Month: February 2021

Chapter 47

“Without opening your door,

you can open your heart to the world.

Without looking out your window,

you can see the essence of the Tao.

The more you know,

the less you understand.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

The pandemic has made amateur monks of us all. We’ve had to close all sorts of doors—our social circles, our schools, our businesses. And in many cases, that’s felt like closing our hearts. Social distancing has made us feel socially distant. Our world have narrowed. And we have lots of time to just stare out the window.

But as with normal retreats, this long strange journey is also an opportunity to withdraw from the world to see it more clearly. In meditation, you do not look out your window, but at your window. We gain knowledge by looking out our window, and wisdom by looking at it. The more you look at your window, the more and better you will see when you look out of it.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 46

“When a country is in harmony with the Tao,

the factories make trucks and tractors.

When a country goes counter to the Tao,

warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,

no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,

no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

Whoever can see through all fear

will always be safe.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

This week I taught Machiavelli’s The Prince, which offers the opposite advice: the ruler should always keep his focus on war and readiness for war, and the key to keeping power is to be afraid of foreign invasions and domestic uprisings. To prevent both, you must make people fear you. Fear is not an illusion to “see through.” It is the truth that stands behind all illusions.

But your main enemy is not people, but Nature. Nature is not the Dao, but “Fortuna,” which Machiavelli casts in feminine terms as a force the ruler must try to master, to, if necessary, “beat and strike her.” Only the prince equipped with virtú—the root of which is Latin for “man”—has a chance of outfoxing and overpowering Fortuna to wrest power and glory from her clutches. But Fortuna is much more Kali or Tiamat than Providence or Gaia. Harmony with her is impossible; the best that can be hoped for is defensive rearguard actions that temporarily fend off her swallowing us whole. Or tearing us to pieces.

Machiavelli would have been fascinated by Trump—someone should write a Machiavellian assessment of his reign—but he arguably never could have predicted what Fortuna would throw at the United States: a cold civil war based on illusions that are both cause and effect of fear. The chief “enemy” is no longer foreign, but domestic. Machiavelli works well for the world of realpolitik, the geopolitics of the world of the 20^th century. But our situation is becoming increasingly characterized by what Ross Douthat calls “dreampolitik”: large segments of the population captured by alternative realities split off from the broader body politic, convinced their fellow citizens are their enemies.

In this world, FDR and the Dao are more useful than Machiavelli. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—and the illusions it fosters and is fueled by. Just as we pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression through muscular government action and wartime mobilization—“the factories make trucks and tractors”—we must pull ourselves out of this perilous moment by making America make again, and leading the 30 year project to decarbonize the global economy and avert catastrophic climate change.

If we do that with speed, at scale, and with solidarity—and with a lot of Fortuna on our side—then we just may help humanity attain harmony with the Dao.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 45

“True perfection seems imperfect,

yet it is perfectly itself.

True fullness seems empty,

Yet it is fully present.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

For the Daoist, the proverbial glass is neither half-full nor half-empty. The conventional binary of “optimism” and “pessimism” is a product of an impoverished way of seeing. Optimism is too fixated on the future, pessimism too preoccupied with the past. Both are caught in what Tai Chi calls the “floating position.” Vaclav Havel agreed:

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

This reflects a deep trust—a kind of faith—not in a set of dogmas, but in the basic order of things. As Alan Watts put it, where belief clings, faith lets go.

For the Daoist, the glass is empty, however “full” it might appear. It may be relatively full or relatively empty, but ultimately it is fully empty. This seems contradictory to the logical mind—“true wisdom seems foolish,” we also read in this chapter—but as Pascal noted, “the heart has reasons that reason cannot fathom.” The heart-mind, according to Chinese philosophy, is that part of us that can intuit things felt but not seen…the hidden logos, the Force, the Dao.

In the modern age, we have lost the faith that, in the final analysis, things hang together, that we are part of a “cosmos”–literally, a well-ordered state of affairs. We don’t have to fall back on belief in the bearded man in the sky; that was never much faith to begin with. We have to fall forward into the world as it is, trusting that the emptiness of space is less an abyss and more an ocean that will buoy us up, the fount of all forms.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 44

“Success or failure: which is more destructive?”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

It was not enough for us to enshrine “success” as the meaningless and therefore unattainable goal of the game of late capitalism. We also had to go ahead and fetishize “failure.” George Carlin quipped that in America, you never have to die; you get to just “pass away.” In the same vein, “failure” just brings you closer to “success,” so we—or rather, the Silicon Valley influencers who were the few lucky winners who despite their brilliance and heroic industry are either monstrously deluded due to their success or cynically gaslighting those less fortunate and whose products and platforms are causing the psychological and political equivalent of climate change—tell young people to fail early and often. Fail up! Fail forward! Marx had a powerful image for how ideology works: a “camera obscura,” in which the true world is turned upside down.

I don’t mean to knock the value of grit, hard work, and risk-taking. These are essential virtues, and we almost always need more of them. I don’t mean to knock capitalism. In its healthiest form, it is both the most moral and the most effective and efficient way to organize our economic lives.

But at some point, cultural scripts about success and failure start to mess with people’s minds. This semester I am teaching a seminar for seniors on work and leisure. They are about to start their adult lives with, theoretically, greater advantages than most people their age in history: coming out of an elite university in the richest country in the history of the world. And they’re terrified. Yes, there’s the pandemic, climate change, the fracturing and fragilizing of democracy, the vertiginous inequalities of late capitalism. But I suspect they’d be feeling this way regardless of these swirling storm systems.

Cleansed of ideological distortions, though, the gospel of failure carries a grain of truth. Perhaps the best advice I’ve ever heard about success was that true success would be to succeed yourself. If you are not dying and being reborn every five or ten years, you’re probably doing something wrong. This is a more psycho-spiritual view of success. Failure is “not an option,” it is a necessity. Not because complete success is possible, but because everything is built to fail. Rather than embrace this truth, the American mind chases a fantasy of perfect, permanent success, and when reality does not bend to its influential wishes and the soul or body breaks down, it calls that failure success in disguise. It tries to make the whole world yang, and when yin asserts itself, it says white is the new black.

