last thing I saw in this portion of my dream were some tire tracks in soft ground that looked like barkdust (a few weeks ago we had barkdust applied to our yard, so bark has been on my mind). I thought: "Other people have crashed exactly this way before."

Then my dream shape-shifted into an entirely different environment. I can't remember as many details of this second part of my dream, just the overall theme and feeling within it.

I could move normally. I felt normal. I was engaged in some everyday activities. I remeber opening a file drawer and pulling out a report. It was from BMW. It had something to do with a technical analysis of their steering mechanisms.

As I thumbed through the report, wondering what it was all about and why it was in my file drawer, some intuitive flashes started breaking into my "everything is normal" dream life. I started to recall some memories of an accident, though I couldn't be sure that they were genuine.

At some point I had a stark realization: "Actually I might not be here in my home, reading a BMW report that I found in a file drawer. I might be unconscious in a hospital, barely hanging on to life after a serious car accident that led to some serious legal wrangling."

This jangled my dreaming psyche.

More accurately, my wondering whether I was dreaming within a dream psyche. Initially I was disturbed by the possibility that the reality I thought I was in was a figment of my imagination (remember, of course, that all of this was occurring in a dream, which truly was an imagining).

Soon, though, that jangly feeling passed. I recall having a sensation of "Oh, well, what I'm experiencing now seems real, so how else can I view it? If it's a dream, that's what it is; if it isn't, it isn't."

Then I woke up.

One of my first thoughts upon waking, as I laid in bed pondering the dream, was Chuang Tzu's famous story about a butterfly.

Once upon a time, I Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again.

But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I was now Chuang Tzu?

However, there must be some sort of difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly! We call this the transformation of things.

There's a lot that can be said about the butterfly story, some (or all) of which seems to apply to my wondering if I was dreaming within a dream.

I'll let Hans-Georg Moeller do the saying for me. Here's an excerpt from his book, "Daoism Explained: From the Dream of the Butterfly to the Fishnet Allegory."

The butterfly dream allegory speaks to both the sage and the nonsage: For those who are not sages, it is appropriate to be fully content with one's reality -- to be fully alive without doubting one's "being" or reflecting on one's I.

If one is fully awake while being awake and fully asleep while being asleep, one will always be fully present. Like in a political or physical organism, one should just naturally live up to one's position within an ongoing process.

If one has become a sage (and the Buddhists will later call this step the attaining of "enlightenment" or wu), if one is no longer either asleep or awake, either alive or dead, one has lost all identifications.

One is then equally close to all phases, but never present in any, and nonpresent in the midst of a changing presence. From the zero-perspective one observes the spinning of the circle -- like Zhuangzi observes the change from Zhuang Zhou to the butterfly.

While everything else is what it is, the sage lets it be. In this way the sage can be identified with the whole process of change, just as the hub can be identified with the whole wheel, or the heart with the whole body, or the sage ruler with the whole state.

In the midst of changes, the sage is no longer a distinct phase, but the core of the whole process of Dao.

Meditation should be pleasant, not a chore

This morning my pre-meditation reading was a chapter on Wu-Wei (non-action) in Alan Watt's "Tao: The Watercourse Way." The passage below reminded me of how different my meditation period is now that I've become churchless, unreligious, and dogma shunning.

In a footnote to a preceding paragraph, Watts says that he is a "deplorable heretic" to those Zen practitioners who favor the "aching legs" brand of Buddhism, since to them long periods of meditation are considered to be key to enlightenment.

On the other hand, those who understand the Tao delight, like cats, in just sitting and watching without any goal or result in mind. But when a cat gets tired of sitting, it gets up and goes for a walk or hunts for mice.

It does not punish itself or compete with other cats in an endurance test as to how long it can remain immovable -- unless there is some real reason for being still, such as catching a bird.

Contemplative Taoists will happily sit with yogis and Zennists for as long as is reasonable and comfortable, but when nature tells us that we are "pushing the river" we will get up and do something else, or even go to sleep. More than this is certainly spiritual pride.

Taoists do not look meditation as "practice," except in the sense that a doctor "practices" medicine. They have no desire to subjugate or alter the universe by force or willpower, for their art is entirely to go along with the flow of things in an intelligent way.

...Contemplative Taoists...meditate for the joy of meditation -- the flow of breath, the sound of roosters in the distance, the light on the floor, the susurrus of the wind, the stillness, and, alas, all those things which militant activists of both East and West have, with their frantic purposiveness, learned to disdain.

This is the yin aspect of the Taoist life, and thus does not exclude -- when it becomes timely -- the yang aspect of delighting in vigor, so that the t'ai chi chuan discipline of bodily movement, flowing and swinging, is as much appreciated as sitting in meditation.

Absolutely. I do quite a bit of Tai Chi and find that it truly is a form of moving meditation.

However, I used to think that the only "real" sort of meditation should be done for an hour or two at a stretch, was aimed at withdrawing one's consciousness completely from the outside world, and had the goal of experiencing supernatural phenomena (such as divine light and sound).

I've come a long way from those notions. Some would say that I've embraced a lazy, loose, undisciplined approach to meditation. And to that I reply...

You're absolutely right! That's why I love my morning alone time. It's pleasant and relaxing. No pressure, no right or wrong, no worry if I fail to live up to some standard, because I don't have any.

I get out of bed, make coffee, and walk up our driveway to get the newspapers. After eating some toast and checking what's happening in my Internet world, I head off into my meditation area with the Oregonian sports page in hand.

I read that first. This gets me focused on what's most important in life (though my main athletic interest is collegiate, particularly the Oregon Ducks and Oregon State Beavers, so summer months aren't all that interesting for me, sports wise.)

Then I look over the several dozen books that I usually keep piled up in the mostly unused large tiled shower that I've made into a contemplative retreat. Whatever strikes my fancy, I pick up and read.

Could be a science book. Or a Buddhist'y book about mindfulness. I also enjoy reading about neuroscience, how the brain works. Cosmology too. I've got several books about global warming and evolution that I'm half-finished with.

When my coffee cup is about three-quarters drained, that's a signal to me to get my iPhone out, because I have various apps and web sites that I like to check before I meditate.

Email. Local weather. Twitter. Google Reader. NPR and NY TImes news apps. My final iPhone activity is playing a game of solitaire, a sacred gesture that I described in "Klondike solitaire -- a fine philosophy of life."

Then I set my iPhone's timer for 21 minutes. And I meditate for about that long. Sometimes a bit longer, sometimes a bit less. I sit on my cushions however I want to. If I feel like I want to move, I do.

I might focus on my breathing. Or repeat a mantra. I might mix the two. I usually don't stick with a single meditation approach for the entire twenty-some minutes. But sometimes I do. It just depends on how I feel that day.

Watts writes:

Wu-wei is is to roll with experiences and feelings as they come and go, like a ball in a mountain stream, though actually there is no ball apart from the convolutions and wiggles of the stream itself. This is called "flowing with the moment," though it can happen only when it is clear that there is nothing else to do, since there is no experience which is not now.

Wisdom from Alan Watts' "Nature, Man and Woman"

I love Alan Watts.

Browsing through the Taoism section of my book collection this morning, I noticed an early edition of his "Nature, Man, and Woman" that I got way back in my college days but hadn't looked at for a long time.

During today's pre-meditation reading I made it through the Introduction. Just reading this one chapter reminded me what a creative, insightful writer and thinker Watts was.

I don't agree with everything he says, but Watts has a knack for taking familiar subjects and looking at them in a fresh fashion.

Here's some quotations that I resonated with:

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Excerpts from the Introduction to "Nature, Man and Woman" by Alan Watts.

In practice, the technical, rational consciousness is as alien to the natural man as was the supernatural soul. For both alike, nature and the natural man is an object, studied always by a technique which makes it external and therefore different from the subjective observer.

For when no knowledge is held to be respectable which is not objective knowledge, what we know will always seem to be not ourselves, not the subject. Thus we have the feeling of knowing things only from the outside, never from within, of being confronted eternally with a world of impenetrable surfaces within surfaces within surfaces.

No wonder, then, that our ideas of what nature is like on the inside are guesses at the mercy of fashion.

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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.

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In such a world it is impossible to consider man apart from nature, as an exiled spirit which controls this world by having its roots in another. Man is himself a loop in the endless knot, and as he pulls in one direction he finds that he is pulled from another and cannot find the origin of the impulse.

For the mold of his thoughts prevents him. He has an idea of himself, the subject, and of nature, the object. If he cannot find the source of the impulse in either, he is confused. He cannot settle for voluntarism and he cannot settle for determinism. But the confusion lies in the tangle of his thoughts rather than the convolutions of the knot.

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Purpose is a pre-eminently human attribute. To say that the world has no purpose is to say that it is not human, or, as the Tao Te Ching puts it:

Heaven and earth are not human-hearted [jen].

But it continues:

The sage is not human-hearted.

For what is not human appears to be inhuman only when man sets himself over against nature, for then the inhumanity of nature seems to deny man, and its purposelessness to deny his purposes. But to say that nature is not human and has no purpose is not to say what it has instead. The human body as a whole is not a hand, but it does not for this reason deny the hand.

It is obviously the purest anthropomorphism to assume that the absence of a human quality in bird, cloud, or star is the presence of a total blank, or to assume that what is not conscious is merely unconscious.

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Furthermore, may it not be that when we speak of nature as blind, and of matter-energy as unintelligent, we are simply projecting upon them the blankness which we feel when we try to to know our own consciousness as an object, when we try to see our own eyes or taste our own tongues?

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The Taoist idea of naturalness goes far beyond the merely normal, or the 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.

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When the mutual interdependence of the opposites is not seen, it becomes possible to dream of a state of affairs in which life exists without death, good without evil, pleasure without pain, and light without darkness. The subject, the soul, can be set free from the concrete limitations of the object, the body.

Thus in the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, the body is usually considered to be so transformed by the spirit that it is no longer in any real sense a body. It is rather a fantasy-body from which all the really earthy qualities have been taken away -- weightless, sexless, and ageless.

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Enjoyment is always gratuitous and can come no other way than of itself, spontaneously. To try to force it is, furthermore, to try to experience the future before it has arrived, to seek the psychological result of attending to the present experience and thus short-circuiting or cutting out the experience itself.

Obviously, however, the person who attempts to get something from his present experience feels divided from it. He is the subject and it is the object. He does not see that he is that experience, and that trying to get something from it is merely self-pursuit.

Ordinarily we think of self-consciousness as the subject's awareness of itself. We would be far less confused if we saw that it is the subject-object's awareness of itself.

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

For the point is not, in our accustomed egocentric mode of thinking, that it would be good to return to our original integrity with nature. The point is that it is simply impossible to get away from it. Similarly, it is impossible to experience the future and not to experience the present. But trying to realize this is another attempt to experience the future.

Letting go -- the essence of Zen

Ah, I love the title of this blog post. It sounds so assured, so confident, so Zen-master'ish. Yet I'm not sure if what I wrote is accurate.

No big deal. Because if Zen actually isn't about letting go, we can let go of that notion. And if it is about letting go, then I've hit the Zen nail on the head.

As should be obvious, I'm a big admirer of Zen who doesn't want to put in any serious work toward satori, enlightenment, or whatever it is Zen students aspire to. This makes me a Zen dilettante -- proudly so, because I'm most attracted to the Taoist side of Zen where self-development (or self-de-development) isn't taken all that seriously.

Nonetheless, my all-time favorite Zen book is Hubert Benoit's decidedly serious "The Supreme Doctrine." (My copy was stolen, by me, from the San Jose Public Library in 1969; the book now is published under a different name.)

I've recommended "The Supreme Doctrine" to several people who I thought would love it as much as I do. I was wrong. They found it confusing and difficult to understand, which admittedly it is.

Having written quite a few blog posts about Benoit's book which contained lengthy quotations, I'm going to take a different approach this time. (Type "Hubert Benoit" into the Google Search box in the right sidebar if you want to subject yourself to my previous pseudo-Zen ponderings.)

This morning I re-read the On the Idea of 'Discipline' chapter, liking it even more than the other ten times or so I've read it.

Instead of trying to reflect Benoit's precise arguments about why discipline, as usually understood, is counter-productive in Zen practice, I'll simply talk in my own words about what's stuck in my mind from what I read some twelve hours ago.

In short, it's my title: letting go is the essence of Zen. And since Zen is just another word for life, letting go is the essence of living.

Hmmmm. Seems like another word is needed.

Let's say "living wisely." Or "living authentically." Or maybe best of all: "living contentedly."

