Psychology

The Place Of Death

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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

Confucians and Conspiracy Theorists

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When I first encountered Taoism, I became aware of their conflicts with Confucians. Later when I took a deeper interest, this “awareness” turned into “wow for a while they really mocked the crap out of them.” Later still, I realized this mockery of Confucians really helped me better understand Conspiracy Theorists.

Strap in for this one.

The history of Confucianism, and the period it was in conflict with Taoists, is complicated, but a few trends stood out in my studies. Political philosophy Taoism (embodied in the Tao Te Ching) were more about psychology, frugality, not seeking complexity, and leaving people the heck alone. Confucianism was seen as ritualistic, rote, and about memorization of trivial bits and bobs of culture. The conflict was simple – “real life” and pointless trivialities.

But something began to tickle at the back of the mind in my recent readings and re-readings. The Taoist documents that mocked Confucians mocked them for pretention, ritualism, trivialities, and over-complicated ideas. Even later Taoist/Taoist inspired documents that felt they had commonalities with other philosophies warned against such things. Be it mocking the Confucians or warning against pointless ritualism, something seemed familiar.

Then it struck me. The Confucians that Taoists mocked – and the people that later Taoists critiqued – reminded me of conspiracy theorists.

Conspiracy theorists have huge, complex beliefs they spin into webs, ensaring them – and if possible, others. Conspiracy theorists are often repetitive – in ritual ways – reinforcing their conspiracies (which often need it). Finally Conspiracy theorists are often deep in trivialities, to the point it’s hard to understand what the hell they’re talking about – the cultic conspiracy elements that wall people off others.

Plus, Conspiracy theorists often seem very brittle and ready to use force to control you, something Taoists also mocked in general and specific.

Suddenly I got the earlier Taoist mockery. I’ve watched puffed-up Conspiracy theorists, confidently spewing nonsense, spinning elaborate incoherence, and arguing they get to decide right and wrong, life and death. Be it some earlier Confucian wonk or the latest maniac analyzed by the near-endless podcasts on Conspiracy theorists, they’re the same.

Thus, I get why some people 3000 years ago said “look at those pretentious motherfuckers.”

Now that I have this unusual insight, maybe there’s really some kind of human archetype at work here. The obsessive, trivia-infused, control freak who builds elaborate plans to make the world work – or explain how it works. A warning sign throughout the ages.

And of course, a useful insight on how some things never change, and maybe we need to be ready to warn against the same problem again and again – or just take a page from the Taoists and mock the hell out of it.

-Xenofact

And The Sadness Feels So Good

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In these hard and indeed stupid times, I’ve been asking more about myself, how to deal with it, who I am, how I grow. It’s required me to confront the fact that so much of our modern world is just so stupid and meaningless. In turn it has made me feel sad.

And know what? It’s a pretty good sadness.

As I contemplate and meditate in the chaos of mid-2025, I stared into the abyss as it were, and the abyss didn’t stare back because it was just sitting there drooling. I watched social media influencers being nothing and saying nothing for money. Politics was a cruel joke told by insecure men with neither humor nor humanity. Brilliant insights and technology were ignored or repurposed by businessmen with no grounding in being a person. Even things I enjoyed I questioned what use were they, what good was this game or this TV series?

It was all so dumb and it didn’t have to be this stupid. We knew better, which was worse, because we did this anyway.

After that the sadness settled upon me. It was a midnight-black shroud, not constricting, but impossible to ignore, a darkness of the soul. I felt sad for the state of the world and sad for the people, for all the stupidity, even our self-inflicted wounds. Maybe we deserved this but in so many ways we didn’t.

However this sadness was real. It was vital. It came out of the soul and my guts. It wasn’t offensive, it wasn’t an affront to my being, it came from me. It was, for all its misery, real in a raw way that felt vital and alive.

I may have felt unhappy, but it was so real that there was a joy in it, an honesty. It was no different than those meditations where you sit and breathe and every moment is so true that you and your awareness are one. You’re not feeling, you are the feeling.

Even if the feeling is bad, it’s real and true and you know it’s real and true. Sitting in my breath and sitting there sad were the same.

In spiritual practices, I’ve seen it mentioned that you’re not there to avoid unpleasantness – that’s part of the journey. Your meditations and contemplations aren’t climbing a mountain to some airy separate realm, but a climb downward into reality, even the painful parts. Trying to escape it all cuts off the world and cuts you away piece by piece, but you find realness when you deal with everything, including the sad parts.

So I felt joy in this sadness. I knew where I was, what I felt, who I was. By acknowledging it I could be real with myself, contemplate the feeling, understand it. It was all so beautifully, painfully true.

The funny thing is, is if so many of us weren’t busy trying to escape reality with so many distractions (some of which involve insecure men manipulating whole nations) we wouldn’t have so much sadness.

-Xenofact