Taoism

The Two That Are None

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In the Taoist-based meditations I do I’ve begun to note an interesting thing about duality and voidness. I’m going to do my best to communicate it, albeit I may sound incoherent or just plain high. Which might be the best way to communicate it, but tolerate me.

So I’ve noticed a lot of dualism or “multiplicative dualism” in various Taoist writings. One reconciles Fire and Water, or uses Sense together with Energy, and so on. Sometimes there’s “dual dualism” like Sense and Energy and Conscious and Real Knowledge. A lot of practices are about combining these elements or reconciling them – and of course the classic Yin and Yang are used among all of these various dualities.

(Sometimes it goes farther like the Tripartate Vitality, Energy Spirit, but stick with me here).

In my Secret of the Golden Flower breathwork I’m working on refining breath and mind, the mind evening and slowing the breath, and the breath being a resting place of the mind. Breath and Mind are another duality and, yes that gets tied to other dualities, which happens in Taoism a lot.

Now in doing that breathwork I’ve found that the refining mind and resting breath are not just best done together, they’re best being done “equally.” You don’t focus more on quality of breath or the resting of the mind, you’re doing both at once, both with equal measure except the occasional course correction

Now if you’ve done any kind of meditation you know those moments where you get clarity, where your perspectives shift, where there’s less you and more reality. I find that the refined breath-and-mind at once are where that starts to happen. You’re doing two things at once, but they’re also one thing, and yet also there’s something about you lighter and emptier.

And yes, as per my respect for Taoism, I’m not going to talk it overmuch since thats when you screw it up (and I’m not that good at communicating it in symbols yet).

I think there’s something about having “two things at once” in meditative practice – two things to do together, two elements to contemplate, and so on – that helps you actually get beyond your mundane self. You get to zero starting with two, but it’s hard to get there from one.

My opinion is that in meditative practices and the symbols used for them, that if we have just one definite symbol or activity or concept, there’s a risk we identify it The self will cling to any one thing as a way to anchor itself. But when your concepts or meditative practices have a duality, it’s hard for the self to settle anywhere – and as you practice, the mundane self becomes thinner as a deeper self becomes apparent.

Is this the only way to do things? Obviously not. There’s focusing exercises, forms of deliberate overload, or round-robin type mental exercises that aren’t dualistic. But I think it’s a useful insight to understand some techniques.

Sometimes you get somewhere from two places.

(I don’t think I over-described, but I’m going to have to start working on how to communicate but not over-communicate more profound experiences).

-Xenofact

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

A Different Kind of A-Hole

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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