Today’s chapter closes: “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” The serpent gets a bad rap in Genesis, but in the ancient near East, the serpent was a sacred animal and a symbol of eternity. The snake regularly sheds its skin. As Joseph Campbell puts it, the serpent represents the power of eternity in time, the force of life continually casting off dead weight, regenerating itself, being reborn. The snake’s skin fails, and it succeeds itself. The snake is not how it appears to others. The snake is not its skin. It is the sinuous line slithering across and around the yin/yang symbol.

Don’t follow the snakes advice and try to be like God. Try to be like the snake.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 43

“The gentlest thing in the world

overcomes the hardest thing in the world.

…

Teaching without words,

Performing without actions:

That is the Master’s way.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

What is the hardest thing in the world?

The images this passage summons are the gentle river patiently wearing down the hard mountain, or the martial artist deftly deflecting a rushing attacker. The hard is found in the heavy and the dense, the crude and the brutal. But these are not the hardest thing in the world.

The hardest thing in the world is a human mind that believes it knows the world. Words are futile volleys of arrows glancing off its proud façade. Actions aimed at prying it open only tighten its grip. How to teach without words and perform without actions? Look to the true Master.

The true Master is nature. “The gentlest thing in the world” is a mountain. Precisely by not moving—through its supreme silence and inimitable inaction—it forces the human mind and body to yield to it. In return, it reveals the view from above, helping us let go of the view from below. And as we descend, it makes us let go of that view too.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 42

“Ordinary men hate solitude.

But the master makes use of it,

embracing his aloneness, realizing

he is one with the whole universe.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

In 2014, a social psychologist conducted an experiment in which people had the choice of either doing nothing for a short period of around 15 minutes, or shocking themselves. The results were, well…you can fill in the blank. The experiment appeared to support Pascal’s famous aphorism, “All of mankind’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” More specifically, perhaps the problems stem from men’s inability to do so; more precisely, the masculine power’s revulsion at solitude sows chaos.

The lines above today’s selection read this way: “All things have their backs to the female and stand facing the male. When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony.”

If the male turns its back on the female, he will only see her shadow. He will, that is, only see Kali. And Kali makes you fight, flee, fawn, or freeze. Kali provokes furious action, frenetic motion, reactive energy, rash behavior—anything but sitting still.

But to turn toward Kali—to “embrace his aloneness”—the male has to fall backward into the black. The little shocks he distracts himself with to feel alive and accomplished are so much pornography filling in for the real thing; if he really wants to give birth to something, he has to turn toward Kali. He has to go, as Plotinus put it, from the alone to the Alone. He has to say yes to solitude.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 41

“The path into the light seems dark,

the path forward seems to go back,

the direct path seems long….”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

Psychoanalysis, it has been said, is expensive, inconclusive, and interminable. In contrast to modern therapeutic approaches like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy that tend to focus more on problem solving—on the future—psychoanalysis presents as a long, leisurely walkabout through the wilds of the psyche, a spelunking sojourn through the vast caverns of one’s past. Who has the time these days?

But however inefficient this continental method may sound to American ears, it had a practical purpose: what Freud called “regression in service of the ego.” The logic is that the unconscious is governed by its own peculiar logic; it “seems dark,” but its threshold is a “path into the light.” The gamble is that by treating with the monsters dwelling in the darkness of the psyche, we will unsnarl the knots in the net that binds us back up top; and that without this descent and return, all our efforts on the surface will only ensnare us more tightly in a matrix of our own making. In Song of Myself, Walt Whitman wrote, “out of the dimness, opposite equals advance.” Or as development psychologist Robert Kegan likes to put it, “Either we feast on our shadows, or starve on our egos.”

Sometimes, the only way forward is downward.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 40

“Return is the movement of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.

All things are born of being.

Being is born of non-being.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

It follows from this that “being” is not a thing. What, then, is being?

Existentialism is one of the most perilous parts of our march up the mountain because it’s easy to get stuck there. Hamlet’s indecision is the classic example, the soul circling about on a rocky promontory, unable to see the point in either pressing on to the summit or coming back down the mountain.

Without yoga—some form of mental and physical practice to jolt the soul awake from its stupor of abstraction—the existential engine stalls. The word yoga is related to the word for “yoke,” and its goal is to align the movements of our being with the order of things.

If we are stuck to “being,” we will be cut off from things, because being is not an idea or a concept of a kind of super-being like God floating in some ether. If we yield to non-being, we will see being for what it is: nothing else than what Daoism calls “the 10,000 things.” The 10,000 things just are the play of being and non-being, form and emptiness, time and eternity.

In Biblical terms, creation is not an event in the distant past, but a process taking place right now. To paraphrase Hamlet, there is nothing past or future, but thinking makes it so.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 39

“When man interferes with the Tao,

the sky becomes filthy,

the earth becomes depleted,

the equilibrium crumbles,

creatures become extinct.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

When The Matrix came out in 1999, no one considered it to be an environmental allegory. Instead, we cast it as Frankenstein for the digital age: the hubris of humanity playing god, our creations turning on us and threatening the survival of our species. Climate change had not yet slid into the Overton window, but now that it has, watching The Matrix in light of it makes sense. What folks in the “existential risk” space refer to as the “control problem” of artificial intelligence is likely to become more and more entangled with the climate problem.

This week, one of the leading science journalists of our time, Elizabeth Kolbert—author of The Sixth Extinction—came out with a new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, reporting on the state of play around the climate problem. Among the many controversial cutting-edge technologies she profiles is geo-engineering, the main form of which involves injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to deflect solar radiation in order to cool the planet. As one of her sources bluntly remarks, we are at the point where we are seriously talking about “dimming the fucking sun.”