Whatever, I think Benoit (a practicing psychoanalyst) was right on in accepting the basic Buddhist assumption that life doesn't have to be as crappy and pain-filled as it often seems to be.

Seems to be. Not "is."

Benoit says that everything is just fine; however, we don't recognize this. So we look for practices, disciplines, dogmas, religions, therapies, and such which promise to assuage our discontent.

However, these things don't work. They can't work.

Why? Because they perpetuate our current condition where we're continually viewing life dualistically: right/wrong, good/bad, happy/sad, higher/lower, better/worse, etc. etc.

Benoit says that seeing self-improvement in this fashion is like two men pulling on the ends of the same rope. Except the two men are both us. For example, if I want to lose weight, I see this as a struggle between the "me" who enjoys eating tasty food and the "me" who wants to be healthily slim.

No matter who comes out on top in this struggle, the tension that comes from clinging to the dualistic psychological rope doesn't go away.

Indeed, every effort to make myself into a preferred version of Me -- wiser, enlightened, more spiritual, virtuous, whatever -- leaves my essential inner condition unchanged, while altering some specifics of my life. I might lose weight, but I'm still faced with a never-ending tension between what is and what (to me) should be.

So Benoit advocates a kind of spiritual non-practice: letting go and basically doing nothing.

Obviously you can't do this all of the time, since everyday life requires making choices, acting on preferred options, and otherwise pulling one way or the other on dualistic "ropes." However, we can experience moments of non-clinging, simply being, relaxing our hold on reality.

Eventually, he says, these letting-go moments prepare the way for a full-blown satori, which Benoit calls "a letting go that lasts."

Benoit offers up a nifty metaphor/analogy that meshes with my recent post, "Know when reality should look fuzzy or sharp." It involves some 1950'ish (when he wrote his book) high technology: the projection of a cinematographic film comprising a projector, a screen, and the luminous cone which connects them.

The projector stands for Zen's No-Mind, source of our consciousness. The luminous beam is our subconscious. The screen is our consciousness.

When the screen is a suitable distance from the projector, images look sharp and distinct. But as the screen is brought closer to the projector, blurriness increases. Eventually there is just bright white light, when the screen is almost touching the projector.

Our letting go of usual understandings thus brings us toward a state of "who knows?" ignorance. As we stop trying to control how life should appear, moments of blooming, buzzing confusion signify that consciousness is allowing subconscious processes to more fully embrace No-Mind.

Have I done justice to Hubert Benoit's discussion of "discipline" in The Supreme Doctrine? No, not at all. Have I made any sense in this blog post? Probably not, not even to me.

Which is as it should be.

Consciousness is the Big Mystery. Nobody knows what it is or how it arises. It's the secular equivalent of God: ineffable, ungraspable, everpresent (so long as we're aware).

When we think we understand what life is all about, we don't. So the saying "let go and let God" makes a certain sense -- so long as we realize that "God" is the Ultimate Question Mark.

Meaning, when we let go we'll have no idea what, if anything, is going to catch us. (Maybe it's letting go.)

 

Sober or drunk? Sacred or profane?

I've rarely gotten drunk. But I love the notion of drunkenness. I don't swear a whole lot in public. But profanity springs from my lips much more freely than prayer does.

Reality just seems more, well, real when it is lived on an intoxicated blasphemous edge -- whether this be conceptually philosophical or crudely physical. Neat and tidy sobriety isn't congruent with the cosmos' natural wildness, though we humans do our best to smooth rough edges and tame savage beasts.

At the end of this post I've included an excerpt from a chapter in Daniele Bolelli's terrific book, "On the Warrior's Path: Philosophy, Fighting, and Martial Arts Mythology (second edition)."

Now, if you're tempted to stop reading because your interest in martial arts is slim to nonexistent, give this post a chance.What we're talking about here is an issue that goes way beyond martial arts: is the straight and narrow a more productive path than a curving and unrestricted way?

If you read the excerpt from Bolelli's "Sacred and Profane: Combat Sports as Athletic Philosophy" chapter -- and I hope that you do -- be aware of your reaction to the two contrasting instructional styles he describes in such an entertaining fashion.

This likely will be an indication of what sort of spiritual, religious, moral, mystical, or philosophical teachings and practices you're most attracted to.

Admittedly, Bolelli features some extremes. But few of us are precisely balanced at a mid-point; it's natural to tilt one way or the other (for example, how many people are so perfectly bi-sexual, they're equally attracted to both sexes?).

I bought the second edition of Bolelli's book, even though I'd already read the first edition (and blogged about it in "Bruce Lee's Taoist life lessons") because two new chapters sounded intriguing to me.

I'm glad I did the Amazon deed. Bolelli is much more into martial arts than I ever was, but we share some common experiences and attitudes on both the philosophical and fighting fronts.

I talked about this in a 2004 post where I congratulated my martial arts friend, Dave, on his black belt accomplishment. (I'm in a black gi on the right; Dave is next to me, in blue; Warren Allen, our instructor, is in the middle, in back.)

After almost nine years of traditional Shotokan karate training where everyone had to wear a plain white gi (and only females wore a t-shirt under it, which helps explain my habitual t-shirtless look), I much appreciate Warren’s hang-loose Taoist attitude toward the dojo dress code. Discipline is needed in the martial arts, but dressing exactly alike doesn’t teach anything except rigidity.

It’s interesting that my changeover from the linear, dogmatic, structured Shotokan training to the Pacific Martial Arts circular, eclectic, flowing style has pretty much paralleled a similar change in how I approach meditation and spirituality. I’ve become much less rigid in my philosophical/metaphysical beliefs during the years I’ve been trying to achieve a similar openness in my martial arts training.

My new Church of the Churchless site reflects this creedless creed mentality.

Daniele Bolelli's comparison of contrasting uptight Shotokan and hang-loose Jujitsu classes rang true to me. I trained for nine years in a traditional Shotokan dojo where we practiced the sort of rigid discipline you can read about in the extension to this post.

When I switched to the eclectic Pacific Martial Arts style, the training was just as tough and demanding -- more so, in fact -- but not as anal. This meshes with Bolelli's description of the Brazilian Jujitsu class he observed, a martial arts style that I learned just enough of to know how much more I had to learn about it.

Anyway, read on for an interesting take on whether sober is better than drunk, and sacred better than profane.

(If you'd rather watch than read, check out Jackie Chan's classic "Drunken Master" on Netflix; it can be watched instantly for free if you have a Netflix account; from about 1:20 to 1:27 is a generally comedy-less look at drunken-style kung fu.)

Are Buddhism and Taoism akin to Sant Mat?

People here in the West often speak of "Eastern religions" as if they were all alike. This shows how little understanding citizens of predominantly Christian nations have of other cultures.

Actually, some Eastern faiths have as much, or even more, in common with the Big Monotheistic Three (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) as they do with monistic/atheistic teachings such as Buddhism and Taoism.

Case in point: Sant Mat, which means the "path of saints." For about thirty-five years I was an active member of an India-based Sant Mat organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, so I know whereof I speak.

That's why I disagreed with a comment that David Hedges left yesterday on a Church of the Churchless blog post, "What if a 'guru' is no different from us?"

Brian, Sant Mat is a path of meditation, nothing more, nothing less. The outer Master puts us on the path of meditation to discover the inner Master, who is the Shabd or Tao or Nam or God. You totally missed the whole point of Sant Mat, which is meditation to discover the truth. Buddha taught the same thing, the path of meditation. David

David equated "Tao" with the Sant Mat "God," and said that Buddhist meditation is the same as Sant Mat meditation. No, neither statement is true.

I'm well acquainted with Taoism through a lot of reading, and five years of Tai Chi practice with a thoroughly Taoist instructor. Ditto with Buddhism on the reading front. And over the years I've had quite a few talks with people who were very much into Buddhist meditation.

The easiest way to explain the central difference between Sant Mat and Buddhism/Taoism is to generalize this distinction. Sure, saying "there are two kinds of..." frequently is simplistic.

But in this case I think it is pretty darn true. So I'll say it.

There are two kinds of religious, spiritual, and mystical pursuits. One aims at bringing individuals into harmony with some sort of divinity. The other denies that individuals really exist, so there is no entity to be brought into harmony.

Christianity is an obvious example of Religiosity #1. Humans are considered to need salvation, because we are sinners who have fallen from an original state of purity. Buddhism is an equally obvious example of Religiosity #2. Our sense of self is a falsity, because Anatta is our nature -- no-self, no-soul.

Here's where the Eastern/Western religious split falls apart (an unpictureable turn of phrase, but I like it).

Hinduism is akin to Christianity in its positing of an enduring individual soul, or atman. So is Sant Mat, which has strong ties to Hinduism. Sure, in these Eastern forms of Relgiosity #1, souls get reincarnated and generate karma, whereas in Christianity they don't.

But the emphasis in Christianity, Hinduism, and Sant Mat is on individual salvation.

Meditative practices, including prayer, are aimed at connecting the soul with God. Salvation is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve on one's own. A savior is needed who serves as a link between God and Man/Woman. This is Jesus in Christianity, and a guru in Hinduism and Sant Mat.

By contrast, Buddhist and Taoist practices -- meditative or otherwise -- are focused on realizing that there is no "me" who needs to be saved. Enlightenment basically is realization of the emptiness, or sunyata, of all things. ("Emptiness" isn't nothingness, but rather interdependence.)

Here's a description of what this means:

To some extent, sunyata is an extension of the concepts made explicit in The Three Flaws. All things being impermanant, nothing can be seen as having an independent, lasting form of existence. And this is, in essence, what sunyata is all about. Strictly speaking, sunyata can be defined as "not svabhava".

The concept svabhava means "own being", and means something like "substance" or "essence" in Western philosophy. Svabhava has to do with the notion that there is a form of being which "is" and "exists" in a form that is not dependent on context, is not subject to variation, and has a form of permanent existence.

As such, the "soul" as understood in Abrahamic religions would have svabhava. God would certainly have svabhava. The Platonic forms (such as those described in the allegory of the Cave) would have svabhava. Certain abhidharma teachings conclude that the building blocks of reality have such svabhava.

But Mahayana philosophers like Nagarjuna concluded that sunyata is the fundamental characteristic of reality, and that svabhava could be found absolutely nowhere.

Pretty deep philosophizing. But the basic notion is simple.

If we are part and parcel of the cosmos, there's nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to become. Any effort aimed at some religious, spiritual, or mystical attainment -- of going somewhere, doing something, or becoming someone -- is misguided. Any such practice is valuable only insofar as it enables us to realize how useless it is.

That's the essence of Religiosity #2, which is very different from Religiosity #1. As noted above, faiths such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Sant Mat all assume the existence of an enduring soul which needs saving or self-realization.

In Buddhism and Taoism, there's no soul and no self, so relaxing into an embrace of ever-flowing, ever-changing reality where there are no hard and fast distinctions is the Way to go.

The Taoist sage Chuang Tzu puts it nicely:

The true men of old knew nothing of the love of life or of the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned no joy; exit from it awakened no resistance. Composedly they came and went.

They did not forget what their beginning had been, and they did not inquire into what their end would be.

They accepted life and rejoiced in it; they forgot all fear of death and returned to their state before life. Thus there was in them what is called the want of any mind to resist the Tao, and attempts by means of the human to assist the Heavenly.

Such were they who are called the true men.

If there's no "me," I don't have any problems

Following up on "My best guess about God" musings, I wanted to take another crack of getting down to the core of a whole lot of religiosity, spirituality, mysticism, and philosophy.

My inspiration is Wei Wu Wei's "Open Secret," which I finished today. Like many books with a Zen, Buddhist, Taoist, Advaita, or non-dual slant, I passed through many stages of literary emotion while reading it.

Interest. Irritation. Confusion. Agreement. Contentment. Bewilderment. To name a few.

What kept me turning the pages were the glimpses of something intriguingly simple that the author, a.k.a. Terence Gray, was trying to communicate. It isn't an original notion, not by any means, but Wei Wu Wei -- at times -- says it more clearly than most.

From page 143:

Bondage, and the consecutive suffering -- which is all suffering -- is entirely dependent on the idea of an objective I, that is "a me." But no such contradiction-in-terms has ever existed, exists, or could ever be.

...To be an object is just to be perceptible, which is to appear.
To appear to whom? To be perceptible to what?

Only I can perceive. What else could there be to perceive, which could perceive? And whatever I perceive must be my object.

My object is an objectivisation of what I am. What else could there be for it to be?

Therefore every object is myself. There can be no thing which is not myself. I am no thing but my objects, and my objects are nothing but I.

