Month: July 2021

Chapter 13: Shameless

“To be in favor or disgrace

is to live in fear.

….

Favor debases:

we fear to lose it,

fear to win it.

So to be in favor or disgrace

is to live in fear.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Whatever your opinion of Tony Robbins, he made an insightful remark in an interview with Tim Ferriss: stress is what comfortable people call fear.

Fear, we sophisticated moderns tells ourselves, is something that happens to children and people in the Middle Ages. Charles Taylor offers a useful phrase to describe the shift from the Medieval to the Modern mindset: we move from the “porous self” to the “buffered self.” The porous self is constantly vulnerable to invasion from spirits good and bad (and, of course, plagues and pathogens), at the mercy of the forces of nature. The buffered self stands apart, autonomous, in control, choosing whether and how to engage the allegedly external world.

It’s easy to see why a buffered self would think itself—and think is the operative word here—above and beyond fear. “Stress” is something that happens to the foundations of a building, or the airframe of a plane, or a skeleton; it’s a physical business concerning weight, pressure, volume, density, and the like. Stress happens to bodies, not souls. By conjuring the spirit of stress, we sanitize our suffering.

Suffice it to say that the times have found us. From the internet to social media to the smart phone to climate change to the pandemic, the zeitgeist of the 21st century has unmasked the buffered self for the useful illusion that it always was. The Big Bad Wolf of the world has huffed and puffed and blown the house down. The buffered self failed the stress test of the last couple of decades.

Part of the story of classical liberalism, our modern philosophical anthropology and cultural DNA, is that we are independent individuals pursuing our own happiness. But the reality, as Rousseau understood, is that this just makes us more psychologically dependent on others—or rather, what we imagine others think of us. Favor becomes heaven, disgrace becomes hell. The steeper the scale of social and economic inequality, the more loudly and proudly the gospel of individualism will be proclaimed, and the more fear there will be of tumbling down the ladder into the pit of disgrace—for everyone, not just the bottom dwellers. Economist Richard Wilkinson has shown that counterintuitively, the higher a society’s level of inequality, the worse off the people at the top are in terms of well-being.

But if we drop the pretense that we are separate, that we secure, that we are actually adults, that we are just what Alan Watts called “skin-encapsulated egos”—that we are afraid—then we can rest at base reality. Favor de-bases in that it literally knocks us off base. We take the game too seriously. The irony is that even if you get a hit and round the bases without getting out, you end up in the same place: at home.

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

Chapter 12: Not Wanting

“Racing, chasing, hunting,

drives people crazy.

Trying to get rich

Ties people in knots.

So the wise soul

Watches with the inner

Not the outward eye,

Letting that go,

Keeping this.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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The French writer Blaise Pascal would beg to differ: he thought that we prefer the hunt to the capture. It’s not the chase that drives us crazy; we are driven to chase because we are crazy. More precisely, the bookends of the chase are beset by boredom, restlessness, anxiety. As Pascal put it, the sole problem with man is that he cannot sit alone in a room with his thoughts. In recent years we’ve gotten empirical support for his claim: in one study, most people preferred to administer a painful shock to themselves rather than sit quietly alone for 15 minutes. People often don’t like what the inner eye reveals. We prefer the diversions offered up by the outward eye.

Here we touch on a subtle seam that separates the Christian and Daoist perspectives. Like Luther, Pascal regarded humanity as a walking contradiction, both “wretched” and “great”: wretched in that we are sinners and, like every other creature in the universe, fragile bodies easily snuffed out; great in that unlike every other creature, we are spirits aware of our condition. Doing stuff doesn’t tie us up in knots—we are knots. And we cannot untie ourselves.

The Daoist has more confidence in humanity and reality. If we are knotted, then all we need do is gently tug at one of the loose strings, and trust that it will serve as our thread of Ariadne to lead us out of the labyrinth, as the unseverable umbilical cord tethering us to the 10,000 things.

And because they are all part of the same web, any string will do.

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

Chapter 11: The Uses of Not

“Hollowed out,

clay makes a pot.

Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows to make a room.

Where the room isn’t,

There’s room for you.

So the profit in what is

Is in the use of what isn’t.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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This inverted idea of emptiness—as useful rather than useless, as value rather than void—is often regarded as a nice lifestyle choice: a little feng shui, a little minimalism, a little simple joy of tidying up. Hardly a principle of macroeconomics. But it may be one of the necessary pillars of the carbon-based economy to come.