When Morpheus explains to Neo how the machines took over—“some time in the early 21^st century”—he says that as a last ditch effort to win the war, humanity darkened the sky in order to cut off the machine’s power source—the sun. Yet this turned out to seal humanity’s fate, since the machines realized they could use human bodies as batteries by growing them in fields, sucking their life force energy away as they sleepwalked through a virtual reality simulation. 

Few paid attention, however, to the deeper meaning of The Matrix sequels—partly because of wooden acting and stilted scripts, partly because they contained a spiritual teaching far too high for popular culture. In the second and third films, we learn that the simple morality play of the first film—“humanity good, machines bad”—is yet another illusion. The machines themselves turn out to be incarnations of spirit. In Hegelian terms, the machines are humanity’s alienated essence, and the war is the “cunning of reason” conspiring to reconcile them to each other. Neo is the Christ-like mediator between the two.

A form of this Manichean morality tale characterizes much of the environmental movement—“ humanity/technology/capitalism bad, nature good”—and colors Western appropriations of Daoism. The rhetoric of balance, harmony, and equilibrium conjures the idea that humanity is, as Agent Smith puts it, a “cancer on this planet.”

The problem with this line of thinking is that nature created a species that interferes with nature. To regard humanity as the problem is, paradoxically, to interfere with the Dao. As Stewart Brand famously put it, “We are as gods. We may as well get good at it.” Our destiny is not what we have tacitly been trying to do for millennia: leave this planet. It is to make it our home for the first time; to restore the balance we began to disrupt with the advent of agriculture; to run the industrial revolution in reverse; and, as energy scientist Amory Lovins puts it, to “reinvent fire,” switching from scarce “fuels from hell” to unlimited “fuels from heaven.” Like the machines, carbon dioxide is our alienated essence, the shadow of our civilization. We must confront it, take responsibility for it, bury it, and refrain from projecting it.

If we interfere with the Dao—if we not grow our consciousness to develop technologies to adapt to the world we have wrought—the sky will become filthy, the earth will be depleted, and creatures will go extinct. Few figures seem more at odds with both Daoism and environmentalism than Francis Bacon. Yet Bacon said that to be commanded, nature must be obeyed. It is earth (geothermal), fire (solar and nuclear), wind, and water power—and the fifth element, the spark of intelligence within us—that will lead us to energy heaven.

Only then will we have true “energy independence.” Only when our civilization is fueled by heaven will we give up trying to get there. Only then will we finally be earthlings.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 38

“When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is morality.

When morality is lost, there is ritual.

Ritual is the husk of true faith,

The beginning of chaos.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

This chapter is a surgical strike against Confucius, for whom li, ritual propriety, was the key ingredient to a successful society. The Confucian saw the ideal society as a carefully choreographed play aimed at maximizing order. The Taoist saw this as a social straightjacket snuffing out spontaneity, sure to court the very thing it tried to control. Lao-tzu is the trickster in the garden Confucius cultivated, telling you to live a little, bite the apple, and see what happens. 

For the traditionalist, rituals are sacred and separate from the profane. 

For the modernist, rituals are silly because nothing is sacred and therefore nothing is profane. 

For the postmodernist, rituals are sacred but found in the profane–and the mundane. 

Growing up in a modern culture, it’s hard not to encounter a religious ritual like the Catholic mass as pointless, inefficient, hollow. There is no room for individual thought or action, since the participant is purely passive. Of course, in truth, the idea is for the soul to be active in prayer. But since modernity, afflicted by what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world,” doesn’t quite believe in souls, a mass seems like a big waste of time—and boring as all hell.

Yet after a while, everything on the modern plane seems like a big waste of time, because nothing really matters. Since nothing is sacred, time isn’t really worth saving, so it can’t really be wasted. The distractions designed to fend off the existential ennui evoked by an entropic universe start to lose their luster, and rituals once again become interesting.

For the postmodern “spiritual but not religious” set, there is no ritual more popular than the morning coffee. That caffeine has become the de facto sacrament of the information age, slavishly imbibed before we cross the threshold into the temple of productivity, speaks volumes about our culture’s priorities. Caffeine may be one of the “old gods,” but in the wasteland any god will do. But apart from that, the re-enchantment of the world has, for many of us, taken the form of simply being more present in the most mundane activities. These little sips of quiet we steal away before being sucked into the maelstrom of the marketplace—the coffee, the meditation, the yoga, the gratitude journals—certainly contain notes of Daoism. But this nibbling at the margins will not quite satisfy. It is as though we know we have to hold our breath all day, and inhale as many big gulps of air as we can before plunging into the fray.

Contra conventional wisdom, though, the traditional attitude has much to recommend it. The Sabbath is not the “end” of the week, a kind of bonus-round tacked on to the main event, a chance to get some R and R to be productive the week after; but it is the “end” of the week in the sense of the purpose of the week, the answer to the question of why the work, why the week—why time—matters at all. As Josh Cohen explains in his gem of a book Not Working, “The Sabbath, explicitly sanctifying non-work, encourages us to imitate this divine lassitude; its disappearance from contemporary life may have as much to do with the sacralization of work as it does with the secularization of society.” The truth is that modernity tells a noble lie about religion; as David Foster Wallace put it, there’s no such thing as atheism–everybody worships. And modernity worships the false idol of work.

The only way to recover the “true faith”–to ascend from chaos back to up to the Dao–is with what John Lewis called “good trouble.” A little chaos now is like a vaccine that inoculates us against a lot of chaos later. It’s true that we need order as an “antidote to chaos,” as Jordan Peterson puts it, but after a while order becomes boring and unbearable. The routines that streamline our lives, the habits that William James called the great flywheel of society, over time congeal into ruts that stifle the spirit. Chaos can be an antidote to order. Rituals are great, as long as we aren’t too religious about them. A little chaos in the morning, a little chaos at work, a little chaos on the Sabbath.

