Taoism notes 🔗

Introduction 🔗

Taoism is a practical self consistent personal philosophy that despite its ancient roots fits nicely with modern scientific thought. This including concepts such as the block universe, recursive structures, quantum theory, fuzzy logic and non-monotonic reasoning. It provides best in class guidance for several practical areas including how to generally conduct oneself, how to interact with others, and quite brilliantly how to think about the universe holistically. No stone is left unturned by the broadness of it’s reach. In addition, and for free, it describes the well in which the water of creativity is drawn.

There is a sense of playfulness with Taoism that I find missing in its daughter philosophy, zen Buddhism. Its not like you’ve got to break yourself as a Taoist, which it sometimes feels like when you encounter zen thinking. It’s also not the case that you need to find enlightenment, as Taoism favours misdirection when it comes to talking the hard route, finding peace by lowering the bar towards more self-love.

This article is inspired by the central Taoist philosophical thoughts, but tries to add a practical edge, particular when dealing with the concept of wu wei and the authentic self. We explain the Tao not metaphysically but by how it directly effects our practical choices. The angle we take is that of a experimental physicist - we have some theories to document and test in practical settings. This means I have heavily stress-tested the philosophy in my own life, like the dice man I have concrete data points with which to assess the efficacy. What we are interested in is the aftereffects of adopting this philosophy, where do you get to, and what features of our modern society might one find a challenge?

I must stress at this point that things become unconventional pretty quickly. Some of the advice seems to be completely at odds with having a productive day to day life. The best thing I can say about this is you’ll develop the key skill of what I call “full body listening” this is the secret sauce (source!!) of Taoism a kind of extension of mindfulness into a decision support tool. Relying on intuition is much maligned in our reasoning technocracy. This is because intuition is a skill that we now fail to hone to it fullest capacity, because it doesnt fit with modern commodification of human existence. But yet when we see something new and brilliant, such as an important piece of art, it all started from intuition, feeling around in the dark recesses of the creative nothing.

This work is also my own discovery process, a synthesis of my own thoughts with several classical and neoclassical sources. The most evident are the famous words of Alan Watts, the whimsical Tao of Pooh, and the less well known vibrant short writing pieces of ted kardash. The work is also heavily inspired by the film “The Big Lebowski” and the corollary work the book “the dude and the zen master”. We will also encounter the thoughts of Zen Buddhist masters like Bernie Glassman and .. as a means of finding comparative examples.

Start by Lowering the bar

The first practical aspect of Taoism is how one relates to oneself, ie how one forms a self opinion and how this keeps true to ones authentic nature. The answer to this question can be simply stated as going “egoless” by abandoning hope of profiting… succumbing to the Tao. By dispensing with both the meddlesome provoking and promoting aspects of your inner voice and accepting that you are bottom of the pile, the low bar becomes no bar. This releases us to experience things directly, by just taking part for the sheer fun of it, like an enthusiastic amateur. And once this is done we move on simply by moving on, we effortlessly put down our endeavour without recourse to judgement or analysis

“When the work is done, and one’s name is becoming distinguished, to withdraw into obscurity is the way of Heaven.”

How incredibly free you’ll be if you don’t have to worry where in the race you come, you just run for the sheer joy of running, the sheer feeling of exercise.

The most difficult aspect of being an enthusiastic amateur is society really doesn’t like you liking you - there’s incredible pressure to compete, to pit yourself against someone else or most harmfully yourself. In my humble opinion It’s lazy to compete, it lacks compassion to yourself and for others. This is reinforced by our beliefs in right and wrong, good and bad, in better and worse. What we fail to see is the fuzziness of this situation, there is no good without bad, no beautiful without ugly, we make these judgements up to suit the need to compare - but if we realise that comparison is pointless, then we need to stop using a comparative approach to life in general.

“When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad.”