The inversion of our economic intuitions is the key to the economy of the future. What we see as full—the vast deposits of coal, oil, and gas underground—we must come to see as empty. What we see as empty—the sky—we must come to see as full.

If the economy is a play, the atmosphere—and the lithosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere—is the stage that makes the play possible. Climate change has broken the fourth wall; from here on out, every play must somehow incorporate the stage into its plot.

Countries that “do nothing”—that do not extract their fossil fuel-based natural resources—must be compensated for leaving it in the ground. Companies that remove carbon dioxide from the air or that make their business operations carbon negative by purchasing carbon credits must be handsomely incentivized to do so. Because we are about to run the industrial revolution in reverse, emptiness is the most valuable commodity.

It’s implied by what the wealthiest men in the world are chasing: space.

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

Chapter 10: Techniques

“Can you keep your soul in its body,

hold fast to the one,

and so learn to be whole?

Can you center your energy,

Be soft, tender,

And so learn to be a baby?”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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The genius of Hindu spirituality is its diversity. In the tradition of the four yogas, you pick your path up the mountain: work (karma yoga), devotion (bhakti yoga), study (jnana yoga), or “yoga” as we in the West know it (raja yoga). What’s striking about this model is that there’s a yoga for both our three centers—head (jnana), heart (bhakti), and body (raja)—and our engagement with others and the world (karma).

And of course you don’t need to “choose” exactly…the paths switch back and crisscross in all sorts of ways, merging into each other and back apart as mountain paths do. But one path will call to us the most. The beauty of this model of spirituality is that it balances plasticity with rigor; there’s wiggle room for free play, but structure to foster true growth.

The word yoga means to “yoke,” to unify or integrate. A truly yogic yoga, then, would exercise all four of these dimensions because they’re all part of our being. The trick is find out where we are over- and under-developed, where the kinks in our hose are, where the breaks and dislocations and knots and snarls lie. If we aren’t truly centered, we need to find out what we are centered on, slowly relax our grip, and let the patient undertow of the soul gently guide us back.

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

Chapter 9: Being Quiet

“Brim-fill the bowl,

it’ll spill over.

Keep sharpening the blade,

you’ll soon blunt it.

Nobody can protect

A house full of gold and jade.

Wealth, status, pride,

are their own ruin.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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This weekend, Richard Branson will, assuming all goes well, claim bragging rights for winning first place in the billionaire space race (BSR). I remember some years back Branson did a publicity stunt to celebrate an inaugural flight of his airplane company by bungee jumping off the Palms casino in Las Vegas. The winds were stronger than expected that day, and pushed his backside to graze the building during his descent. As he slowed down for his dismount, Branson looked dazed, shaken, and in serious pain. He flashed a smile for the crowd and the cameras, then limped off stage.

When you think about the hype around this space soap opera, it’s odd: we’ve put people in space before. So what’s new? The commercial aspects: companies are funding it, and the purpose is tourism.

The contrast between this and the moon-landing in 1969 illustrates how we have become what Ross Douthat calls “the decadant society”: “a victim of its own success.” No one was unconsciously rooting for the Apollo 11 to blow up. But not a few people I’ve talked to over the last couple of weeks about the BSR have ironically quipped that they wouldn’t be that upset if Bezos and co. don’t make it back. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and intoned that it was “one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind,” it was a world-historical moment, the completion of a national project announced by JFK a decade early, and cause for collective celebration. Where Armstrong was a pilgrim, Branson will be a tourist. When Branson and Bezos go up, it will be one small leap for the 1%. As Jamie Wheal quips, the BSR space-capades are like Atlas Shrugged in space.

Wheal relays the story of when technology writer Douglas Rushkoff was invited by a band of billionaires to give a talk about the future of technology. Rushkoff assumed he’d be giving a lecture to a large audience, but it turned out that his $50,000 speaking fee was for talking with just five men. The question each of these men paid $10,000 to ask him was this: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The “event,” Rushkoff explained, “was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.”

The idea here is that the Chosen will escape to their sea-steading platforms, their New Zealand bunker fortresses, their space colonies, or upload their consciousness to the Cloud when their bodies give out: that they can protect their “houses made of gold and jade.”

But just as there would be no SpaceX without NASA and no Tesla without the Department of Energy, there would be no market without the rule of law and money would have no value without civilization. The men asking that question of Rushkoff failed to realize that men of their class planning for the apocalypse were hastening its arrival, brim-filling the bowl and over-sharpening the blade. They are, in effect, shorting civilization. Betting on ruin is a symptom of ruin.