A little chaos, not too much.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 37

“If powerful men and women

could center themselves in [the Dao],

the whole world would be transformed by itself….

People would be content

with their simple, everyday lives,

in harmony, and free of desire.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

Few passages in the Daodejing sound more utopian than this. Yet few ages, arguably, are more cynical than ours. Sure, the elimination of desire and world peace are impossible and, in the case of the former, economically disastrous.

But if we adopt the hermeneutic of Trump apologists and take the passage “seriously, but not literally,” it has something important to tell us.

One of the many lessons of the Trump years was that who is in charge matters. For a long time, many Americans—call them casual centrists—didn’t think or worry much about politics, naively assuming that the system would take care of itself, or cynically believing that they’re all crooks anyway, so why bother?

The very idea that the character of the leader doesn’t matter was foreign to the ancients. For Plato, the ideal leader was the philosopher. The philosopher was not a professor of philosophy, but a person who had attained self-mastery, possessed the virtues, and was driven above all toward the truth and the common good.

The idea that character doesn’t matter in politics flows from the political atomism of our cultural DNA: classical liberalism. As Patrick Dineen has pointed out, the idea that we are first and foremost individuals, islands unto ourselves, isn’t just corrosive to the flourishing of human society; it’s false. You don’t even need to ask Aristotle; just consult your local evolutionary biologist.

People instinctively look to the leader—even if they’re disgusted, even if they can’t look away. And even if they are repulsed and don’t follow his example, it makes them just a little bit more cynical, a little bit more jaded. It’s precisely that fatalism that is fatal to a free society. Without leaders centered in—or at least orbiting—the Dao, it’s harder for people to be center themselves.

But what follows from this is that we are all powerful men and women, caught, as King put it, in a seamless garment of destiny. We are part of the same social fabric that produced Trump. We must then take responsibility for ten thousand tiny ways we “transform the world” every day. We must center ourselves precisely by remembering that we are not the center of things.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 36

“If you want to shrink something,

you must first allow it to expand.

If you want to get rid of something,

You must first allow it to flourish.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

In How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan relays one of the key “flight instructions” given by veteran “psychonauts” to people embarking on their first psychedelic trip: if you see a monster, go toward it.

As with all monsters, this requires defying our most powerful guardians—our desires and fears—as well as the conventional wisdom around monsters. At root, the word “monster” means a “showing.” He is always trying to show you something, even if he can’t articulate it—especially if he can’t articulate it. And he will not retreat from the stage until you get the message.

The monster’s medium—raging, roaring, rearing up—is his message. All he really craves is attention. It is hardly surprising that our contemporary culture is so monstrous: we live in an attention economy, where the latest form of manufactured scarcity is consciousness itself.

The art of monster-whispering requires not just courage and patience, but a heroic dose of imagination. Here, Lao-tzu calls it “the subtle perception of the way things are.” The way things are is not how they seem. The monster is not as he appears; or rather, he is precisely as he appears, if we look carefully enough: afraid.

So seen, he disappears.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 35

“She who is centered in the Tao

can go where she wishes, without danger.

She perceives the universal harmony,

Even amid great pain,

Because she has found peace in her heart.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

There is little we would like more right now than to “go where we wish, without danger” and little more we desire than to feel centered. You can tell how long we’ve been in the underworld when memories from the before-times seem strange; I was recently recalling my first time meeting a colleague years ago, and it struck me as strange that we weren’t wearing masks. We can’t go anywhere without danger, and if anything, we feel too centered—because we’re always home. You can’t really go home if you’re always there.

What’s incongruous about this chapter is that it decouples danger and great pain. Modern Buddhists like to say that “pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional.” Physical, emotional, and mental pain is going to happen—hence the first Noble Truth, “Life is suffering”—but what we control is how we respond to it. Today’s suffering is tomorrow’s pain.

But pain conducted produces harmony. It reminds us that we are caught in a labyrinth, and gives us an Ariadne’s thread to fumble our way out so that we can see its brilliant design. The pandemic has been a tragedy, but the crisis, as the cliché goes, is also an opportunity to appreciate the reality and fragility of the world we have inherited and innovated: politically, culturally, economically, and ecologically entwined. Society is largely a conspiracy to protect its members from the truth, but the truth is just a broader, more concrete, and less nefarious conspiracy—that of life.

Life is the business of human beings and life forms breathing together in the same space, the background against which our religious and political stories appear childish things. The pandemic has laid bare the truth of our 21^st century civilization, which is really the truth of civilization itself: our destiny is not to leave this plane or planet for heaven or space, but to learn how to live on it, how to breathe together with all of its inhabitants.

The great danger is that we cocoon ourselves with comforts inside the cave of conventional wisdom, which largely consists of conspiracy theories, some more benign than others. The pandemic must be the “great pain” that breaks this spell, and helps enough of us perceive the “universal harmony” that we can begin to face the music: climate change. Like our democracy, our home is not a given, but a goal.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 34

“Since [the great Tao] is merged with all things

and hidden in their hearts,

it can be called humble.

Since all things vanish into it

and it alone endures,

it can be called great.

It isn’t aware of its greatness;

Thus it is truly great.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

Mother Theresa (allegedly) said we cannot do great things, only small things with great love.

St. Valentine was not, in fact, the patron saint of lovers. He was a 3^rd century Christian cleric and martyr who ministered to persecuted Christians. The legend of St. Valentine was created in the 14^th century, and the industry of Valentine’s Day developed centuries after that. But both the legend and what little we know of the reality of the saint tell us a great deal about the hidden meaning of perhaps our most light-hearted holiday.