Another try at saying it, from page 88:

The perceiver in fact has arrived at a point in his investigation at which he is looking at what he is himself; he has reached a dead-end in his analysis and finds himself face to face with his own nature, but, instead of recognizing it as such and realizing that the void is what an eye sees when it looks at itself, he goes on trying to objectify what he does not see, what he can never see, by turning it into an objective concept, like the good and well-trained philosopher he usually is.

...But there is, has always been, an alternative, when the dead-end, the Ultima Thule of conceptualisation has been reached, and that is just to turn round and wake up to the truth. Having arrived at the gate they tried to prise it open, not realizing that they were already on the right side of it.

And how is this realized? By doing nothing. From page 135 and 139:

All practice must necessarily be futile, and why the exercise of volition must necessarily defeat its own ends.

It is vain for an object to seek the subject which it is -- for only the subject could seek, and it cannot find itself by seeking -- for the sought is necessarily elsewhere than that which seeks it, is in a different moment of time and in a different area of space from those of that which is seeking. 

...It is from the illusion of autonomy that a pseudoidentity awakens, and it is the condition that then obtains, a state of universality, which has been given the name "enlightenment," for an apparent identity has become aware of its universality, and has returned to full consciousness of the totality that it is.

Now, maybe this doesn't sound so clear to you. So I'll express my own understanding of what Wei Wu Wei is getting at in some (hopefully) simple words.

We try to know who we really are. Why?

Because we feel that if we knew, we'd be better off. Happier. More at peace with ourselves and the world. And religiously speaking, we'd be saved, enlightened, God-realized, whatever you want to call it.

We presume that there is a self, a soul, a psyche, a "me" -- something objectively real -- which is going to be known by us. So we search for it via meditation, prayer, contemplation, drugs, psychotherapy, walks on the beach, studying books, and many other sorts of ways.

But wait! Who is doing the searching?

Why, it must be...me. Who else could be doing it? Hmmmmm. This means that if I find myself, it won't be me, because I'm the subjectivity doing the looking, not the object that is found.

There's a spiritual/philosophical and a scientific/logical way of looking at this. Both end up in the same place: There's no "self" in myself. No "ego" in my egocentricity. No "soul" in my soulful searching.

Mystics, like Rumi, say that what we're looking for is so close, we don't recognize it. Here's how I expressed a Rumi story in my book about the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus: "Return to the One." 

Rumi, a Persian mystic, speaks of a sage who told a man how to unearth a buried treasure. Paraphrased, the story goes like this: "Stand here," the sage says, "and shoot an arrow in that direction. Where the arrow lands, there the treasure will be found." The man gets a bow and enthusiastically does as instructed, carefully watching the high arc of the arrow as it flies away.

After digging where it landed, he is dismayed at not finding any treasure. "I'll keep trying," he vows. More arrows are shot, and soon the ground is cratered with holes. But still no treasure. Exhausted, he goes back to the sage and complains that all his work has gone for naught.

"I didn't tell you to shoot with all your strength," the sage tells him. "Simply let the arrow drop from your bow." The treasure, it turns out, was right beneath the man's feet.

Similarly, Plotinus says that our spiritual wealth is so close we are unable to find it. What separates us from what we seek isn't physical distance but rather the mistaken notion that we are separated at all. For it is by running outside ourselves that we distance ourselves from the One. A spiritual seeker's first step, then, is to stop moving and realize his or her true self.

Which, according to Wei Wu Wei, doesn't exist. So there is nothing for the non-existent self to do. Only to be.

There is no need to read books, chant Sutras, recite Scriptures, perform any antics; there is nothing whatever to discuss, argue about, or explain. There is nothing whatever to teach or to be learned... No volitional action whatsoever is possible that could "liberate" from "bondage," since there is no entity to be bound or to be free.

And from a scientific perspective, here's how Thomas Metzinger starts off his book about modern neuroscience, "The Ego Tunnel."

In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self. Contrary to what most people believe, nobody has ever been or had a self. But it is not just that the modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are just about to shatter the myth of the self.

It has now become clear that we will never solve the philosophical puzzle of consciousness -- that is, how it can arise in the brain, which is a purely physical object -- if we don't come to terms with with this simple proposition: that to the best of our current knowledge there is no thing, no indivisible entity, that is us, neither in the brain nor in some metaphysical realm beyond the world. So when we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has an answer in his book, "I Am a Strange Loop."

The strange loop making up an "I" is no more a pinpointable, extractable physical object than an audio feedback loop is a tangible object possessing a mass and a diameter. Such a loop may exist "inside" an auditorium, but the fact that it is physically localized doesn't mean that one can pick it up and heft it, let alone measure such things as its temperature and thickness!

...And thus the current "I" -- the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions -- by tampering with the vast, unpredictable world of objects and other people, has sparked some rapid feedback, which, once absorbed in the form of symbol activations, gives rise to an infinitesimally modified "I"; thus round and round it goes, moment after moment, year after year.

In this fashion, via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind.

Interesting. Good stuff. But we're back to some complexity. I'd better end with some simpler Wei Wu Wei.

In this process of personalizing "mind" and thinking of it as "I," we thereby make it, which is subject, into an object, whereas "I" in fact can never be such, for there is nothing objective in "I," which is essentially a direct expression of subjectivity.

This objectivising of pure subjectivity, calling it "me" or calling it "mind," is precisely what constitutes "bondage." It is this concept, termed the I-concept or ego or self, which is the supposed bondage from which we all suffer and from which we seek "liberation."

...There cannot be any such thing as bondage at all, but only the idea of such. There is no liberation, for there is no "thing" from which to be freed. If the whole conceptual structure is seen as what it is, it must necessarily collapse, and the bondage-enlightenment nonsense with it.

Along with religion. Spirituality. Mysticism. Self-development.

Bye-bye. All gone. Good riddance.

Focus on experiences or the experiencer? The big spiritual divide.

When we get down to the essence of religion, spirituality, and mysticism, it seems to me that the broad divide between various sorts of faiths can be boiled down to this question:

Is the focus on experiences, or the experiencer?

This isn't an either/or, a crisp choice between one or the other. Still, Zen and Advaita Vedanta are decidedly on the experiencer side. Meaning, what's more important is how the consciousness of a practitioner perceives reality, not what is perceived.

Pouring a cup of tea (or for me, sipping a mug of coffee) is as significant, or not, as soaring to the highest heaven and beholding the radiant face of... whatever.

Monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam are much more into experiences. Their theologies are pretty weak when it comes to explaining how our human subjectivity relates to so-called "objective" reality, which is a central concern of Buddhism.

Rather, the goal is to experience God's love, embrace Jesus after death, spend eternity with the angels in heaven.

I was inspired to ponder this subject after I started reading "Open Secret." The author is Wei Wu Wei, the pseudonym of Terence Gray. Between 1958 and 1974 this Taoism aficionado (who also was attracted to Zen and Advaita) wrote a series of books.

Previously I'd heard of Wei Wu Wei, a Taoist term meaning action that is non-action, but this is my first foray into his writings. I like his blend of logical Western philosophizing and indirect Eastern "pointing at the moon."

As several reader reviews of Open Secret on Amazon say, this book is best read slowly. The author frequently crams a lot of meaning into a few words.

Like many other "non-dual" writings, Wei Wu Wei's prose stimulates conflicting feelings in me. Sometimes I'm convinced that the guy is just talking gibberish. Then I'll come across a passage that strikes an intuitive just so chord, leading me to think, Ah, this indeed is what life is all about.

Wei Wu Wei/Terence Gray zeroes in on the nature of subjectivity and objectivity. Here we are, conscious. We're aware of all kinds of things. However, we can't make a "thing" out of our consciousness, since it isn't possible to step outside of our subjective awareness.

These are some quotes from a concluding chapter that I skipped ahead to and read this morning:

If you can't find it by looking -- don't look, if you can't find it by thinking, don't think! It is where there is no looking, and no thinking.

Not because it cannot be seen or thought, but because there is no "one" to look or to think!

If a phenomenon could be "enlightened" then "enlightenment" would be phenomenal, like inebriation or any other psycho-somatic condition. If it is not phenomenal -- and anything the word could mean metaphysically certainly is not -- then there is no "self" to experience it.

The sought is the seeker that is no thing, absence is the presence of no presence and no absence. What we are, apart from one another's objects, is the absence of all objects, whereby all objects appear to be!

In-seeing does not mean looking in one direction instead of in another, "in" instead of "out," from the same centre as is commonly supposed, but seeing from within instead of from without, seeing from the source, which is noumenon, not from manifestation, which is phenomenon. 

I am not an identity which understands something: understanding that there is no one to understand and nothing to be understood is understanding what I am!

Reading Wei Wu Wei, I was reminded of how my wife and I have friends who do a lot more traveling than we do.

They're off to Europe, a Caribbean cruise, hiking in New Zealand, exploring Bryce Canyon, and such while we usually hang around fairly close to home here in Oregon. Even though sometimes they'll urge us to take a trip that they've enjoyed, I never feel like they consider their experiences to be superior to our experiences.

After all, each of us is always experiencing something (assuming that dreamless sleep and other states of unconsciousness are experiences). So no one has an experience deficit; people simply have different experiences.

Each to his own. That's the general attitude in everyday life, even when someone tells me "You absolutely must try this new restaurant. It's marvelous!"

I know what they mean. They had a really good experience dining there, and they think I'd like the place also. But they aren't saying that my life will be worthless if I don't do what they did. It's just a suggestion for a new experience.

However, when it comes to religious, spiritual, or mystical experiences, often people who supposedly have had a special vision, insight, or whatever will speak as if anyone who hasn't shared that experience is missing out on something vitally important.

Well, maybe I was sipping my coffee instead. Or mowing the lawn. Or cooking spaghetti. I now tilt much toward the experiencer side of the divide I mentioned at the beginning of this post, than the experiences side.

What I do doesn't seem to be nearly as important as the quality of the doing -- using "quality" to mean something that I can't really describe, yet is real to me.

I'll let Alan Watts say it better than I can.

If I may put it in a way which is horribly cumbersome and inadequate, that fleeting glimpse is the perception that, suddenly, some very ordinary moment of your ordinary everyday life, lived by your very ordinary self, just as it is and just as you are -- that this immediate here-and-now is perfect and self-sufficient beyond any possibility of description.

You know that there is nothing to desire or seek for -- that no techniques, no spiritual apparatus of belief or discipline is necessary, no system of philosophy or religion. The goal is here. It is this present experience, just as it is.

...You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now -- otherwise you would not be here. Hence the infinite Tao is something which you can neither escape by flight nor catch by pursuit; there is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it.

So become what you are.

Taoism and imagination

Reality is what it is. That's difficult, if not impossible, to argue with. And it's a central proposition of Taoism, which is one reason I'm so attracted to this philosophy.

We humans like to name things, conceptualize things, analyze things. But what if something isn't really a "thing"? Then how do we relate to it?

Like, the universe, the cosmos, the whole shebang.

Not a piece of it, which could reasonably be viewed as a thing. Rather, the entire mysterious ungraspable stupendous all-encompassing entirety of everything -- that can't be divided into this thing and that thing.

A few days ago I went to a talk by Qiguang Zhao at Salem's Willamette University. He's a Taoist scholar who practices Tai Chi, and has written a book about Taoism: "Do Nothing and Do Everything."

On my other blog I wrote about Qiguang's talk. Here I won't repeat what I said there. I'll start in where I left off, with some thoughts about imagination. After his talk, I asked Qiguang how imagination relates to Taoism.

I liked his subtle answer, which basically was that nature is real and imagination is, well, imaginary by comparison. However, we can't grasp the essence of the natural world, or Tao.

Why? Because we are that essence. We are nature. We are Tao. 

So we imagine what it is like, because that's all we can do. We tell stories about it. We name what can't be named, conceptualize what is beyond concepts, and analyze what can't be broken into parts.

All this imagining is fun. It's enjoyable. I'm doing it right now. So are you, as you read and ponder what I've written.

Why? Well, I don't know. I guess because we can. Humans can do these things. My dog can't, so far as I can tell.

It's good, though, to be reminded that whatever we think we understand about the cosmos, it isn't much. Through science, art, music, poetry, philosophy, religion, and simply living we get glimpses of what The Big Picture is, but our perspective is inescapably narrow, restricted, incomplete, partial.

I recall saying to Qiguang, after he replied to my question, "Imagination is fine, so long as we know that we are engaging in it. Problems only arise when we mistake our imagination for reality."

