Kinda gettin’ a spirit-boner here

As many of my readers know I seem to be heading in a direction of Taoism.  As any amateur Buddhist will likely attest, my journey should (and has) started with a long study of the Tao Te Ching.  As countless pupils before me have been, I’m simply astounded by the venerable and practical wisdom found in the teachings of Lao Tzu.  Here’s a cat 25 centuries ago pretty much summing up everything in 81 short chapters.  I mean, come on – Confucius consulted him for crying out loud.

Where this gets interesting is in how it raises a difference of perspective from Eastern and Western philosophy.  The idea in Western culture that things are defined by their polarity and are often found in conflict or paradox confounds us endlessly.  The contradictions that lie in our world, the behaviors that we perceive as hypocritical, and the lack of balance struck between what we say on Sunday and do on Monday are some of many sources of stress that may be unnecessary.  Our perception of time as finite, death as an end, and our work as non-eternal, all things ones and zeros is killing us.  Whereas in Tao the idea that things are both one and zero, and something else undefined can be a bit unsettling to those who’ve been conditioned to label everything and place them neatly in compartments.  Consider that Tao is both that which is unnamed and the 10,000 things in nature which are named.  Tao is by definition indefinable.  The moment we try to understand it, we destroy it – yet we don’t.  I’m kinda getting’ a spirit-boner here when thinking about celebrating paradoxical philosophies. 

This may boil down to me taking 81 Days to study and live the teachings of Lao Tzu.  What’s scary isn’t living Tao today.  It’s living Tao tomorrow.