So here’s one of the most intriguing and difficult things to explain about taoism - the “art” of wuwei. Books have been written solely about this and they tend to dwell on the idea of “flow” often with an athletic connotation, which I think is too simplisiic . My view on wuwei is a bit more pragmatic and it involves three things, not having goals, not having tightly held plans and thirdly working at something regardless of the first two. Lets step through each of these individually and provide some rationale. You’ll notice this initially makes no sense no goals but some kind of plan. I think that is the crucial distinction, not having goals but still doing something means stuff gets done but its achievements are more modest and internalised in their outlook. Couple this with a bit of earnest and not necessarily hard work and you have the ideal recipe for getting great stuff done without a battle. This to me is wuwei in it’s simplest recipe. I have one further wrinkle that works for me, having a million plans is like having no tightly held plans, so when I specify no plans it might also mean you embrace the connectedness of the tao and have so many “interests” that no one thing is a priority. This idea forces you to stay general and allows you to engage with full body listening like we discuss in a later section. Moreover it is an absolutely great recipe for unblocking creativity in your life because you can effectively synthesise on the go. With this in mind and together with the afore mentioned full body listening you will find yourself completely at ease and in touch with the moment, which I think is where the athletic references start to feel more relevant.

So with this in mind how do you deal with the elephant that is working for a living and the basic responsibility of modern life. One way is to drop out and do as little work as possible, like “the dude” in “The big lebowski”, not take part, be completely free from the shackles of society. This is possible, and indeed I know some exceptional people who have done this, though not that many. I have a particularly close friend who manages to only do a slither of work and earn just enough to get by perfectly. However dropping out has a passivity that perhaps contradicts wuwe and hence the second way is to find something work-wise that doesn’t seem like work, something that seems like fun with the added bonus of getting paid. This might be easier than it sounds as one usually does something one is a good at People who like cooking become chefs, people who tinker with computers become programmers. That’s the way my life has worked. so far I’ve enjoyed my work in an area that particularly suits my character. This doesn’t mean you will end up being well remunerated, that’s a different ball game entirely, what you will be is happy and be able to manage yourself and ultimately that’s the Taoist goal, remember that’s our mantra Life gets lumpy if this is not the case and people rely on other means to balance out work, I’m sure it is the case that people do well from the perspective of social standing but I know that this doesn’t necessarily make them happy and whole.

Wuwei is a crucial first step but we need to engage with two further ideas, one I call full body listening the other is the need for simplicity of mind.

Lets talk about full body listening, this is the process of allowing you to engage more with your subjective gut instinct instead of trying to engage your logical objective brain. I find objective vs subjective as one of the great distinctions in my life, it is the split between boolean thinking and thinking in terms of probabilities and fuzziness. Full body thinking is 90% subjective and 10% objective. How do we tell the difference? logical thinking leaves an audit trail, which although useful is often fairly simplistic. The benefit is therefore that you can explain why you got to some kind of decision, but the decision may have been created using big block reasoning. On the other hand you may arrive at a better decision subjectively but you have the side effect of not being able to explain why. Of course this is easily explained when you think about how difficult it is to understand fuzziness and probability. So better decisions or more explainability … pick one!

So here’s where things for me move away from normality again - with full body listening the universe supports your subjective thoughts the more you let them into your life (together with the a simplified viewpoint, which we discuss shortly). What you find is the more intuitively your engagement with the tao the easier it is for the tao to engage with you and to drop subtle hints that keep you heading in the right direction. What are these hints? They usually takes the form of good luck or good timing, something dropping into place in a more spontaneous and chance driven than designed way. Serendipity with a little touch of karma.

By being more subjective you partly hand over control to the tao and this in turn allows you to benefit from it’s support. Yes, I know this sounds odd, I did tell you earlier that things would be like this. The more you believe in intuition the more you are nourished by the feedback. This is for me the most essential part of taoism and the part least easily explained by modern science, perhaps only touched upon by causality research in quantum physics . So this is primarily a “leap of faith” discussion, are you willing to abandon heavyweight logic and rely more on the message from the tao. This, dear reader, is your challenge!

Back to the practical we have mentioned simplicity through compassion frugality and modesty in the previous writing. These virtues help us tap into the tao (full body listening) and to wuwei as it clears the deck of wants and needs which cloud out vision and prevent spontaneous creativity. Again imagine how far you can get by becoming more modest imagine how nice it is to show genuine compassion and imagine how easy life becomes when we don’t want for more. These are clouds that obscure any true insight and add the general lumpiness of life.