Religions start off with imagining. For example, true believing Christians imagine that God exists, that Jesus saves, that sins can be washed away, that heaven awaits after death.

I like how Taoism ends with imagining. The message I got from Qiguang's response to my question is that imagination fills the gap between what we can comprehend and what is real.

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.

Time...the essence of enlightenment?

Einstein showed that we live in spacetime, a continuum comprised of the familiar three dimensions of space and the much more mysterious dimension of time.

Nobody knows what time is really all about. Not scientists, not philosophers, not mystics. And certainly not theologians.

We have a sense of it passing. But the theory of relativity proves that this sense differs for people in different circumstances.

Two events, simultaneous for some observer, may not be simultaneous for another observer if the observers are in relative motion. Moving clocks are measured to tick more slowly than an observer's "stationary" clock.

Astronomers look up into the sky and observe stars in distant galaxies. Their vision is of a natural time machine, because the light from those stars can take from minutes (our Sun) to billions of years (the edge of the universe) to reach us.

So they are looking back in time. It takes about eight and a half minutes for light to reach Earth from the sun. Thus if the Sun disappeared, it would be take that long before we knew about it.

What has already happened at one place in space hasn't yet occurred at another place. Scientists say "a supernovae just took place in galaxy X." But that could have been billions of years ago.

Now is relative. The "power of now" is a popular notion (and a best-selling book). However, there's more to time -- and reality -- than our now.

All those galaxies millions and billions of light years away have their own nows, as do all of the inanimate and (likely) animate entities elsewhere in the universe. We can grasp this intellectually, with difficulty, but it's very difficult to actually experience time markedly differently than we do now.

Sure, time slows down and speeds up for us -- a subject that has been of more than a little interest for me as I grow older and a week rushes by in just a few days.

I've learned some tips to make life seem to last longer. However, seemingly the best thing would be to view time in a completely fresh fashion. After all, most -- if not all -- of our problems arise because of time.

No time (as we know it), no arising. Or setting. 

I'm clueless about what would replace our normal sense of time. But I've been reading a book, "The Tao of Meditation," that has given me a new perspective on what enlightenment might be all about.

A different view of time, the fourth dimension.

Man is the ruler in three dimensions, but he is the pawn of time. He has no control over it and no ordinary means of comprehending it as a dimension. Man is born and dies in time, and in between he only perceives the now-present, now-present, now-present of it.

When he is twenty he can't see himself at sixty. When he is sixty, the young man of twenty is gone. He admonishes, "Know thyself," and forgets himself from minute to minute, unable to see the ends of his words or actions, or the beginning of the chain in which he is linked.

Appealingly, the book doesn't offer up much of an explanation of what a more enlightened perspective would be like.

What would be the fourth dimensional view of time? We can't talk about that because we have no way of knowing about it. It is beyond all three dimensional knowledge; it is a part of the Tao. Whatever we might say would be pure superstition or fiction. 

Still...

The purpose of T'ai Chi Chuan is to seek stillness in motion. The aim of meditation is to seek action in inaction. This is experienced from the sense of their opposites within motion and within tranquility.

It is possible with patience and persistence to feel, as if intuitively, very subtly, very delicately, the nature of time. By following this feeling we may move close enough to the border of the fourth dimensional world to get a glimpse of that reality. This is the first stage of enlightenment.

Well, as I so often say: maybe.

What I like about this notion of enlightenment is that it doesn't involve any supernatural journeying -- no soul traveling, no grand mystic ascent, no exploring of any spatial realm other than where we are right now.

Perhaps it's time that is the dimension to be more fully understood, not so much space, whether physical or metaphysical.

Albert Einstein:

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest ... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

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.

I like how John Lash, a Tai Chi teacher himself, puts it in his book, "The Spirit of Tai Chi."

No one can know with the mind what Tai Chi and the Tao are. These are things that cannot be grasped with the mind. One can only stand in awe of them. The Tai Chi journey is thus a journey without signposts or guides.

This means that the traveler is completely on his own. There is no guru, guide, or authority that can say, "This is the way." Each of us must find our own nature and flow with it where it leads us.

...The Tai Chi school is a ship that sails towards the Tao upon uncharted seas. The teacher is the captain of the ship. He is a captain who does not know the way, but he can handle a ship and has a good feeling for the sea.

He guides his ship by relying upon his own intuition and his past experience of the journey. He has no chart or guide.

...In other words, the Tai Chi teacher is experimenting with life. Every second of his life, he stands at a crossroads with no sign to point the way.

...I am a Tai Chi journeyer. I do not know where I am going for I have never been there. 

So are we all, when it comes to the course of our lives. None of us knows for sure what will happen after we take our next breath.

And nothing at all of what will happen after we take our last breath.

[Next day update: Today The Rambling Taoist has a post that reflects the watery theme in the passage above. "A Diving Platform" points out that the core writings of Taoism aren't scriptures to be taken as gospel, but as a platform to dive in on your own from:

In this same vein, the works of these three visionaries provide great insight and a foundation into Taoist philosophy. They tease out ideas and concepts that often seem foreign and contradictory. Their purpose is to provide you with a place to gain your footing. But none of them want you to stand there flat-footed -- they want you to dive into life and to swim in your own direction at your own pace!

Which reminds me of another reason I like Tai Chi: my teacher encourages us to modify the forms (or "dances" of Tai Chi movements). In traditional karate this is a big no-no, unless you're an umpteenth level black belt.

But we frequently add moves, or take some away, in traditional Tai Chi forms. Individual expression is encouraged, rather than discouraged. When you feel the Tai Chi spirit moving you to move in a certain way, you follow it -- rather than thinking "Oh, no, I'm doing something different!"]

Erotic dream stimulates philosophical thoughts

In the almost-five-year history of this churchless blog, erotic dreams is a subject that hasn't come up for much discussion. Time to make up for the omission.

I don't have erotic dreams very often. But last night featured an interesting and pleasurable brief one -- nicely PG rated for open sharing.

I was walking down the side of a road. Glancing down, I saw an youngish attractive dark-haired woman lying on her back, arms by her sides, eyes open, completely relaxed.

Moment of decision.

In a flash my mind chose between (1) continuing on my way, and (2) stopping to kiss her. A whole lot went on in that millisecond of choosing, but the outcome felt absolutely clear and correct.

Kiss.

At first she was passively receptive. Then, actively inviting. The vibe was "zipless fuck." Except sadly, the dream ended with the kiss.

Now, on to the philosophizing. The most interesting aspect of dreams is that they take place entirely within one's own mind. My brain was producing both characters in the fantasy: me and the woman.

In a way (and I don't want to think about this too much or it will creep me out) I was kissing myself.

In the "real" world outside our heads, people interact with other people -- not just themselves. This makes moral and other sorts of decision-making more involved. We can't always go with our snap intuitions, as I did in my erotic dream. (Or if we do, we have to accept cause and effect consequences that aren't usually present in a dream.)

I've enjoyed pondering the notion of desert island morality. However, we don't live on desert islands where, like the "Lost" TV series, we can forge new identities with little or no connection to the life we've lived before.

Except...in some ways we can. Which is one of the messages of "The Untethered Soul," a book I wrote about in a previous post.

The author, Michael A. Singer, talks about the teachings of Taoism in a final chapter, noting that "it discusses that which is very difficult to discuss" -- namely, the Way that enables us to live life most pleasurably and productively.

There aren't any rigid rules regarding the Way, or Tao.

You can't say, "When heading down a road, never stop to kiss a desirable person." Or, "always stop." It depends on the circumstances. You want to avoid the extremes of being hit with a sexual assault charge or losing out on unexpected joy.

In his chapter, "The Secret of the Middle Way," Singer says:

In the Tao of sailing, the balance point is not static; it's a dynamic equilibrium. You move from balance point to balance point, from center to center. You can't have any concepts or preferences; you have to let the forces move you. In the Way, nothing is personal. You are merely an instrument in the hands of the forces, participating in the harmony of balance.

You must reach the point where your whole interest lies in the balance and not in any personal preference for how things should be. It's that way with all of life. The more you can work with the balance, the more you can just sail through life.

Effortless action [wu wei] is what happens when you come into the Tao. Life happens, you're there, but you don't make it happen. There is no burden; there is no stress. The forces take care of themselves as you sit in the center. That is the Tao. It's the most beautiful place in all of life. You can't touch it, but you can be at one with it.

Eventually you will see that in the way of the Tao you're not going to wake up, see what to do, and then go do it. In the Tao, you are blind, and you have to learn how to be blind. You can never see where the Tao is going; you can only be there with it.

... If you cannot see the way, all you can do is feel for the edges. But if you feel the edges, and don't go there, you will stay in the Way. That's how you live in the Tao.

The edges are extremes.

Extreme emotion and feeling nothing. Activity and passivity. Masculine taking charge and feminine letting go. Talking incessantly and listening all the time. Continually stopping for a kiss and never doing so.

During the churched phase of my life, I enjoyed the feeling of surrender that came with accepting a set of moral and lifestyle rules. What my spiritual guide or guru commanded, I tried my best to do.

Now I realize that this same sensation of surrendering to a higher power can be had without personalizing the entity to which you're deferring. Life itself can be that entity, that power.

Singer writes:

Deep inner release is a spiritual path in and of itself. It is the path of nonresistance, the path of acceptance, the path of surrender. It's about not resisting energies as they pass through you. If you have difficulty doing this, don't get down on yourself. Just keep working with it. It's the work of a lifetime to become that open, that complete, and that whole.

The key is to just relax and release, and deal only with what's left in front of you. You do not need to worry about the rest.

...You truly can reach a state in which you never have any more stress, tension, or problems for the rest of your life. You just have to realize that life is giving you a gift, and that gift is the flow of events that takes place between your birth and your death.

To comfortably handle this flow of life, your heart and mind must be open and expansive enough to encompass reality. The only reason they're not is because you resist. Learn to stop resisting reality, and what used to look like stressful problems will begin to look like the stepping-stones of your spiritual journey.

Bruce Lee's Taoist life lessons

Most people are familiar with Bruce Lee as a famous martial artist. Lee's philosophical accomplishments are less well known. But they are part and parcel of his Jeet Kune Do artistry.

This morning I couldn't resist -- I jumped ahead and read the final chapter in Daniele Bolelli's "On the Warrior's Path: Philosophy, Fighting, and Martial Arts Mythology."  It's called "Epistemological Anarchism, The Philosophy of Jeet Kune Do."

Bruce Lee's philosophy is rooted in Taoism. The past few days I've been enjoying some spirited discussion about Taoism in comment conversations on posts here and here.

I've been arguing that philosophical Taoism (as contrasted with its religious variety) isn't metaphysical or other-worldly, but instead is focused on the art of earthly living. Bolelli's description of Lee's Taoist leanings fits with my conception of Taoism.

Bolelli notes that Lee was at odds with much of Chinese culture, since religious Buddhism and Taoism, plus the rigid moral structures of Confucianism, don't fit with the iconoclastic Jeet Kune Do philosophy.

As we can see, then, Lee's love for philosophical Taoism and for the most radical aspects of Buddha's teachings was hardly in line with the diluted and simplified forms of Taoism and Buddhism favored by the masses. HIs philosophical outlook was therefore more at odds with Chinese tradition than consistent with it.

...By rejecting Confucianism and choosing to embrace the antiauthoritarian viewpoint of philosophical Taoism, Lee allied himself with the fringe-dwellers, the outcasts, the mavericks, the philosophical outlaws, the misfits of Chinese culture.

Ooh! Count me in! Those are my sorts of people. Following my sort of philosophy.

Whereas the philosophical Taoism and the Buddhism embraced by Lee can be subtle and paradoxical, Confucianism offers the security of precise formulas and simple, straightforward rules. Philosophical Taoism requires great sensitivity to be grasped. Confucianism is very easy to follow. Philosophical Taoism mocks rigid laws. Confucianism reveres them.

The philosophical side of martial arts is near to my heart, because I spent nine years studying traditional Shotokan karate -- an exemplar of a Confucian style (though Shotokan is rooted in Japanese culture).

About the time my churchlessness started to flower, I got disenchanted with the rigidity of Shotokan karate. I shifted to a mixed martial arts style and enjoyed the much looser dojo atmosphere (which included a photo of Bruce Lee on a wall).

After three-plus years of that, I've been Tai Chi'ing it for about five years (yes, Tai Chi is a martial art; even more, my instructor likes to say that it is the foundation of the martial arts).