What yokes the life and legend of St. Valentine is devotion. Our modern conception of romantic love—that marriage should be based on personal passion rather than economic necessity and social status—derives in large part from the tradition of courtly love from the Middle Ages. But this idea was profoundly moral and religious: the knight errant does not simply devote himself to a noble lady because of her beauty and purity, but because she embodies qualities that reflect the divine. Put another way, he is not attracted to her, but through her, to something that transcends her. The danger of this, of course, is obsession: to idealize her and put her on a pedestal. That is the dark side of passion.

But the other side of passion is captured, to the best of our knowledge, by the real St. Valentine: selfless, sacrificial love. David Foster Wallace put it well:

“there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

To do small things with great love is precisely to do great things.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Day 33

“Knowing others is intelligence;

knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength;

Mastering yourself is true power.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

One of the many fascinating findings in analyses of Trump supporters is that men who identify as “completely masculine” were more likely to vote for him and approve of his policies. Hardly a shocker.

But it gets at something elemental, something too easily dismissed as simple misogyny or, in cutting-edge cultural parlance, “toxic masculinity.” Like “racism,” “transphobia”, and “nativism,” misogyny is a term referring to a real thing whose power declines in proportion to how commonly it is deployed.

It’s true that Trump and Trumpism are suffused by a brutal and basic form of masculinity. It’s true that this lines up perfectly with findings from social psychology that conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to experience than liberals, and hence drawn to black and white views of morality and gender identity; indeed, for conservatives generally, the very idea of a differentiation between sex and gender, between biological reality and social construction, seems confused and confusing.

But it’s also true that this is a deep stratum in our body-minds, a foundational piece of our evolutionary inheritance. We ignore it—or attempt to exorcise it—at our individual and collective peril. The Daodejing nudges us to “know the male, but keep to the female,” not to cling to the female and castrate—or cancel—the male.

One way to understand Trumpism is to see it as a symptom of a deeper cultural problem: a lack of respect for traditional masculinity, and the collapse of the socioeconomic stage that allows it to flourish. Put another way, if you do away with traditional masculinity, toxic masculinity will take its place; one of the blind spots of many progressives is that they cannot distinguish between the two, and hence dismiss both. And that, of course, is cause and effect of toxic femininity.

Beneath all of this is an elemental truth: the masculine and feminine powers are not merely social constructs. In fact, social constructs are not merely social constructs or, alternatively put, the idea of “social constructs” is a social construct; they are a part of an integral whole in the world that we separate in analysis in order to better understand the complexity of reality. For human beings, it is natural to construct social reality. The reason we have trouble seeing this is that we have inherited the idea that nature and nurture are separate—that our nature is merely our genetic priors. For Aristotle, however, our nature included “nature” and nurture because we are social, political, meaning-making animals; our nature is to create culture.

And when it comes to sexuality and gender, the culture we create is bounded by biological forces. The sexual forces of male and female are like relatively fixed biological anchors, and the psychological forces of masculine and feminine are like ships tied to them but relatively free to move depending on the currents of culture. Gender is distinct from, but cannot be completely detached from, sex. Otherwise, the entire idea of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine—that is, the very ideas of sex and gender—become meaningless.

The obvious form of “mastering others is strength” is the alpha male monster bullying people into submission. But the opposite form of this is the dark female power—Tiamat or Kali—that, unconscious of her own masculinity, captive to her shadow, tries to destroy the other, all in the name of respect for otherness.

“Mastering yourself” means, in part, recognizing and expressing the masculine and feminine within—and not necessarily in equal proportions. At its best, traditional masculinity is one of the most successful formulas for doing this. The code of chivalry, traditional virtues like humility and moderation, and the ideal of the “gentle-man” all sublimate the will to dominate to a higher purpose and connect with the “taming of testosterone” that, as Ken Wilber puts it, is one of the primary tasks and fruits of civilization. That formula may be incomplete, has certainly been applied incorrectly, and needs to be supplemented; but it is a mistake to abandon it as a mere cypher for misogyny, patriarchy, and/or white supremacy.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 32

The Tao can’t be perceived,

smaller than an electron,

it contains uncountable galaxies.

….

When you have name and forms,

know that they are provisional.

When you have institutions,

know where their functions should end.

Knowing when to stop,

you can avoid any danger.

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

The use of the modern word “electron” is obviously a liberty taken by the translator, but it also reflects one of the most influential modern appropriations of Daoism: the identification of quantum physics with Eastern mysticism more broadly. Popular New Age or New Age-adjacent books like the Tao of Physics and the The Dancing Wu Li Masters posited a parallel between the new physics and Eastern conceptions of impermanence and interdependence. Beyond this, they helped to spread the idea that science and spirituality are not incompatible, and that physics somehow “proves” the Tao.

In Quantum Questions, Ken Wilber convincingly argued that this line of thinking is misguided. But his intention was not to dismiss spirituality as “woo woo,” as the Defenders of Science commonly do. His approach was similar to evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s view of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria”—a clunky phrase for a simple idea: do not, so to speak, try to join what God has separated.

But a problem with the way this idea is spun is that science gets seen as “objective” and “rational” and “empirical,” while religion is “subjective” and “emotional” and based on “faith.” Science is the realm of the known and knowable, religion that of mystery.

Without for a minute dismissing the legitimacy and sophistication of contemporary physics, perusing the work of popular writers like Brian Greene or Neal DeGrasse Tyson, it’s hard to come away without thinking that the universe if fundamentally weird. It is as though physics and philosophy have switched places: the hard science is now in the business of positing abstract entities—superstrings and god particles and dark matter. Physics is the new metaphysics. At some point, you feel compelled to ask whether we are just bumping up against the limitations of our knowing.

And here, the medievals’ approach may be of use, without adopting their theology. Their idea was that faith and reason were not incompatible, but mutually entailing. We have to know the limits of our reason (“knowing when to stop”) in order to make room for what transcends it. What transcends it may be mysterious, but that is no excuse for pretending it doesn’t exist, or asserting that someday science will “explain it.” When science does that, it stops being science and turns into scientism.