Branson’s stunt, and the city where it happened, are revealing. There is no greater symbol of decadence in American culture than the Sin City. And while Branson was moving in the opposite direction he’ll be going in this weekend—with gravity rather than against it—and though the scale was dramatically smaller, the physiological effect will be similar: a rush of blood to the head, a passing euphoria, a sense of self-importance that swiftly fades, and then a restlessness and a need to move on to the next big thing. But what could get you higher than space?

Perhaps the quiet of space will evoke a mystical rapture among the .01%, a cosmic consciousness that shrinks their egos down to size, a literal conversion in the sense of a turning around, shifting their gaze from the heavens and back to earth, to escape the urge to Escape and embrace the need to Return. Perhaps then we will be cheering on the billionaire place race—the race to terraform not Mars, but Earth.

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

Chapter 8: Easy by Nature

“True goodness

is like water.

Water’s good

for everything.

It doesn’t compete.

It goes right

to the low loathsome places,

and so finds the way.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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I have at long last gotten around to reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the high-water (or perhaps low-water?) mark of medieval literature. In part one, Inferno, a central conceit of Dante’s cosmology is the “Harrowing of Hell,” an apocryphal anecdote in which Christ descended to Hell after dying on the cross and granted salvation to the deserving dead. It’s perhaps the most graphic depiction of the Jesus move: to embrace suffering rather than try to escape it.

One of the most surprising things about Dante’s Hell is that its floor is not fire, but ice. There is a “logical” reason for this in Dante’s cosmology: since the sun is the center of the universe and Hell is the center of the Earth, Hell is the farthest from the sun, with the sun, of course, representing God. Satan rests at the bottom of the world imprisoned in a block of ice, incessantly beating his wings and generating a fierce wind that keeps the ice frozen. Satan “competes” by trying to fly up to Heaven.

But ice, of course, is water in disguise. Stuck in the blackest pit of Hell, Satan is so surrounded by true goodness that he can’t see it. As Ken Wilber puts it, spirit is not hard to find, but impossible to avoid.

If you try to compete with water, you’ll always lose, because water is playing a different game than you are. Stop beating your wings.

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

Chapter 7: Dim Brightness

“So wise souls

leaving self behind

move forward,

and setting self aside

stay centered.

Why let the self go?

To keep what the soul needs.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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“Out of the dimness,” Walt Whitman wrote, “opposite equals advance.”

Every organism stays alive by constantly policing the boundary between its self and its environment. There are always scouts tacking about the liminal space, the no man’s land between in and out, self and non-self, life and death. But every organism, so far as we know, is spared the ordeal of this osmotic operation—consciousness. Humans don’t just struggle to survive—we struggle with the struggle. We desire an end to the struggle—not death, but heaven, nirvana, happiness, fulfillment, self-actualization, flourishing, retirement, and on and on. “Cuz people believe…that they’re gonna get away for the summer,” as Oasis sang in “Champagne Supernova.” Nihilism, Nietzsche wrote, is the “will to the end.”

It’s all too easy to get tangled in the thicket of terms that frequent our talk about human nature—persona, ego, self, soul, conscious, unconscious, mind, brain, spirit. But if we let go of the terms, or at least relax our death grip of them, it’s pretty easy to sort out. Carl Jung called the conscious self the ego, the part we show the world the persona, the part we hide from ourselves and others the shadow, and the truest part behind and beneath all of that the Self. In this passage from the Daodejing, what Jung called the ego is called “self,” and what Jung called Self is called “soul.”

Building on Jung’s concept of the shadow—the ugly parts of ourselves we disown, repress, and project onto others—Robert X posited the idea of a “golden shadow,” the gifts we project onto others. We give away our gold because we are afraid of what others will think of us and, most importantly, of our own power. More precisely, we are afraid that our own power is not really our own, that some secret cord ties us to the center of the world, that the energy of the cosmos courses through us.

But we aren’t really giving away our gold, we’re just hoarding it. We hoard it because we have mistaken self for soul (or, in Jung’s terms, ego for Self). This keeps us stuck in place—not centered, but floating. The paradox with hoarding, of course, is that you never feel secure and never think you have enough. If you hoard your breath, you’ll die. If you let it go, you’ll live. If we boil down the psychobabble of our self-talk, what remains is spirit, but spirit is just breath—the most bodily business. The Earth, as philosopher Jason Wirth writes, is simply the “conspiracy of life.”

Alan Watts half-joked—the highest truths always trade in humor—that we are really just “tubes.” We’re organisms after all! What a relief.

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