So my evolution has been in the direction of Bruce Lee's Taoist Jeet Kune Do, whose basic precepts are "using no way as way" and "having no limitation as limitation." Lee encouraged his students to question everything and find out for themselves what works, and what doesn't.

Rather than establishing a new style, he [Lee] created a major controversy by suggesting that martial artists should be constantly involved in a process of research that never crystallizes its findings into a finished product....To Lee, an endless process of trial and error was therefore preferable to establishing one's day intuition as an immutable law.

Good advice. I've stopped meditating the way I was taught in my true believing phase, because I didn't feel that it was doing for me what I wanted. Now I'm much more eclectic.

Just as Lee used "whatever works" as his guiding philosophy, I don't feel that I need to follow any set of moral, ethical, or meditative dogmas. I'm still a vegetarian, but I drink a glass of red wine most evenings. I still meditate every morning, but I vary between mantra and mantra-less awareness, and worry a lot less about how much time I spend on my cushion.

Bolelli shares some good Bruce Lee quotations:

How can there be methods and systems to arrive at something that is living? To that which is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way, a definite path, but not to that which is living. Do not reduce reality to a static thing and then invent methods to reach it.

True observation begins when one sheds set patterns, and true freedom of expression occurs when one is beyond systems.

Knowledge is fixed in time, whereas, knowing is continual. Knowledge comes from a source, from accumulation, from a conclusion, while knowing is a movement.

Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques or means which serve its ends.

More excellent Taoist advice. Lee makes the same point that I've been arguing in the above-mentioned comment conversations:

Philosophical Taoism's embrace of every way, depending on the circumstances, doesn't make this philosophy a defined belief system. Rather, it is the antithesis of religious, moralistic, or ethical dogmatism.

Bolellis says that Lee gave full power back to the individual through this set of "using no way as the way" aphorisms:

1. Research your own experience.
2. Absorb what is useful.
3. Reject what is useless.
4. Add what is specifically your own.

Sure sounds good for a churchless philosophy of life.

Epistemological anarchism, in fact, does not attempt to substitute one method for another. Rather, it frees individuals to find their own methods, and invites them to change them at will if, after some time, their discovery stops producing the desired results.

(For more about Bruce Lee's philosophy, check out my "Kung Fu meditating" post.)

Tai Chi doesn't have much to do with "Qi"

George asked some good questions in a comment on this recent post. I responded briefly to the Tai Chi section of his query in a comment of my own, but wanted to reply more fully to these thoughts:

Why do even the most churchless on here appear to follow a spiritual practice of some kind? If truly churchless, why not be wholly secular and skeptical, devoid of any and all spiritual belief.

If on the other hand such spirituality is indeed practiced and tolerated, why not the same extended to other mystic traditions or religions? Christianity and RS [Radha Soami] have been slammed on here.

Brian appears to be an adherent of Tai Chi and sympathetic to Taoism. Fundamental to both is ‘chi’ or ‘qi’, which suggests an energy flow principle to all living things. There is also Yin Yang that presupposes an inherent dualistic nature to the universe. And of course there are masters who teach this discipline to disciples.

There is no evidence for ‘qi’ or a stream of energy flowing within us. Instead, we have blood that flows within our veins and arteries. Human anatomy does not consist of energy or life-energy pathways.

First, I think there may be some misunderstanding of Chinese terminology going on here. The "Chi" in Tai Chi doesn't have anything to do with "Qi."

Tai Chi Chuan, which is what I have been learning for about five years, often is translated as "Grand Fist Ultimate" (chuan meaning "fist," the martial aspect of Tai Chi). I'm no expert on Chinese, for sure, but I'm pretty sure Qi and Ch'i are synonymous, but certainly not Qi and Chi (without an apostrophe).

So when George said that Qi, or Ch'i, is fundamental to Tai Chi, this really isn't true. You can practice Tai Chi assiduously, and even become expert in it, without believing in the subtle energy known as Qi.

Some long-standing practitioners in my Tai Chi class are big on Qi and Qigong. Others aren't. As I mentioned to George in a comment, I've settled on viewing Qi as whatever energy I'm feeling in my body at any given moment.

This isn't a "spiritual" belief, in any way similar to the dogmas of Christianity or Radha Soami/Sant Mat. It is simple awareness of internal bodily sensations that usually people pass over or ignore, being focused on external objects and movements.

Further, a lot of research has been done on the health benefits of Tai Chi. My wife subscribes to the Harvard Women's Health Watch newsletter. The May 2009 issue had an article that described some of the medical evidence. (This is a 1 MB PDF file.)
Download Health benefits of Tai Chi

Tai chi is often described as "meditation in motion," but it might well be called "medication in motion." There is growing evidence that this mind-body practice, which originated in China as a martial art, has value in treating or preventing many health problems.

Scientific research demonstrates the benefits of Tai Chi, which I've experienced personally. However, it's true, as George said, that I'm also attracted to the philosophical side of Tai Chi, Taoism.

Churchlessness is a continuum, not a sharp divide between believing and not believing. Even so, George asked why not be "devoid of any and all spiritual belief?" Well, I'd say that I am.

I find nothing "spiritual" in Taoism. This is a wonderfully natural philosophy. Mind and body are integrated, not split into concepts of spirit and matter -- which most religions consider to be at odds with each other.

What I don't want to do is shut myself off to new knowledge, understandings, truths, insights into reality. But I also don't want to embrace weird beliefs that have no connection with what I know now.

Like everyone else, I'm a bodily being. Probably that's all I am, no soul or spirit included.

However, there are a lot of mysteries left to unravel about the human condition. Now I find that physical pursuits -- martial arts, dancing, horse riding, scootering/motorcycling -- are a valuable means of learning who I am and how I function best (plus being plain fun).

I used to be much more other-worldly, philosophically. Thus Tai Chi and Taoism are where I've ended up at the moment in my descent from abstract conceptual metaphysics to directly experienced here-and-now awareness.

In physicality, where Tai Chi and Taoism are rooted, there are no places to hide behind metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

You either can balance on one leg in a Tai Chi form and perform a sole (not soul) kick, or you can't.

You either can gracefully move with your partner in a Tango overhead turn, or you can't.

You either can control your horse as it canters around barrels in an arena, or you can't.

You either can smoothly guide your scooter/motorcycle through a series of tight curves in the road, or you can't.

Each of these activities -- which I've done recently -- requires my mind and body to act together harmoniously. Tension, fear, anxiety, unsureness, or lack of confidence produce shaky results.

Learning about life in this fashion seems much more real to me than the "spiritual" practices I used to engage in. So, George, I hope this helps answer your questions. In the latter part of your comment, you addressed some queries to tAo about Dzogchen. He has responded in another comment, echoing some points I've just made.

Basically, to understand how someone looks upon a practice like Tai Chi or Dzogchen, it's necessary to dig into their individual approach to it. I can understand how you could look upon Tai Chi as a spiritual belief system, but in my experience it isn't anything like that.

Tai Chi vs. Shabd Yoga -- I name a winner

I love questions. Especially those I can answer. Here's one that Todd Chambers asked me a few days ago via a comment on a post about giving up Buddhism and Zen.

So Brian, on the subject of Tai Chi, I wanted to ask you if you could say which practice has seemed more rewarding for you: Shabda Yoga or Tai Chi? Or do you have a preference?

Interesting question.

I diligently practiced the Radha Soami Satsang Beas version of Surat Shabd Yoga (a.k.a. Sant Mat) for over thirty years, including a whole lot of daily meditation. And for about five years I've been studying Tai Chi fairly intensely, usually attending classes for five hours a week and doing the forms on my own at other times.

Now, comparing Tai Chi and Shabd Yoga might seem like an "apples and oranges" sort of thing, because they are so different.

But Todd asked which has been more rewarding for me, which doesn't require a point by point comparison. Plus, most people would say they are both "spiritual practices" -- though I really don't understand what spiritual means and wish we could do away with the notion of spirituality.

I've gained a lot from both Tai Chi and Shabd Yoga. However, here's why I consider Tai Chi and Taoism (Tai Chi is an expression of Taoism) to be much better suited for me now.

I love the naturalness of Tai Chi.

There is nothing, or at least very little, forced about it. You don't try to be anything other than what you are, doing what you can do. Performing a form (a set of movements) is called "playing."

My instructor, Warren, likes to tell a story about a bunch of senior (meaning, old) Chinese Tai Chi adepts who got together and said, "Let's each play a form." They did. And every playing looked way different from the others.

Each practitioner had his own style, his own way of melding Tai Chi with himself -- his personality, energy, physical body, attitude, and such. When they all had shown their stuff, laughter erupted with hearty expressions of "Everyone looked so good."

And so different.

In Shabd Yoga, or Sant Mat, the goal is sameness. Every disciple of a Shabd Yoga guru tries to emulate the master, aiming to merge his or her self with the oft-heard "will of the Satguru." The result is a straining to act just right. Shabd Yoga disciples are perpetually worried about doing something wrong.

In Radha Soami Satsang Beas this could be eating a speck of meat, sipping some wine, consuming pastries with egg in them, having sex outside of marriage, or not meditating for several hours a day.

In Tai Chi and Taoism, the variety I've been exposed to, there are no rigid rules. Laughter and a smile is the response to a seeming stumble, whether of the physical or psychological variety. I like that. It feels so right to not worry about being wrong.

We are human beings living in the physical world. That's where Tai Chi and Taoism start. And, in a sense, end.

Meaning, there isn't the other-worldly emphasis that dominates Shabd Yoga and Sant Mat -- which are aimed at releasing the soul from the confines of mind and body. In Tai Chi mind and body smoothly combine in flowing movement, as well as stillness.

The frequently-stated Tai Chi goal is to listen.

To yourself. To an opponent. To the cosmos. You aren't trying to dominate, control, force, overturn, fix. You listen, and from the listening comes appropriate action.

Which will be different for every time, for every person, for every situation. My instructor is fond of relating how a Tai Chi master was asked what the application, or martial purpose, was for a particular Tai Chi movement.

The master laughed and said, "Who can say? Whatever is happening determines what needs to be done." In other words, if you are attacked or find yourself in a confrontation, there are no rules except listen and respond appropriately.

This makes Tai Chi and Taoism wonderfully flexible and non-dogmatic.

So I've found that by no longer trying to be spiritual, I'm closer to being whatever the hell that word means, or doesn't mean.

Example: when I practiced Shabd Yoga/Sant Mat, I worked hard at being humble. Every serious disciple I know did also. If someone thanked you for your volunteer work, you were expected to say something like, "Oh, it is all the grace of the guru. I'm nothing, just a tool in His hands."

Then you'd feel ever so special for being so marvelously humble. After a while (several decades, because I can be a slow learner), it dawned on me that feeling special isn't an especially laudatory quality.

It certainly was at odds with the egolessness that Shabd Yoga held up as the goal of spiritual practice.

I came to realize that the Sant Mat dogma of initiates being especially chosen by God and the Guru to return to "heaven" (Sach Khand), while other poor souls (like my wife) were doomed to endless reincarnations on this crappy physical Earth, wasn't helping me on the humility or ego-loss front.

Now, I love not feeling special. I'm just a run of the mill Tai Chi student, and run of the mill human being, who is doing his best to live life halfway wisely, responsibly, and enjoyably.

I no longer feel that I'm part of a chosen group who are privy to knowing, or on their way to knowing, secrets of the cosmos that are hidden from others by a divine design. I used to talk a lot about being one with my fellow human beings and the universe at large.

Now, I don't talk much about that stuff. But I feel the oneness much more than in my Shabd Yoga days, because I've stopped setting myself apart as a member of a special group.

Hope this answers your question, Todd. Halfway, at least. That's good enough for me these days.

(Here's ten reasons for guys to like Tai Chi, using "guys" in the inclusive modern sense.)

Buddhism and Taoism deconstruct religion

Even when I was young, a pre-teen, I was attracted to Taoist and Buddhist imagery. During my first visit to San Francisco's Chinatown at about the age of twelve, I bought a bunch of scrolls and artwork showing sages wandering on misty mountain paths.

Where the heck did that immediate attraction for a philosophy I knew nothing about come from? I have no idea. But it was a premonition of things to come.

Because now my churchlessness has evolved to the point where Taoist and Buddhist writings are just about the only kind of spiritual literature that my psyche can stomach. And even with these genres, occasionally I get turned off by excessive dogmatism.

On the whole, though, philosophical Buddhism and Taoism are pleasantly compatible with a churchless frame of mind.

The book I've been blogging about recently (see here and here) helps explain why.

