Xenofact

Maybe We Should Be Copying

by

Think about how much of human knowledge was dependent on Some Person With A Pen. Before the internet, before the printing press, there was Person With A Pen copying books stroke by stroke, word by word.

Even as technology advanced, Person With A Pen was important (and after a point, Person With A Typewriter). Print shops, printing devices might be carefully controlled by the government or just unavailable due to cost. Person With A Pen was there, and knowledge continued outside of official sources.

Others might have copied things for which a printing press might be excessive. Among my library of Taoist literature is a book on massage and energy exercises called Immortal Fang’s Longevity Quigong. The original book is rather small and illustrated, so people passing around these exercises might find it easier to copy them. The book seemed to have been passed among friends, so that was probably the norm.

There are doubtlessly many motivations for Person with a Pen, but one common thing they all share is that they are getting very intimate with a book. Imagine what it’s like to copy a book, how it sits in your head, how it’s burned into your mind. Imagine what it’s like to do it more than once.

It has to drive the knowledge into your head, to make you understand it more. I’ve often heard stories of people borrowing books to copy them, some people making both a copy for themselves and another for someone else. Imagine what it’s like for religious and spiritual professionals to copy a holy text, the words settling into their souls.

Now of course it’s usually easy to get books. If it’s not in stock you can probably get it print on demand or find it used. Looking at my own library I’m grateful for how many people made this possible.

But, and you can guess where I’m going, I wonder if maybe some of us spiritual and religious types should give copying a book a shot now and then.

I’ve thought of doing this with a few Taoist works – at the top of the list are The Secret of the Golden Flower and maybe a composite of my favorite Tao Te Ching translations. Even typing them up – let alone writing them – would make me evaluate words, remember them, live them. I wonder what I’d learn, retain, and feel if I just copied some of the worlds that have influenced me.

I’m not sure I’d do it, but hey three years ago I wasn’t thinking of zines.

Maybe it’s an exercise some of us should try. Imagine taking time, like a weekend away, just to copy a spiritual work that’s important to you. Imagine reliving the role of Person With a Pen and connecting not just to the work in question, but with our history.

–Xenofact

The Place Of Death

by

In The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 50, there’s a line about people who’ve attained the Tao that translates as “they have no place of death to enter,” “they have no place of death in them” or “for them there is no place in the land of death.” I’d not thought much about this chapter or this line until recently until a mix of meditation and stressful events gave me a new understanding.

In analyzing my own fears and concerns, I saw how they would obsess me. I’d worry about things, and thus my fears, from death to petty things, were actually part of me. I’d carry my concerns with me constantly, and as you doubtlessly know that was a heavy burden.

But being isolated, worrying, etc. just cuts me off from myself. It keeps me from engaging with life – with the Tao. It keeps me from being truly alive, freezing me in place. Honestly we all know too well how fears and worries can lock us down and even lead to bad outcomes – sometimes the very ones we feared.

There in my head, is the Place of Death.

Life, I realized, is a dialogue. You’re constantly reacting and interacting with places, people, ideas, food, etc. You make judgements and evaluations, changing or maintaining your course. Being alive, really alive, really there in the Tao, is a conversation.

And you can’t really have a dialogue when you’re hiding away. Life has to be lived, engaged. You can’t freeze yourself in your head or loop with scenarios to “protect” yourself.

Before I had talked about what I call “The Escape Capsule” in psychology and psychoanatomy. We build a walled off part of ourselves, shoving our supposed “self” into a box inside of us to protect it. This produces tension, warps our concept of ourselves, creates physical discomfort, and is quite miserable.

The “Escape Capsule” and “The Place of Death” are close to or are the exact same thing. Trying to get away from a changing world means you carry the changes you fear with you.

Life is a dialogue, really embracing yourself and the universe means you’re engaging. You can’t hide away in that case, you have to be open and vulnerable – because that’s how you have the dialogue with the world. The attempts to escape just lead you to build a mausoleum in your head.

It might be hard, but we can’t run away or stew in our fears. Why have a place for Death in us? Death has its own place in the world. We might as well find our place as well.

-Xenofact

A Different Kind of A-Hole

by

As regular readers know, I consider myself a Taoist, and am using reading some Taoist literature or other philosophical or artistic writing. Often I find myself fascinated at how much brilliant wisdom people had thousands of years ago – and how often they tried to get someone to listen to them.

Today, I try to imagine exposing certain people to the wisdom of, say, the Taoists. Would they pay attention to warnings about being overburdened with desires? Could advice on not wrecking the environment from fifteen hundred years ago still reach someone wrecking the environment now? Could people maybe not screw everything up for everyone?

I mean how many Business A-holes got The Art of War and tossed it as it wasn’t what they expected There’s a reason I see many copies at used book stores. So I kind of am of the opinion “lots of so-called leaders would ignore good advice.”

So as I contemplated the plight of the political Taoists and their like, something struck me. I was thinking about people who lived thousands of years before me, in vastly different environments. As I’ve written before, such people lived in different worlds, and they dealt with a different kind of A-hole.

I thought about the political Taoists and others like the Confucians attempting to convince some feudal lord of the rightness of their teachings (and the personal benefits). Such a person might be royalty, but because their father or grandfather overthrew the last guy. They still have relatives who may be in the fields or the military or in the mercantile professions. This imaginary feudal lord may hear, see, and smell everyday life in their province – which might be as small as the real-estate of a small city. Droughts, harvests, weather, floods affect them as well as the people under them and they get to fear assassination or conquest.

Oh they may be a-holes. They may be violent, they may not be nice, they may have a strong hand in rulership. But they exist as human a-holes, they have human contact, human feelings. As abstract as royalty may be, there’s a chance they’re still as human as others, even if not nice humans.

There’s a chance such people might listen to your ideas, after all even if they’re a-holes.

Now today, how many leaders exist in bubbles that feudal lords of China and ancient kings could ever imagine? How many people with power exists inside a media echo-sphere worse than any group of sycophantic ministers? We have leaders and supposed rulers who never worry of hunger or pollution, who can’t see, hear, or smell the everyday lives of people.

Such folks seem much harder to convince because they’re not just abstract from people but abstract from humanity. There’s a point where insulation becomes inhumanity or at least mental illness. No wonder some supposed elites suck down psychedelics trying to feel something.

This does not decrease my enthusiasm for the wisdom of the Taoists and those like them. It’s just a reminder that much advice requires you to reach someone’s humanity.

The problem is you have to know how to find that humanity first, and that can be a challenge. Worse, it may not be there.

– Xenofact