Chapter 14
Thoughts and Applications on the Tao-Te-Jing through the lens of Master Zhu's Teachings.
One looks for it and does not see it, its name is invisible.
One listens for it and does not hear it; its name is subtle.
One reaches for it and does not feel it; its name is small.
These three cannot be separated, intermingled they become one.
Its rising is not light; its setting is not dark.
There is only the infinite that cannot be described.
Returning back to non-existence.
This is called the formless form, the objectless image.
This is called the darkly chaotic.
Walking towards it one does not see its face; following it one does not see its back.
If one holds fast to the Tao of antiquity in order to master today’s existence one may know the ancient beginning.
This is called Tao’s continuous thread.
Our understanding of the world in which we live has constantly changed, developed and shifted over the last 10,000 years (and longer). It is from this scale where I look at the Taoist ideas. Did they think about our predicament the same way? In some ways yes I’m sure. When I think of our “reality” I think of us as nameless beings on a nameless planet spinning on an axis circling the sun in a solar system that is part of an even larger galaxy and Universe. This is an absurd predicament when you think about it. So what do we actually know about anything outside of our own thoughts and ideas? Maybe a glimpse of something about the natural world…
What is the nature of the Universe? I imagine it as a energetic flux that is filled with layers of cycles upon cycles of change. Relative relationships between objects and space, creating rifts and landscapes. What is our relationship with the Universe? Its from here that the Shape of the Tao makes sense to me. I think the root of this passage is our relationship to the world.
If the Universe is an irrational energetic soup of relative relationships, is this reality? Do ideas exist in the world? Is there order in the patterns and cycles? In general I think of our consciousness as rivers of energy, of thoughts cascading and flowing. Thought forms free and vibrant until we stop them, when we create stagnations of understanding in the oceans of possibility. This is what our minds do, we create structures of understanding. These structures are chiseled from the unknown, sculptures of thought rising up from our collective imagination. The root of this in the Taoist understanding is formlessness (Wu-Ji) and form (Taiji) Figure 1.
Figure 1
Is there formlessness and form in the natural world or is this just how we understand it? This is a serious question, “Is the Tao real?” I think the ideas of the Tao are a way to understand how we understand the world. I think these ideas mirror what our senses experience in the natural world.
One way to recognize patterns of the mind is if you recognize a Yin/Yang pair. For example, hot and cold, light and dark. These descriptors are dependent on our senses and are a direct relation with the natural world. This is level where the Yin/Yang pair of the Mind and Spirit exist in their closest relationship, aligning our experiences. In the natural world this is similar to the taiji moment where heaven meets earth, where the endless sky meets the expansive lake…
Another question I ask myself, Is time real? I was walking around and had the idea that time is nothing but a measurement of change. Now I wonder if we are the only beings that experience the temporality of time. We remember the past and imagine the future. What of the present? Our mind is recalling our experiences and is always locked in our past. Our senses (spirit) experience the present. It’s when we ponder our past when we are able to imagine the future. Does this make time real? I’m unsure, it is tied to our internal worlds and how we understand the world. In modern scientific thought they talk about the light from distant stars being billions of years old. I have really no way to fathom this, my mind goes to the idea that after billions of years are those stars dead and long gone? Is where they were after their demise a void of cold and darkness? I wonder if our minds are the only phenomena that are able to stop the perception of time. We stop the flow of change in small incremental increments (memories) every day. It took a long time for me to break out of the idea of the linear model of time. That time is an infinite measuring stick unfolding into the endless future hour by hour and minute by minute. Now I think of time as cycles of change, relative positions that lead to changing seasons, cycles of the sun and moon, and our cycles of life.
What do these ideas say about our relation to the world. The world is an array of indifferent, irrational possibilities unfolding into cycles. We experience this and build understandings and beliefs that creates our worlds, our cultures, and our lives. It is how our minds differentiating our experiences that create our understandings. These understandings stand alone gazing into the face of the irrationality of the natural world. I think the only thing we can really understand is how we attempt to understand the Universe in which we live.
Everything we know is dependent on some other piece of knowledge we have created. These strands of understanding are tied together into long strings of stagnant possibilities.
If one holds fast to the Tao of antiquity in order to master today’s existence one may know the ancient beginning.
This is called Tao’s continuous thread.
The Tao of antiquity is the root of the Taoist understanding (Figure 1). I trace the ancient beginning back to the Wu-Ji of our existence. Everything we understand flows from this relative state of formlessness, creating our understanding from the shape of our minds.
The modern world is consumed with the ideas that radiate from our minds. Within this modern paradigm of thought is the idea of a great Truth that is searched for and desired. This is a form of the mind, every truth has a Yin/Yang pair with its untruth. For me this idea of Truth was another thought form I needed to break away from. It was within Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Poetry where I found my salvation from dogmatic ideas of Truth. The ideas I took from Rorty’s text were:
Truth is only what we happen to agree upon.
Philosophy is a poem that is rewritten by each generation.
What does Tao’s continuous thread look like in our understanding? We start from the ancient beginning, the place of Nameless Beings on a Nameless planet (Wu-Ji). I imagine groups of beings wandering around the forests, plains and deserts surviving and witnessing the world. Watching the cycles of the sun and moon, the seasons… Then one being points at the moon and says “Moon” and the other agrees. This idea of moon and sun are related to what we experience with our senses. It is also where we begin to carve out our understanding of the world in which we live.
It is an important note that “Understanding” is fundamentally different from what we think of as “Truth”.
As we formed our understanding from the unknown, we created a world view that connected us to the natural world and our lives. We created stories that connected us to our experiences, where were an integral part of the natural world. Then after 1,000’s of years somewhere along the way towards the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition the idea of Truth began to take shape and form, where there is an ultimate capital “T” truth that we can know. I link this to Plato’s ideas of forms.
This is the beginning of Tao’s continuous thread as applied to the Western idea of Truth. It is from here others began to dream and imagine how to apply this idea of Truth. They logically tied together different ideas and scenarios. It is through this searching for Truth that early science developed, asking questions and creating theories, formulating hypotheses, testing these hypotheses, and then deducing if the evidence supports their hypothesis. Each one of these questions and the subsequent answers forms an understanding, as well as a thread of understanding, coated with a desire, to uncover an aspect of this idea of Truth.
In the realm of philosophy another thread of Tao’s continuous thread flows through the ideas of philosophy, between analytic and continental philosophy. Analytic philosophy uses: formal logic, logical analysis, and empirical evidence to search for Truth. Continental philosophy focuses on cultural understanding, social and societal issues in their search of truth. I see these two diverging branches as a search for truth in analytic philosophy and an understanding of who we are and our situation in continental philosophy. The western idea of Truth is an extension of Tao’s continuous thread in both these scenarios.
Taoist understanding is an understanding of relativity. Everything is connected relatively. Truth is a relative understanding of what we happen to agree upon in any specific situation. It is our minds that create the continuity of our understandings. Truth is relative, a series of possibilities tied together with a continuous thread, creating what we in the modern world would call logic.