Jim Powell's "Deconstruction for Beginners" contains a nice description of how Taoism and Buddhism undermined the traditional religiosity of Hinduism and other logocentric faiths.

I like Powell's way of saying things so well, I'll let quotes from his book speak for his point of view and not try to paraphrase him. Here he talks about the first Hindu skeptics who appeared in what is now India.

They began to question everything Hindu. In fact, sometimes they would eat the flesh of dead men or would meditate atop a corpse. And instead of chanting Om, and instead of seeking for Brahman -- the essence of everything -- they began to question if anything has an essence -- if Brahman even exists. They questioned everything -- using riddles.

And from among this group of skeptics emerged a young prince, Siddartha Gotama, who was to become known as the Buddha. The Hindus had believed that the soul or Atma was identical with Brahman or God, and that it was eternal. But Buddha taught that all things are impermanent, and that there is no soul.

...Buddha paved the way for Asia's greatest Indian philosopher, who was to be called "The Second Buddha." His name was Nagarjuna, and many modern scholars have found that his philosophy has much in common with Derrida's "deconstruction."

Powell then discusses this familiar optical illusion. Is it a white cup? Or two black faces?

The important point is that we cannot see both the cup and the faces simultaneously. Each image appears to possess svabhava or self-essence. Each image appears to be a self-sufficent, self-existent, discrete image. But they don't possess self-essence!

There is an intimate, subtle relationship between the faces and the cup. One cannot exist without the other. They depend on each other. According to Nagarjuna, we tend to think in terms of such dichotomies (or binary opposites).

For instance, the Hindus thought the Universe is made of up of this pair: (1) An eternal spiritual Self (Atman or Brahman) and (2) a Non-Self, made up of Matter. This fundamental dichotomy lies at the basis of all Hindu experience. But the Buddhist will say that neither the Self nor the Non-Self is substantial.

A fundamentalist Christian or Muslim will also think in terms of such dichotomies. He will claim that only his religion is true, and that every other religion is myth or of the devil. As Derrida and Nagarjuna have shown, we tend to form these dichotomies (binary opposites) and to favor one member of the pair. Either Christian or Muslim.

But the cup and the faces are not separate. Each image is in a subtle and intimate relationship with its hidden partner. Though they cannot be seen at the same time, neither of them exists alone. Neither of them possesses svabhava or self-existence.

In fact you could say that they are Empty of Self-existence. This does not mean that they don't exist, or that they don't appear. Emptiness just means that the illusion of their separateness is a mirage.

...Ordinary people are like the magician's audience. They assume that everything has self-existence. They become emotionally and intellectually attached to the "things" they perceive. Thus, most people see only the ordinary level of truth (samvritisatya).

Those who see the Emptiness of things are like the magician -- he sees the same things, but from a different point of view. He knows that things are empty of a fixed, self-existent nature. He simply perceives things accurately. Thus he sees the Ultimate level of truth (para-marthasatya).

And even the concept of these two levels of truth is empty of self-existence! For if you cling to the concept of an Ultimate Truth, then IT becomes the lower, Conventional Truth!

Then Powell talks about someone -- Coyote, say -- gazing into a pool of water and seeing his own image, but thinking that it is the real unreflected Coyote.

But then you suddenly realize that the reflection is not what it appears to be. This does not mean the reflection does not exist. The reflection now seems to be an illusion only because you had believed it was the real you.

But now you know that the reflection in the pool does not have self-existence. After all, the reflection depends upon the pool, the eyes, mind and presence of the real Coyote. But this doesn't mean that you abandon the reflection. It is still useful to you for admiring yourself, etc.

The reflection is like the Lower Conventional Truth. And realizing it is only a reflection, devoid of self-existence, is like the Higher Truth. According to Nagarjuna, everything in the world is like the reflection of the mirror.

Taoism gets less attention than Buddhism in Powell's book. The deconstructive power of Taoist teachings is just as great, however, because Taoist sages similarly clear away dualistic oppositions that clog up human minds.

There isn't any room for conventional religious dichotomies -- body/soul, God/man, heaven/earth, virtue/sin -- in Chuang Tzu.

Nothing exists which is not "that," nothing exists which is not "this." I cannot look at something through someone else's eyes. I can only truly know something which I know. Therefore "that" comes out of "this" and "this" arises from "that." That is why we say that "that" and "this" are born from each other, most definitely.

Compare birth with death, compare death with life; compare what is possible with what is not possible and compare what is not possible with what is possible; because there is, there is not, and because there is not, there is.

...When "this" and "that" do not stand against each other, this is called the pivot of the Tao. This pivot provides the center of the circle, which is without end, for it can react equally to that which is and to that which is not.

...To use a finger to show that a finger is not a finger, is not really as good as using something that is not a finger to show that a finger is not a finger; to use a horse to show a horse is not a horse is not as good as using something other than a horse to show that a horse is not a horse.

Heaven and Earth are as one as finger is, and all of creation is as one as a horse is.

Zen minus Buddhism equals Taoism

Becoming “churchless” doesn’t mean that someone has given up the search for meaning in life. Quite the opposite.

Speaking personally -- as if I had a choice -- I don’t feel that the intensity of my quest for ultimate answers concerning the nature of the cosmos has lessened a bit since I turned away from organized religion and spirituality. 

All that has changed is the style of my search. I’m more open now to wandering in the open fields of mysticism and philosophy, being less concerned about staying on a well-defined path.

Still, I enjoy learning about how other pathless (or semi-pathless) wanderers look upon reality from their vantage point. I don’t want to follow in someone else’s footsteps, but it’s nice to meet up with like-minded travelers for a friendly get-together around a literary campfire.

These days, when I walk into a bookstore or browse through my own library I usually head for the Taoism and Buddhism sections. This is where my churchless soul finds the most Yes, Yes, Yes resonance.

So Ray Grigg’s “The Tao of Zen” is right up my reading alley, since it features a discussion of both philosophical systems.

I’ve read the book several times. Each re-reading offers up new insights, with some thoughts popping out of a page with much greater vigor than before.

Browsing through “The Tao of Zen” the past few days, I’ve been struck by the distinction Griggs makes between (1) Zen, and (2) Zen Buddhism. I’ve tended to see these terms as being virtually synonymous. But there’s good reason to argue that genuine Zen has little if anything to do with Buddhism.

And a lot to do with Taoism.

Makes sense to me. I’m a big fan of philosophical, as opposed to religious, Taoism. I also enjoy Zen literature, unless it is heavily tainted with the religious side of Buddhism.

Grigg’s notion is that Zen minus Buddhism equals Taoism. Or at least is virtually identical.

Ch’an [Zen] then, when understood without the overlay of Buddhism -- when its Indian element is removed -- is almost indistinguishable from Taoism. In personality, philosophy, and intellectual character,  Ch’an without Buddhism is almost identical to Taoism.

As much as I’m attracted to Buddhism, the most churchless world religion, it’s other-worldly aspect often leaves me with a Huh?

I mean, Buddhist meditation practice emphasizes mindfulness in the here and now. Yet much of Buddhist philosophy stresses the goal of detaching from this illusory world of maya, getting off the wheel of rebirth, and experiencing some sort of transcendent reality.

This reading time around, some previously non-highlighted passages in “The Tao of Zen” got a heavy dose of yellow.

For Taoists such release from ego is a means of reconnecting to wisdom and body of Earth, to the Great Mother; for Buddhists it is a way of disconnecting from the burden of samsara, the “Wheel of Life.”

...For Buddhism, however, enlightenment creates a metaphysical disconnectedness; for Taoists it creates an earthy reconnectedness. At a superficial level the two forms of awakening seem similar. Both cultivate an attitude of separation, of detachment, but at a deeper level they are quite different.

For Buddhism the separation is an objective; for Taoism it is a means. Buddhism separates from the world to transcend it; Taoism dissolves back into the world to become one with it. Later, in Japanese Zen Buddhism, this difference is clearly expressed in the distinction between Buddhist and Zen attitudes.

I’ve always liked the Buddhist adage, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” So nicely non-fundamentalist. You won’t find many Christians advising, “If you meet Jesus, kill him.” They’re eager to have Jesus return, not to get rid of him.

Griggs, though, writes:

Killing the Buddha comes from the Zen in Buddhism, not from the Buddhism in Zen Buddhism. The aphorism illustrates the polarity of difference between Zen and Mahayana Buddhism.

Why is it important for Buddhists to kill the Buddha? Or for Christians to kill Jesus, for Muslims to kill Muhammad, for Jews to kill Moses, for Taoists to kill Lao Tzu, for Sikhs to kill Guru Nanak, or for adherents of any other religion to kill the founder or current  leader? (metaphorically, of course -- this is a killing of outwardly directed devotion and intellectuality, not of a body)

Because natural reality doesn’t have well-defined boundaries, whereas human belief systems do. So if we want to know what’s real, we have to kill the artificial concepts and forms that obscure our universal vision.

Both Taoism and Buddhism experience from within systems of understanding that must finally negate and abandon themselves; both practices can only happen when they are free of the constraints of themselves.

Much of Taoist literature is an admonishment against becoming caught in any system, whether moral, political, philosophical, linguistic, or religious. With such freedom, belief is replaced by experience. A traditional Buddhist dialogue reflects the same principle:

The Buddha was asked, “Are you God?”
“No,” he said.
“Well, then, what are you?”
“Awake,” said the Buddha.

To become a pure Buddhist, a Buddhist must ultimately renounce Buddhism just as the Buddha renounced self and all attachment. This principle pervades Taoism as well. Taoists cannot live Taoism if they hold to the system called Taoism.

Individuals who practice either Taoism or Buddhism are inevitably inclined toward inconspicuousness and, finally, invisibility as the system that contains them dissolves itself.

Nice.

Churchlessness isn’t viewed as a movement away from “divinity” in Zen and Taoism. Rather, it is a necessary step toward it. Which in the end is realized as being exactly where each of us is now.

But wandering can teach us a lot. Mainly, I’ve found, that no matter how many different places I go to, I always find the same person there.

Roll with life like a ball, not a brittle teacup

I love Tai Chi. So far as I know, it's the only philosophy of life that you can express in movement. (Unless expressive movement -- such as dancing -- is philosophy also, a non-verbal variety.)

One of the first things a Tai Chi student learns is circularity. Also, one of the last things. Letting go of rigidity is a never-ending process, like life itself.

There are no straight lines in the yin-yang symbol. Most of the physical movements in Tai Chi have the same curving feel. Ditto with the philosophical precepts. Taoist sages don't point directly at truth.

The intimate blend of physicality and philosophy in Tai Chi appeals to me. I used to be much more of a dualist, believing that matter and spirit are worlds apart.

Until I'd done enough looking around, both inside and outside of me, and realized that this world is all there is. And that's true for everybody else also.

As I've said before, and am about to say again, not one single person in all of human history has ever had a spiritual experience -- if "spirit" is taken to mean non-physical.

When you're not physical, you're dead. Maybe dead people have experiences, but nobody alive has direct knowledge of that. (Q. "Why?" A. "Because they're alive.")

So spirituality is materiality is living is being a human is meditating is dancing is Tai Chi is having sex is drinking wine is chanting sutras is studying science... and is everything else also.

What works for you, works. What doesn't, doesn't.

In Tai Chi, I've found that flowing relaxed circularity works. Better, in my opinion (based on fourteen years of previous traditional and semi-traditional karate training) than rigid tense linearity.

An oft-heard adage in spiritual circles is to make the mind like an empty teacup. Only then can it be filled with wisdom -- not when it's already full to the brim with existing notions.

OK. Sort of makes sense. 

But what happens when the tea cup has been filled after being emptied? Isn't it time to empty it again? How are we supposed to know when the perfect cup of wisdom has been poured? And is there any end to the pouring? Does life ever stop teaching us new lessons?

I smile when people email me, or leave a comment on this blog, saying "Brian, how could you forsake what you used to believe in?"

They should know the answer: life is nothing but change. Each of us is changing continually. Our bodies change. Our beliefs change. Our experiences change. It's crazy to think that we can stop change in its tracks.

Or that we should. Dead people don't change. Living people do. Why would we want to be dead when we're still alive? There will be plenty of time to be dead later.

In the Spring 2009 issue of Tai Chi magazine there's a nice article about "The Intrinsic Qualities of Taijiquan." Even if you don't know much about Tai Chi, including what root means, the authors' message should come through.

The moment you struggle to stay firm, you will stiffen up, and then your weakness (your root) is exposed. In fact, the stronger your root, the more you are giving your opponent a target and a leverage to attack.