Likewise, when religions claim to have the Total Explanation for Everything, they stop being religions and become cults.

Only be stopping can we start to see the mystery.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 31

“Weapons are the tools of violence;

all decent men detest them.

Weapons are the tools of fear;

a decent man will avoid them

except in the direct necessity

and, if compelled, will use them

Only with the utmost restraint.

….

His enemies are not demons,

But human beings like himself.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

One of my favorite book titles is Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. One of the reasons we moderns are meaning-poor, I suspect, is that we are insulated from war. War or the threat of war was a near constant for most of our species’ history, so much so that the ancients generally regarded it as natural and inescapable.

The basic idea of modernity is that we should stop fighting and start fucking—exchanging goods in the physiosphere (economics), bodies in the biosphere (immigration), and ideas in what Tielhard de Chardin called the “noosphere” (culture). The logic of the post-World War II “liberal international order” was based on the idea that economic interdependence would make the large-scale national conflicts intolerable and unlikely. The hope was that classical liberalism would act as a sort of booster rocket to help humanity achieve the escape velocity from Thucydides’ trap and attain Kant’s “perpetual peace.”

It’s true that this rocket ship was built on the backs of slaves, the exploitation of colonies, and the degradation of the environment. But it’s also true, as Steven Pinker demonstrates in The Better Angels of Our Nature, that despite the cataclysmic conflicts of the 20^th century, the modern world is far more peaceful than prior eras in history. Within the gates of civilization, at least, we live in a historically anomalous garden of peace and prosperity.

And it turns out that’s kind of boring.

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously warned that the “end of history”—the victory of democratic capitalism in the multi-millennial contest of ideologies—was the beginning of a new threat: the “last man,” a phrase he took from Nietzsche. The last man is what C.S. Lewis called “men without chests” and T.S. Eliot termed “hollow men”—all reason and appetite, no heart. With a political system telling him to respect others’ rights, an economic system telling him to be a good producer and consumer, and a biology telling him that his only purpose is to survive and reproduce, the last man’s only goal is to…last. Tyler Durden distills the plight of the last man in Fight Club: “We’re the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The great depression is our lives.”

True peace is not just the absence of war. Rather than exorcise the warrior energies that are part of our evolutionary inheritance, modernity denies their existence, and is confused when they erupt into the public square. It is hard to imagine a better example of this than the QAnon shaman howling in the heart of the Capitol.

Eliminate nature wars, and you’re going to get culture wars. The converse of Bismarck’s adage that “war is the continuation of politics by other means is also true.” For the vast majority of us in the so-called developed world, the weapons we wield are words. Most of us—particularly those in UMPMC (upper middle professional managerial class)—fancy ourselves decent, reasonable people free from ideology, far more civilized than the “great unwashed” idiocrats from the sticks attending Trump rallies, spellbound by the delusion that they are foot soldiers in some world-historical struggle re-enacting 1776. And of course it is horrible that, as Ross Douthat put it, the “dreampolitik” of today’s Republican party—the fake news, the conspiracy theories, the live-action role playing game ethos—tore the veil between the virtual and the real on January 6^th.

But this move is a mistake, and a subtle form of violence. We other the others because they other. We “them” them “theming” us. David Frum put it well in “Against Revenge,” the final chapter of his recent book on Trump:

“comparatively few of Trump’s voters were intentionally bad actors. Most of them were fallible human beings like everybody else. They were deceived by people they trusted. Fox News and Facebook penned them like farmed salmon inside a lagoon of ignorance. Irresponsible politicians them hauled them flopping into their nets. These Trump voters were not victims, exactly. They could have struggled to overcome their prejudices. They could have sought out better information. They could have made wiser choices. They did grave harm to American democracy. Yet if you are going to hold them accountable for their bad choices, you should also hold yourself accountable for the choices you will make after the political pendulum swings. These are your countrymen. They are not going anywhere.”

For if we recognize that we are caught in and, however minutely, contributing to a world-historical conflict—if we awaken from the dream that history has “ended,” and realize that the fate of democracy, capitalism, and the climate is bound up with the culture wars in the United States—we might come to see our struggle in quite different terms. As Nietzsche put, “in times of peace, the warlike man attacks himself.”

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 30

“The Master does his job

and then stops.

He understand that the universe

is forever out of control,

and that trying to dominate events

goes against the current of the Tao.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

When it comes to Fortune, Machiavelli is the Western yin to Lao-tzu’s yang.

“I certainly believe this: that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under it is necessary to beat her and force her down. It is clear that she more often allows herself to be won over by impetuous men than by those who proceed coldly.

“Fortune is a…raging river, which floods the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil; everyone flees before it; all yield to its violence, and no one can resist it…”

For Machiavelli, Fortune is tantamount to Tiamat.

What separates the two thinkers is the desire to dominate it. Machiavelli believed that the will to conquer the world is part of human nature; Lao-tzu believed that the ability to conquer desire is the key to harmony with nature.

The great leader aims not to be feared or loved, but to be ignored. There is a reason the Biden presidency has come as a relief to so many: boring is a blessing.

But it would be a mistake to cast Trump as a Machiavellian success story. His great masterstroke was to seize to perceive and mercilessly exploit the GOP’s hollowness, rural America’s anger, and Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity in 2016. His great mistake was that he tried to Tweet his way around Tiamat in 2020. Fortune, in the form of the pandemic, carried him out to sea.

If he had done his job and stopped Tweeting, he would be president. And we would not be bored.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 29

“Do you want to improve the world?

I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.

It can’t be improved.

If you temper with it, you’ll ruin it.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

This is blasphemy to modern ears. The whole idea of modernity is progress, particularly material progress. As the old Dow slogan put it, “better living through chemistry.”

