Death of Taoism
There are some things that our language simply cannot convey. Some things that are beyond the world of numbers and letter. Some things that just are. And, at the same time, are not.
This is the world of the Tao, symbolized so perfectly in the Yin Yang. I will not even be able to explain it here in words. I can only point to it and hope that it appears.
The negation found within is often difficult for people to understand, particularly those raised on Aristotelian logic.
In such a view, predominant in the west, you cannot be both in a room and not in a room at the same time. Barring the oft-discussed famed theoretical cat, something cannot be both positive and negative. It either is, or it isn’t. That’s why God is this and the devil is that. But this misunderstands the negative in a way that traditional Asian thought did not. They did not even have a personification of ultimate evil until it was introduced by the Christians.
Nevertheless, the Taoists knew something about the world. They had a profound insight into the manner of things. It wasn’t necessarily concerned with gods and creation, but rather the nature of life around us. And I fear that that once important wisdom has disappeared.
Thirty-six spokes meet in the middle of a circle but it is the hole in the center that holds them together to make a wheel.
A bucket is useful for carrying water or holding fruit only if it has a hole in the middle. The value of a house is not its four solid walls, but rather the emptiness inside in which we can live. And if you suddenly shout a word, where does it come from? From you? No. It comes from the silence. Something comes from nothing. The emptiness, the nothingness, is important. It is the source of creation.
In this way, the negative space is not actually negative but rather an essential part of the totality. Without night, we do not have day. Without the sky, we do not have the earth. Without woman, there is no man. The two complete each other. And, in doing so, they give rise to something greater than the sum of their parts: time, space, and life respectively. But despite how intertwined they are, despite the enduring inevitability of their connection, they can never meet. The opposites can never become each other.
The day starts when the night ends. And the night ends when the day starts. They are connected, linked forever, but destined to always be apart. And this movement, this dance, is existence. The totality, the sum of opposites, is something beyond our world of language. What word can we give to everything that happens and doesn’t happen? There isn’t one. There is only Tao.
In the modern world, we have begun more and more to mistake the map for the territory. We have begun to believe that one half, generally our half, represents the whole. We have abandoned the other and lost touch with the great cosmic dance.
Contemporary society tells us to love ourselves, and this at first sounds like a progressive and beautiful observation. But it is empty. Because it should really tell us to love the other. For without the other, we are no-one. Loving ourselves is the opposite of what we should do. We have pushed the pendulum harder and harder to the left and what has happened? It has swung back to the right. A society so focused on loving ourselves means we have the world’s lowest birthrates and people no longer seek the other. They have lost the idea that they find themselves in someone else.
The modern world tells us, orders us even, that we should be happy. But that can again only ever be half the story. We also need sacrifice. To serve. And to find the opposite of happiness. For if someone or something is always happy, they never truly know what happiness is. And it’s why our lives are more convenient than ever before, in terms of food, shelter, and modern comforts. But is our society happier than ever? Are we one of the happiest societies that has existed? I think we have to say, “No. We are not.” And why is that? Because in living a life that pursues happiness, we still nevertheless feel desperately unfulfilled. Living as if something is missing. By filling our lives with a commodified happiness to be bought and sold, we have at the same time increased the levels of sadness and anxiety. Happiness cannot be pursued and it cannot be caught. It cannot be found without in material goods such as money and cars. Instead it must be experienced, felt within. Happiness is an internal state.
By the same token, today we have embraced righteousness, believing our views, our politics, and our ideas to be pure, correct, and inevitable. The other, by the same token, is not only incorrect, it borders on evil, fascist, capable of ending existence as we know it. We get stuck on one side of the Yin-Yang, attacking the other with all of our might and fervor. We spit and brutalize. And yet, in our blind anger, we do not see, or at least we have forgotten that by attacking the other, we are essentially attacking ourselves. Envy, anger, and resentment become poisons that we drink hoping to harm others but eventually only cause pain to our own bodies.
Righteousness requires humility. Pride must come with ceding. The two must work in symphony with each other, just like the sun and the moon must dance, and the sea and the land must shake hands at certain points. They are aware of each other, of how frightfully incompatible they are, and how brutally different they appear, but through Taoist wisdom they understand that it is for those very reasons that they require each other. There is a deep connectivity to things that gets lost when we use words and language. When we call one progressive and one conservative, we see them in opposition. But one cannot be progressive if there is not a conservative, and vice versa.
Moreover, if we embraced the totality of our nature, of our thought, and our existence, how much kinder would the world be? How much more pleasant would our society be if we acknowledged the other? But we stare into our personalized technological devices, seeing only ourselves, hearing only our voices, and believing only our promises. We are telling ourselves only half the story. We have forgotten to dance. And until we remember what we are, and where we come from, we will be stuck. Bottlenecked in opposition to each other. Night taking up arms against day and the sun in conflict with the moon. We must go back to go forward. We must find the Tao.