..."No root" in Taijiquan is really about having a moving root, not a fixed root. This is like an object floating on water or a ball rolling on the ground.

Compare a tea cup with a ball. You might say the cup has "root" because it is stationary while the ball has "no root" because it rolls around.

However, the tea cup is stable only within a limited range, beyond which it will topple and break. On the other hand, a ball always has a point touching the ground, which is its root. When it starts rolling, that point changes with its movement.

If the function of a root is to stablilize an object, then a ball rolling around in all directions "without falling over" is like having root and not having root at the same time.

You say it has root, yet it rolls around; you say it has no root, yet it never topples. The root of a ball is everywhere, but is also nowhere.

Back in my youth Bob Dylan asked a question. Taoists would answer, "just fine."

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
A complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Turn around, if you feel like it

Yesterday I related the following story to my Tai Chi class. Our instructor had been talking about the importance of staying empty, keeping one foot unweighted so you can easily move it in a desired direction.

Being double-weighted is a no-no. That's when you're firmly planted on both feet, committed to where you are, which prevents you from fluidly being somewhere else if the situation demands it.

I came across this tale in "A Short History of Chinese Philosophy."

Wang Hui-Chih was living at Shan-Yin. One night he was awakened by a heavy snowfall. Opening the window he saw a gleaming whiteness all about him ... Suddenly he thought of his friend Tai K'uei. Immediately he took a boat and went to see Tai.

It required the whole night for him to reach Tai's house, but when he was just about to knock at the door, he stopped and returned home. When asked the reason for the act, he replied: "I came on the impulse of my pleasure, and now it is ended, so I go back. Why should I see Tai?"

Yes, why?

We talked about this in class. I mentioned that standing firm, remaining true to a plan, honoring a commitment -- this is seen by most people as a good thing.

Shifting gears, changing direction, charting a new course -- this also is viewed as having its pluses, but there seems to be more wariness associated with a zig-zagger in contrast to a straight-liner. Can he be trusted?

But one isn't less dependable than the other. They just have different commitments.

Wang was committed to honoring his sense of what felt right. When he was drawn to visit his friend, he did. When he wasn't, he didn't, even though he was about to knock on the door. Wang wasn't bound by the rigid "should's" that most of us carry around in our mind, placed there by learned social conventions.

Such as, If you've journeyed all night to see someone, you should take the final step and cross the threshold.

Well, again the question arises: Why? Who is a better judge of what's the right thing to do than you? If you feel an urge to turn around at the last moment (or any other time), follow your instinct -- whether you're on a religious or any other sort of path.

After all, U-turns often lead to a better direction. So turn back, if you're on the wrong road.

Taoism’s cosmic melody

Music. Sound. Vibrations. Dance. These aren't just worldly night club notions. They're also at the root of some of the world's most profound mystical and spiritual traditions.

Like, Taoism.

Yesterday I left a comment on a post, responding to some thoughts from Adam . I said:

Adam, I don't think it's accurate to say that the form of meditation practice you described differentiates RSSB/Sant Mat from all other faiths.

Sant Mat likes to claim that the "sound current" is at the foundation of every deep mystical practice. This is an exaggeration, but I have quite a collection of books that describe meditation practices involving hearing a subtle spiritual sound.

For example, Taoism, the mystical side of it, speaks of an audible energy that permeates all of the cosmos. However, Taoism obviously doesn't believe in the need for a "perfect master" to connect the meditator with this power, because the Tao is considered to be omnipresent -- the root of all things.

So meditation on an inner sound isn't unique to Sant Mat.

Adam replied with, "Brian, How does taoism recommend one be able to hear this audible energy?" Here's an answer.

This morning I reviewed some passages I'd highlighted in Livia Kohn's "Taoist Mystical Philosophy." She describes the teachings of the Xisheng jing ("Scripture of Western Ascension"), a text that dates to about the fifth century.

Here's a central goal of Taoism, understanding that wu wei, effortless effort, isn't aimed at forceful striving but at gently relaxing into what we already are.

To attain oneness with the Tao, one has to abandon all ego personality, blot out the intention and silence the will, go back to the center of the mind, isolate the spirit and make it stable and infused with Tao…Unity in thinking and feeling is attained, the inner spark of the mind joins with the pure cosmic energy of the Tao. Human beings not only intuit the divine reality within and without, but join it with all their being.

…Human beings are within the Tao because the Tao is the enveloping order of the whole universe. But the Tao is also within every human being inasmuch as he or she needs it to be alive, to be himself or herself.

How does a person become one with the Tao? Simple, but maybe not easy. Stop being so separate.

One first examines the structure of one's mind and finds the root of all problems in the development of an ego-identity, which must be abolished and eradicated completely. The process by which this is achieved is called "forgetting": first one forgets to make any distinctions between the various living beings without, then one forgets the value judgments attached to mental classifications within.

Increasingly one merges one's mind with the Tao, the underlying flow of existence as such. In the end there is no more knowing, no more clinging, no more definite identity. When there are no more categories of perception, life and death subjectively cease to exist.

Fully at one with the flow of existence, the mystic is then able to enjoy everything as it is, without ever wishing to change it, without the least desire or regret for anything.

Now we come to a seeming contradiction. I say seeming, because dualistic logic takes a hike in Taoism (as it does in quantum theory). Either-or is supplanted by both-and, or none of the above. On the one hand…

According to these descriptions, the Tao is a force that cannot be grasped, it is invisible, inaudible, and subtle…The realization of the Tao is a state of dissolution, of union where all sensual perception is replaced by the non-seeing and non-hearing qualities of the Tao itself.

On the other hand…

In the cosmology of Taoist mystical philosophy, one may imagine the Tao as a tone of a certain wavelength that pervades and encompasses all there is. Or, as the Taoists themselves have it, a certain quality of qi that underlies and furnishes all existence.

…In terms of Taoist mystical philosophy, this means that the more out of tune any individual is, the more "evil" he is from the point of view of the Tao, the more unhappy he feels, the less fortunate he appears. Such "evil" is not fundamental; it is not rooted in the cosmos. It is merely a deviation, a change in pattern, a different wavelength, an unmatched pitch.

Beings have the potential to be either in tune or out of tune with the true pitch of the Tao. It was the Tao itself that equipped them with the individual power of producing their own tones. The power and beauty of the Taoist universe lies exactly in this freedom that is yet a form of bondage.

The bond of the Tao is an inner tendency, a feeling of belonging, a natural affinity for the right sound, a deep longing for peace and harmony. Never fully free from the all-encompassing flow of nature, all beings feel the need to return to the perfect harmony that they had before they were born. Like fish out of water, they feel estranged away from the Tao.

…The sage, then, is one who has found perfect pitch in all his thoughts and actions. He happily goes along with the piping of the Tao and never adds even a trace of disharmony to the cosmic concert.

Sweet! Tell me more about how to dance with the universal music.

Overall, the more positive and relaxed qualities of human life and mind are therefore associated with the Tao. All violent emotions and tensions of humanity are linked to the conscious mind...Taoist mystical practice, then, reduces and controls the conscious mind in favor of the eternal Tao.

…Yearning and worry are forms of passions and desires; they always go together with fear and joy, anxiety and hope. The activity of the mystic consequently consists of reducing and eventually abandoning this misdirected power of thought, to keep all thinking in the present and on the Tao in a state of meditation.

…Thinking no longer with the mind, the accomplished mystic now lives by the spirit alone…Ordinary knowledge is nothing but a form of ignorance, a foolhardy way of taking outer manifestations of things for real while in truth they are only rippling waves on the surface of the deep and eternal Tao.

Then…

The Tao, itself invisible, inaudible, and subtle, is realized fully when all ordinary sensual seeing, hearing, and knowing is completely given up. When the intention dies and becomes a pure stream of consciousness, sensual input is turned into a series of floating images and sounds…Taoist mystics increasingly see themselves confronted with the central issue of epistemology: anything heard or described in human language or common metaphors is not ultimately identical with reality or truth as such.

Now we come to the music of the Tao, which may or may not be metaphor (no one can say, since the Tao can't be spoken).

To prepare one's ears for the Tao, the Xisheng jing continues, one first of all has to abstain from listening to ordinary talk. Very gradually one's senses become softer and finer, more attuned to the subtle movements of the Tao in the world.

The Tao is barely perceptible and its sounds are faint, like the gentle tones of the flute. As one becomes increasingly able to perceive the Tao, whatever it is that one perceives lends itself less and less to considering and naming.

…The tender cosmic melody of the Tao is the purest manifestation of the musical harmony of the universe, but all existence is sound or at least like sound.

I spend about thirty years as a Sant Mat true believer. Now Taoism is my favored philosophy, in part because I absorb it naturally through the Tai Chi that I've been practicing for four years.

The way I see it – and I understand that everyone has a unique vision of how things are – the Taoist notion of a divine melody pervading the universe is a more genuine reflection of Sant Mat's shabd, dhun, or "sound current."

That is, by and large Taoism lacks the religious dogma and metaphysical baggage that organized spiritual faiths carry along.

Taoism and Sant Mat both teach that mental conceptions obscure a wordless primal reality. However, Taoism (like Buddhism) espouses no-mind, not-knowing. Sant Mat, however, is based on an involved belief system. Once someone has bought into the beliefs, further questioning and conceptualizing is supposed to stop.

So while Taoism has no-mind, Sant Mat has locked-in-place mind. The aspiring Taoist mystic seeks to embrace mystery directly; the aspiring Sant Mat mystic considers that cosmic mysteries will be revealed after travelling a well-defined path.

A final Kohn quotation:

The underlying ground is deep within; it is shrouded in darkness. One approaches it by deepening, darkening, closing in…The ideal state of mind is not so much one of joy and freedom, rather it is characterized by innocence and utter simplicity.

Life in the Tao here is a state of purity in the sense of originality. It is unsophisticated, neither brilliant nor radiant. Comparable not a glittering gem, it is more like an uncut block of wood.

Great news! Being a blockhead is just fine for a Taoist.

“From Taoist to Infidel” – sounds like me

It's too damn hot here in Oregon today (100 degrees!) to slave over a hot laptop trying to cook up a blog post.

So, thanks to Marcel Cairo, my favorite after life medium (also, the only one I know), I've got a readymade Church of the Churchless sharing for this over-heated Saturday.

Marcel emailed me a link to Richard Carrier's "From Taoist to Infidel," titling his message It could be you.

Yes, indeed. I saw a lot of myself in this essay. And I'll bet a lot of visitors to this blog will see themselves similarly reflected in Richard's journey from Christianity to Taoism to whatever he calls his philosophical leaning now.

His essay was written in 2001. Amazon has a 2005 book by Carrier, "Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism." Naturally, I just ordered it.

In his piece Richard says:

I still cherish the memory of seeing a picture of three holy men travelling a road together, all laughing with each other. One was a Buddhist, another a Taoist, and the third a Confucian. This image is in fact a regular motif in China. There, the three religions, despite being so doctrinally and intellectually at odds, get along peacefully, even happily, a friendship that is celebrated in such artwork everywhere.

A few years ago I also wrote about the "Three laughers at the tiger ravine." Great way to live – with laughter.

(Reading note: I don't like excessively wide web pages filled with text. Really tough to read. The human eye scans narrow columns much more easily, something newspapers know. So make your browser window smaller or narrower, and you'll be able to read Richard Carrier's essay quite a bit more easily.)

Lowering our spiritual center of gravity

I was walking along the Metolius river in central Oregon, semi-lost in thought. Which isn't unusual for me. Like most people, I spend a lot of my day focused on what's going on inside my head.

That's as far from earth level as my six foot bodily consciousness can rise.

Since I've been reading "Tajiquan Theory" in the morning before I meditate, some Taoist lessons came to mind.

Breathe. Focus on your abdominal center, the lower dan tian. Simply be aware. Without thought.

I've heard this in each of the Tai Chi classes that I've been taking for three and a half years. "Rise from above. Sink from below."

Where does that leave you? Centered. Often we carry a lot of tension in our upper arms and shoulders. Letting it go, relaxing the elbows, softening the knees, we settle into a comfortable wu chi stance, rooted.

As in the Tai Chi dojo, so on the riverside trail.

Attention to a few breaths, feeling my abdomen expand on the inhale, contract on the exhale, and my psyche was several feet lower, seemingly. I wasn't teetering along inside wobbly mental confines any longer. Nature and me were much more intimately connected.

That's how I've been feeling ever since I entered my churchless phase: more attuned to the world that exists outside of conceptual thought.