The Daodejing tends to mix with progressive spirituality in American culture, so it may be surprising to consider that here, it embraces two core conservative ideas: one, that the world cannot be fixed, and two, that the attempt to fix it often messes it up even more. As the British conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it, “Those who in Elysian fields would dwell, do but extend the bounds of hell.” Yang is not a problem to solved or managed.

At first glance, this appears to counsel pessimism; and indeed, it certainly recognizes the tragic side of life. But seen rightly, it spells relief. Thomas Merton understood this:

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

That doesn’t mean we should quit our moral striving and slouch into cynicism. As Pope John XXIII put it, “See everything, overlook a lot, correct a little.”

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 28

The world is formed from the void,

Like utensils from a block of wood.

The Master knows the utensils,

yet keeps to the block:

Thus she can use all things.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

In the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, the “villain” is the goddess Tiamat, a dragon-like monster of the deep who represents chaos, winter, death. In the story, essentially an agricultural allegory for the changing of the season, the “hero” Marduk slays Tiamat to thwart her destructive rampage and rebuilds the world with her body.

In Genesis, God calls forth the cosmos out of the watery chaos, or “the deep.” The Hebrew word used here is tehom, which is etymologically related to the name Tiamat; hence it is widely believed that the Biblical creation myth is an adaptation of an older story. But notice the differences: Chaos or nothingness doesn’t get a starring role, and there is no living female principle at the creation. In fact, in mythologies of the ancient Near East, the Bible is the odd ball in having no goddesses.

The vision of God drawing order out of the watery chaos later gets worked up into the theological idea of creation “ex nihilo,” out of nothing, but in the text, God does no such thing. The void is there first. The general effect of the Genesis narrative is to repress—to negate—the negative principle, and it haunts the Western tradition in various forms:  the problem of hell, the fear of death, punishment in hell and, of course, garbage.

When Jesus warns his followers about a place called “hell,” the word used is Gehenna. This was not an underground cavern filled with fire and fiends. It was a place in Jerusalem that was seen as cursed, formerly a site of child sacrifice, where the carcasses of animals sacrificed at the temple would be piled up and burned. Hell, in other words, was the town dump.

Architect Bill McDonough has a simple formula to explain his eco-friendly design philosophy: “waste equals food.” Just as the new world order is built out of Tiamat’s body, in the natural world there is no such thing as waste. Whether something is waste or food to you depends on your place in the food chain.

In this chapter, we find three couplets:  the male and the female, the white and the black, and the personal and the impersonal. In each, we are told to “know” the former, and “keep to” the latter.

Mind the gap.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 27

“A good traveler has no fixed plans,

and is not intent on arriving.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

Mike Tyson put the point more crudely: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

The text does not say to not make any plans—just to not hold onto them too tightly. Every moment, every situation, every day is the same: we come to it with a cluster of ideas, expectations, goals, plans, etc., but reality ultimately dictates the terms and tempo of battle. The art of entering the battle well is to strike just the right balance between narrowing our focus to master the moment and opening our awareness to welcome what it has to show us.

Our productivity-driven culture is great at goals—at doing the right things (effectiveness) and doing them the right way (efficiency)—and poor at dancing with things (efficacy).

If we don’t dance with things, we are doing to get punched in the face.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 26

“The heavy is the root of the light.

The unmoved is the source of all movement.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

When I was learning Tai Chi in graduate school many moons ago, this insight was made visceral.

I was paired up with a twitchy freshman to practice a simple drill: you take a straddle stance about three feet away from the other person, they kick straight at you, and you shift your weight to the side, dodge the kick, and clasp their foot.

Keep in mind that a) this is a practice drill, and b) Tai Chi is slow. Like, really slow. Slow like, yes, the way you see elderly Asian people practicing it in the park slow. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Once we had taken our positions, the instructor, Sifu, gave the go ahead, and my partner, impatient as a greyhound about to be loosed from the starting gate, proceeds to wind up and swing his leg toward my groin.

Luckily, we had just completed the warmup exercises. I mentioned slowness. The warmup has the effect not only of getting your body ready for a workout, but calming the mind and focusing the attention—Sifu likened it to be naturally stoned.

A long leg hurtling toward my groin, I pivoted instantly, effortlessly, like Neo dodging bullets, and seized his foot in one crisp, sure, snapping motion.

I turned my face to see Sifu next to me, a knowing grin resting on his face: “You see how quickly you can react when you’re relaxed?” The lesson didn’t just save me from a half hour or so of excruciating pain. It proved to be transferrable to pretty much everything.

The reason I was able to react so quickly, Sifu later explained, was that I was in the “grounded position.” The idea is Tai Chi is to draw power from your surroundings, particularly from the ground; gravity is not an obstacle to defy, but an energy source to harness. The more rooted we are, the more quickly and correctly we can respond to whatever comes our way.

The opposite—the posture we hold most of the time—is the “floating position.” We are easily knocked off balance or dragged away by distraction.

How often are you in the floating position?

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 25

“There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

In this chapter Lao-tzu comes the closest to violating the precept he lays down in chapter one: “the tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” It’s probably the most concerted attempt to describe the Dao in the entire text.

So stated, it sounds similar to the monotheistic idea of a God hanging out in the eternal void before creating the universe—except for two things: it is empty, and it is female.

Modern thinking is allergic to seeing the universe anthropomorphically. Postmodern thinking is allergic to seeing it patriarchally. It’s easy to see how ancient societies’ views of the cosmos were refracted through the structure of their societies, with a despotic God being depicted as king of the universe. It’s easy—and kind of fun—to debunk those mythic stories.

But Daoism offers a subtler way of thinking about the cosmos and our place in it. The masculine and the feminine are not simply features of human sexuality and gender identity, but basic principles of the cosmos. Put another way, the polarity between male and female in the human drama is just one iteration of the play of primal energies that suffuses the cosmos.