Or at least, on the far edges of it – since I'm not sure that it's possible to completely separate sensation from cognition. The human brain isn't wired in such a dualistic fashion.

It's strange that I hear so frequently, "Brian, you think too much." This advice (or criticism) usually comes from true believers who question my leaving a religious fold. They view themselves as having gone beyond thought into pure spiritual experience.

Yeah, right. I don't see it this way at all. And I feel like I know whereof I speak, because I've been there and done that – the true believing thing.

Belief involves thought. So does faith. Each adds on something to direct experience that isn't naturally there. A complex conceptual superstructure is constructed on top of simple sensation, leaving the psyche top-weighted.

Christians believe in the presence of Jesus. But there's no Jesus actually there in prayer or a church service. Without all the dogma and theology of Christianity, Jesus wouldn't exist. He's only evident when the thought of a believer is active.

Same with guru worship in Eastern faiths, something I know a lot about. The elevation devotees feel in the presence of the guru comes from believing in his (or, rarely, her) divinity. No belief, no elevation.

It's all in the head, another example of top-weighted experiencing. This was the point of my "Did I see God in first class?" post. The ahhhhh from being a few feet away from a purported God-man erupted only from those who believed in him.

By contrast, when I walk along the Metolius there's no believing involved in recognizing the river's beauty. My thoughts keep me from fully experiencing what's really there, rather than being essential ingredients of the experience – as is the case with Jesus or guru worship.

There's nothing wrong with thinking. But when it's the foundation of religious or spiritual faith, we're out of balance, way up there in our own head, not grounded in natural reality.

I'll end with some Alan Watts.

The first element of Chinese Taoist yoga is to stop talking to yourself. Don't explain the world…So one has to get to the nameless state, the nonthinking state, which is called in Chinese wu nien. Wu means "not" and nien means "the heart-mind."

…Now, you will find, if you try, that it is a very difficult thing indeed to stop thinking. "Stopping thinking" doesn't mean to stop using your eyes and your ears and your hands and all your senses. It means that when you see a dog, you don't say "dog" to yourself; you just see what is there. The Buddhists call this the state of suchness.

…When in ancient texts of mysticism you read that it is necessary to go beyond the senses, that necessity can very easily be misunderstood. The texts are not saying that it is the senses – the eyes, the ears, and so on – that falsify.

It is our conceptions of what the eyes and the ears bring to us that cause the falsification…The splendor of a river is that it is the meaning and has none, and there is about it a quality of meaninglessness, of having no meaning and yet being meaning to all nature.

Feeling the spirit…via body or soul?

Here I am, someone who's pursued spiritual practices for almost forty years, and I can't tell you what "spirit" is. Go figure.

But seemingly such figuring is impossible, because whatever spirit is (assuming that word means anything at all), there's general consensus among mystics, meditators, and metaphysicians that it's something beyond the bounds of rationality, explanation, experimentation.

Just like life, consciousness, and existence – which to me are pretty much synonymous with spirit. Meaning, the foundational aspect of the cosmos, that which there is no deeper which'er. Or, that'er.

For those inclined to going off the deep end, a club I'm proud to belong to, a central question is: Where's the diving board?

The two basic answers are: body and soul.

Some believe that spirit is realized only by going beyond physicality into a more ethereal realm of reality. Meditative exercises are aimed at drawing one's consciousness away from material sensations so that the soul can escape from the cage of the body.

Bad body! Bad body! That's the essential attitude of the soul'arians, though usually the big problem is considered to be one's attachment to the physical frame, not the flesh and bones themselves.

Regardless, spirituality is viewed as an ascent from the crudity of matter into airy skies where the soul can soar freely, unencumbered by bodily ties.

I used to march to the beat of this philosophical drummer. Big time. That was how the Sant Mat cosmology of Radha Soami Satsang Beas viewed reality. And it also was the Neoplatonic teaching of Plotinus, about whom I wrote a book.

Now, though, I lean toward beginning (and maybe ending) with the body. From my social work graduate school days, I remember a central adage: "Start where the client is at."

Well, where I'm at right now is being a body.

Yes, maybe I'm something else also. Soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it. But what I'm aware of currently is physicality (along with recollections of it, which form my dreaming and imaginative realities).

This helps explain why I'm so attracted to Taoism and Tai Chi, which I've been practicing regularly for almost four years. Tai Chi is the bodily expression of some ethereal Taoist philosophy.

But Taoism doesn't find any conflict between spirituality and physicality, since they blend seamlessly into each other. That's the goal of Tai Chi, as described in Yang Jwing-Ming's "Taijiquan Theory."

Taijiqiuan [or Tai Chi Chuan] was created in Daoist monasteries and is a Qigong practice for enlightenment. The only difference is that this Qigong practice can also be applied in martial arts.

The author translates a Tai Chi song or poem:

The purpose of learning Taijiquan is to aim for the comprehension of Taiji and Yin-Yang so (we) are able to reach the Dao [Tao], therefore (allow us) to protect (our body), strengthen (our body), and enjoy longevity. Furthermore, by nourishing and cultivating (our) human nature, (we are) able to reach the final goal of unification of heaven and human spirit.

If spirit is the essence of life (again, assuming "spirit" is something more than a human concept), it makes sense to get in touch with it through the life we're living now.

Thus Tai Chi finds a resonance between heaven and earth, spirit and body, mind and matter, subtle and gross energy. I don't know to what extent this is true, but the notion that reality has gradations rather than sharp distinctions strikes me as pleasingly scientific.

Most religions would have us believe that spirituality is other-worldly, a state to be achieved by denying physical desires, ignoring physical sensations, eschewing physical wisdom.

Well, like I frequently say, maybe. It's just not the way I choose to pursue now.

[Here's the first thirteen pages of "Taijiquan Theory," courtesy of the YMAA website. It's a fine summary of Taoist philosophy, including how Wu Chi, Tai Chi, and Yin-Yang relate.]

A wee bit of guidance on the Way

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, Joshua left a Taoism related comment on a DSL-themed post. Go figure, especially since some of the sentiments I expressed in the post were just a tad on the egocentric side.

Many of my neighbors are deeply grateful that I've brought the potential of DSL to some 240 homes in our area. Quite a few are trying to run businesses out of their homes. That's tough to do with a dial-up connection, and satellite is expensive.

I've been thinking that a bronze statue of me, commemorating my DSL triumph, would be a nice addition to one of our local streets. Which could be renamed after me also.

Regardless, in his comment Joshua asked for a wee bit of guidance about following the Way of Tao.

When I was younger I was incarcerated. The crimes although petty and debateable are of no matter here. But, one day I came across a pocket sized version of the Tao Te Ching. Even at my fairly young age I was intrigued. I loved how overwhelming the message was.

Ever since, although inconsistently, I have pursued these teachings. I carry the Tao te Ching with me practically every where I go. I have also started reading the Basic Writings of Chuang Tzu and have tried unsuccesfully many times to utilize that oracle of fortune we call the Book of Change(I ching).

I really feel as though I will never turn back and totally abandon the Way but I have a lot to "unlearn". Maybe you could refer me to some sources or give me a wee bit of guidance, because it feels as though I'm lost.

Figured that I might as well reply to Joshua in a Church of the Churchless blog post.

And a "wee bit" of guidance it will be, since I'm a lot better at coaxing Qwest to install DSL in our neighborhood than cajoling Taoist wisdom to reveal itself in my consciousness.

But for what it's worth, Joshua, here's a story and a suggestion.

My wife left for a trip to Florida today. Last night Laurel was having a tender moment with someone she's going to miss terribly. Our dog. (Not that she won't miss me also, but I'm not nearly as cute as Serena).

Serena and Laurel were having a cuddle-fest on the living room floor in front of some bookcases. I joined them. In the course of scratching a furry ear (not Laurel's, I hasten to add), something drew me to look at a bottom shelf that held a row of books on tape belonging to Laurel.

One item looked like it didn't belong. Which, it didn't. Because it was a real book. And not a book of Laurel's, but one of mine.

A book that I'd been trying to find for quite a while. A book that I'd remembered enjoying a lot, yet couldn't put my hands on, because it was somewhere I'd never thought of looking.

In short, a book that I'd lost. Much as you feel that you've lost the Way, Joshua. Except a book isn't the Way, one of the basic precepts of Taoism.

Nothing is. The Way is just the Way. And that happens to be a central theme of the book that I found last night, "Buddhism Without Beliefs" by Stephen Bachelor.

It's a terrific book, one of my all-time spiritual favorites. I suggest you read it, Joshua, if you haven't already. Heck, even if you have, read it again.

That's what I did this morning. Skimmed it at least, focusing on the passages that I'd highlighted in the slim book's 115 pages.

Bachelor says that Buddhism isn't a belief, but action. It's being fully alive and aware, right here, right now. His chapter on awareness starts with a quote.

And further, a monk knows when he is going, "I am going." He knows when he is standing, "I am standing." He knows when he is sitting. "I am sitting." He knows when he is lying down. "I am lying down."
-- The Buddha

The Buddha and Bachelor know a lot more about the Way than I do, Joshua. But what little I know, or rather, suspect, is in line with that starkly simple premise: the path is here and now, not there and then.

This is disconcerting, because we're used to orienting ourselves by structuring the real present within an imaginary past and future.

That locks us into a conceptual framework – yesterday was such and such; tomorrow will be such and such – which seemingly offers stability. But actually it constricts reality unnaturally, leaving us wanting more: the real thing.

And that lacks the boundaries we're accustomed to. Hence, we can feel lost just when we've found the Way.

To know emptiness is not just to understand the concept. It is more like stumbling into a clearing in the forest, where suddenly you can move freely and see clearly. To experience emptiness is to experience the shocking absence of what normally determines the sense of who you are and the kind of reality you inhabit.

It may last only a moment before the habits of a lifetime reassert themselves and close in once more. But for that moment, we witness ourselves and the world as open and vulnerable.

…As mindful awareness become stiller and clearer, experience becomes not only more vivid but simultaneously more baffling. The more deeply we know something in this way, the more deeply we don't know it.

Joshua, I'm not saying that your feeling of being lost is what you're looking for. Maybe it is; maybe it isn't.

But it sure seems to me that it's better for someone to feel genuinely spiritually lost than to imagine that they've found their self, when they really haven't.

The self may not be something, but neither is it nothing. It is simply ungraspable, unfindable. I am who I am not because of an essential self hidden away in the core of my being but because of the unprecedented and unrepeatable matrix of conditions that have formed me.

…This perplexed questioning is the central path itself.

…Like life itself, it just keeps going, free from the need to hold to any fixed positions – including those of Buddhism.

…Questioning is the track on which the centered person moves.

There's your Way, Joshua. Perplexed questioning.

Relax. You're on it.

I’m a Bright, see me shine

I'd heard of brights before, but didn't know that it was possible to become a Bright (with a capital "B") until Tao, a frequent Church of the Churchless visitor, mentioned the brights web site in a recent comment.

This evening I learned enough about bright-ness to conclude that I could sign up as an official Bright.

You can be a lower case "bright" just by considering yourself to be such. But registering on the brights web site turns you into a honest to God nature "Bright."

Slipped up just now. Hope my reference to a supernatural entity doesn't void my registration. Because the essence of being a bright is a naturalistic worldview.

That fits me, since my sensibilities are becoming more and more Taoist. The way I see it, everything real is natural. Otherwise, it'd be unreal – fantasy, imagination, belief.

More accurately, those products of the human mind are real, but only in an extremely limited sense. They aren't lasting aspects of the natural world like trees, water, stars, frogs, and jellyfish are.

Or as gravity, electromagnetism, quarks, electrons, and black holes are.

I had to ponder what I mean by "natural" before I took the plunge and became a Bright (which took less than a minute and should only entail getting a newsletter emailed to me every month or so).

I'm entirely open to the possibility that realms of reality exist beyond the physical. Heck, so are physicists and cosmologists, since higher dimensions are a hot scientific topic these days, especially in string theory.

So would the existence of a higher dimension beyond the three of space and one of time that we're familiar with be natural, or supernatural?

Me, I'd call it a part of nature. A hitherto unconfirmed part that now has joined our understanding of what reality is all about.

Magnetism once was thought to point to a soul or god, a supernatural entity. Now we know better. Electrical and magnetic phenomena are governed by natural laws.

We haven't come to the end of our knowledge of those laws, for sure. So brights need to be open to an ever-expanding view of what is "natural."

Quantum entanglement, where particles separated by millions of miles (or even light years) change instantly in concert with each other, once was felt to be too strange to be real. But it is.

I agree with what J.B.S. Haldane said:

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.