This is not the same as magical thinking and childish superstition, in which we project our wishes and imaginations onto the world. It’s the recognition that we should fully expect the basic elements of our being to reflect and cohere with the order of things that gave birth to us. The existentialist notion that we are “strangers in a strange world” is a strange doctrine, the sign of an age that has forgotten where it came from.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 24

“He who clings to his work

will create nothing that endures.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

Paradoxically, the worry, stress, and anxiety we experience around work is a function of not paying attention to our work.

When we “cling” to our work, we are fixated not on what we have to do, but our opinions and feelings about what we have to do—on our selves. Our attention is pulled out of the present—the task at hand—and inward toward concerns over the results and how they’ll be perceived by others.

But the clinging also takes our focus off of others as recipients and beneficiaries of the fruits or our labor. We dwell on how we will judged.

By taking work too seriously, we diminish its quality, and stymie the condition for its excellence: serious play.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 23

“Express yourself completely,

then keep quiet.”

---

A psychological formula I quite like goes something like this: “what you do not express you will repress, and what you repress will cause distress.” Not just in you, but in others—in small, subtle, osmotic ways.

If we do not express ourselves, we may keep quiet on the outside, but we will face the blowback of noise on the inside. A silenced signal breeds noise that gnaws on us until we explode. Better to express on our own terms, rather than the terms of our repressed feelings.

The chapter casts this in terms of trust and openness: “Open yourself to the Tao, then trust your natural responses; and everything will fall into place.” It means trusting—both that our thoughts and feelings are legitimate and deserve to be, and that however much we might fear letting them out into the world, they belong there.

An exchange between the dancers Agnes DeMille and Martha Graham illustrates this:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Express yourself completely, so that you may find quiet within.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 22

“When the ancient Masters said,

‘If you want to be given everything,

give everything up,’

they weren’t using empty phrases.

Only in being lived by the Tao

Can you be truly yourself.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

How much this last line sounds like St. Paul’s “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”! In chapter 19 of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is asked by a young rich man how to enter the kingdom of heaven. “Do you follow the commandments?” Jesus asks him. Check! But then Jesus makes a more exacting demand, asking the man to sell all of his possessions. Exit young rich man stage right.

This story—combined with the phrase that it will be harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel passing through the eye of a needle—Is typically invoked to illustrate the idea that wealth if frowned upon in Christian teaching and, more generally, that it is incompatible with the moral and religious life. God or Mammon. But that is not the sense of the story.

Jesus is testing the young man to see how attached he is to his possessions. The story is not about the man’s net worth—it’s about the state of his soul. Put another way, the way to read the first beatitude—blessed are the poor in spirit—is that it calls for spiritual, not material, poverty: an empty, open, free soul unattached to power, property, profit, and prestige.

Jesus is calling the young man to “empty” himself, not to empty his coffers.

This is the same emptying to which the Daodejing is calling us. The demand sounds extreme only because, like the young man, we imagine it requires some dramatic change in our life circumstances. But what it mainly requires is a shift of perspective, to relate to our life circumstances in a different way. It’s a different kind of hard.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 21

“Before time and space were,

the Tao is.

It is beyond is and is-not.

How do I know this is true?

I look inside myself and see.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

A theme that runs through the Daodejing—and Zen Buddhism—is that the path to the knowledge of the self and the knowledge of reality is one and the same. But it is not confined to these traditions. Even St. Augustine’s formula can be cast as “going within takes me beyond,” or as one of his interpreters put it, to move “from the exterior to the interior, and from the interior to the superior.”

To our modern ears, this sounds odd. Why? Because we live in a secular age, which philosopher Charles Taylor suggests is bound by an “immanent frame.” The immanent frame is the idea that there is no transcendent spiritual reality, no unseen order, nothing really mysterious or spooky going on in the universe. The vision was perfectly encapsulated by Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of “scientific materialism”: “Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.”

In this frame, the self is what Taylor calls “the buffered self,” or what Alan Watts famously called a “skin-encapsulated ego.”

In this kind of a universe, if I withdraw into myself, I am eventually going to just hit a wall somewhere in the dark crannies of my unconscious or, worse, I’ll get lost and descend into madness. Also, I’m going to realize that wow, I’m really kind of crazy and weird. Maybe better to not make the trip?

In Taylor’s story, the “buffered self” came to replace the “porous self.” The porous self is that of the Biblical world, where God speaks to his people in dreams, of the Greek world, where gods and goddesses possess mortals, of the medieval world, where spirits and devils circle and penetrate the soul. Arguably, the internet has reactivated this “porous self,” but now our minds are vulnerable to hijack by spectral forces from the cloud—algorithms, influencers, bots, trolls, software engineers.

None of this is to say that that old enchanted world of magic and myth is true. But it does suggest that we ought to push the immanent frame and test the boundaries of the buffered self, not based on faith in some invisible order, but by being good skeptics in the original sense of the term:

To look for ourselves.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 20

“Stop thinking, and end your problems.

What difference between yes and no?

What difference between success and failure?”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

One of the bestsellers of the aughts was The Purpose-Driven Life, by pastor Rick Warren. The term “purpose” functions in our cultural lexicon somewhat like the term “meaning”: a nebulous, semi-spiritual cypher that contains multitudes, that can be put to any purpose and carry any meaning. And the pursuit of purpose has much to recommend it.

But for Lao-tzu, purpose is a trap. Before she was secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice was a gifted pianist. Her teacher told her biographer that while Rice was technically proficient, she lacked the “disciplined abandon” needed to become a great concert pianist.

Where Confucianism pushes us to be disciplined, Daoism calls us to abandon. We need both.

The idea that what we decide (“yes or no”) and whether our efforts bear fruit (“success or failure”) doesn’t really matter sounds nihilistic. Nothing matters, so why bother?

But the Daoist receives this “nothing matters” as gospel. It is the good news that we are not on trial, that we are not being tested, and that the weight of the world is not on our shoulders. That means that we are free—to play, to create, to fail—to build sandcastles with the intensity and abandon of a child.

---

New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”