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00:00:22
Hi everybody welcome to this episode of Enlightenment Today, I'm Jason. In this episode I'm going to speak about what it means to be an accomplished Taoist. We often hear people say they follow the Tao, the Way. But what does it even mean and are they truly a Taoist or are they just intuiting their experience according to their own biases and confusing it with flow?
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When we think of Taoism we have to revert back to the two great sages of Taoist philosophy: Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. The core of Taoism which came from both Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu is that Taoism is a way of life that is focused on having healthy and sane people who are then capable of understanding and aligning with the spiritual core and order of the universe, the Tao.
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This in turn creates a healthy and sane world. By following Taoism we are supposed to be immune to the inevitable perils we encounter in life. Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu's methods and strategies to achieve this type of immunity differ somewhat. Lao-tzu would suggest that we break away from society and become a hermit in the actual physical sense.
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And most of us can see the appeal in being a physical hermit because of the anxiety and stress that our complex society produces. Chuang-tzu, on the other hand, would say it is fine for us to remain within society but our mind must not be polluted by the culture. We essentially have to refrain from the motives that drive society. When we refrain from these motives we become social hermits because we are inwardly recluse,
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having undergone an inner emigration. Chuang-tzu indicates that we can go along with society and not get involved with it mentally or spiritually. Yet being in the world and not of it is easier said than done. But the way this is achieved is by not identifying with your role or the image you have of yourself. We've created a world where what you do is who you are.
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This was also rife back in the days of Confucius because Confucius believed enacting social roles would lead to sincere and virtuous people. But Taoism explains that this moral effort actually leads to insincere and inauthentic people because the expectations of a role are too lofty which ultimately reveals that we are human after all, which actually is a positive thing.
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Even though Taoism is spiritual, it's philosophy is very cognizant of our natural humanness. We all try to live up to this image of ourselves in the hope that the world will accept us or think we are worthy. All this truly does is lead to suffering because the image you try to project into the world is a ghost, it doesn't exist. You're trying to become somebody that cannot be maintained or sustained, and in fact is
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not real. And holding an image up of yourself and enacting a social role goes deep because the person we believe we are is still a role, still a mask we have accumulated and tried to create over time. It is this sense of an isolated ego that needs to define itself in the world to appear special.
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As a result our personality associates with social roles and labeling to define its character, giving us the illusion that we belong and are somehow special. We think this is a surefire way to happiness and contentment but find ourselves trapped in a psychological cul-de-sac full of anxiety, stress, depression, and ultimately a lack
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of fulfillment. Many philosophies in the East explain this problem and they urge us to turn around and go in the opposite direction. An accomplished Taoist doesn't identify with any role, but instead they make a return to the zero perspective. And this zero perspective is the same in essence among many of the great Eastern traditions but it does appear different in theory. The zero perspective is the absence of self, the absence of ego, the ground of our being.
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We can only be sane and healthy when we reside in this zero perspective where everything else depends on it, like an empty center where the hub around revolves endlessly. We are insane and live in an insane world when we believe we are the hub and other components of a wheel and not the center. This means we invest wholeheartedly in a social role and the ego that drives it.
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In Taoism sanity and health are essentially immunological. What I mean by this is that Taoism developed methods and strategies to remain unharmed by the world. Its central focus is on how we can remain unharmed in the midst of danger and not allow the hostile elements of the world to enter our consciousness. We allow them to enter our consciousness when we believe we are these social roles that need to
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be defended. As a result, we suffer all kinds of socially inflicted injuries that come along with internalizing an imposed identity that we mistakenly believe we are. These injuries we all know too well and they range from anxiety, stress, emotional afflictions, and also conceited and hypocritical forms behavior.
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The question is how do we counter these internalized afflictions? The Taoist method for achieving immunity from all these problems is the ability to dissociate and distance ourselves from our social roles. The absence of our personal investment in our social roles and the image we have of ourselves produces emotional immunity from worldly afflictions.
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This emotional immunity frees the heart-mind from all the stress and anxiety these afflictions produce. The heart-mind is known as xin in Chinese. And when our heart-mind is psychosomatically immune resulting from emptying itself, we begin to evoke te, a Chinese word meaning power, virtue, and it can even be thought of as charismatic power.
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So the powerful virtue of te is not something you can induce. It is produced through the dissociation and distancing to oneself. Hence, te should be thought of as the virtue of the non-virtuous, or the virtue beyond virtue because it is evoked when someone is not trying to be virtuous but really is. So if you have te then you are healthy and sane, essentially you are an accomplished
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Taoist. We all have the potential to be an accomplished Taoist and allow our te to emanate in the world. But the problem we all have is we don't know how to personally dissociate and distance ourselves from our roles. Chuang-tzu provides a solution in the Chuang-tzu text. The title of the first chapter of the Chuang-tzu is called "Xiaoyao you." Chris Fraser translates this as "meanderingly wandering," A.C. Graham translates it as "going
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rambling without a destination," and Burton Watson famously translates it as "free and easy wandering." The character "you" is most important in this term and it actually occurs ninety-five times in the Chuang-tzu text. "You" is the heart of free and easy wandering. "You" is the skill to move playfully in everyday life with ease and spontaneity. It is a kind
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of unspectacular excellence only acknowledged by the wise. The playful ease of "you" shouldn't just be thought of in the physical sense, though it can mean that for Lao-tzu. "You" is boundless and limitless. It is a state of being where we are not bound or limited by a commitment to a place, no matter whether that commitment is geographical, social, or psychological.
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In this state you don't identify with anything belonging to you. We could say that this completely free state is a sort of radical homelessness, where we completely understand that nothing belongs to us which frees us to wander effortlessly through life. According to Taoism our life actually is like a beautiful stroll through the wonder of existence
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when we shake off the image of who we think we are. This is where your heart-mind roams in the limitless, where you are completely content with life as it is. This free and easy wandering of the heart-mind helps us avoid the internalization of our roles. We can enact a role but there is a healthy distance and dissociation with it. The role and image of who we think of as oneself does not stick in our mind.
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Professor Hans-Georg Moeller and professor Paul J. D'Ambrosio call this type of accomplished Taoist a "genuine pretender" because a genuine pretender develops an impersonal attitude towards the task they face and the roles they play. They are free to move in and out of a role but are not inwardly afflicted by it because they have come back to the still-point of the Tao, the zero perspective, where there
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is a distance and dissociation to our role in the same way we try on and take off a t-shirt and are not inwardly attached to it. Or we could say that "you," everyday playfulness and ease, allows us to merely play our role rather than claiming we are it. As a result, a Taoist virtuoso, is free from strong, disruptive emotions, no matter whether
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they are pleasant or unpleasant emotions. This doesn't mean a Taoist virtuoso is utterly emotionless, insensitive, narcissistically self-centered with a lack of empathy, which are all the classical traits of a psychopath. It is quite the opposite, as an accomplished Taoist remains healthy and sane no matter whether they are happy or sad which means they don't overly identify with their emotions.
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As Moeller and D'Ambrosio explain "Immunity to emotional afflictions does not mean being immune to feelings altogether but being immune to getting hurt by what one feels." Misfortune can come into our lives and instead of crying and whining"why me, why me," we don't internalize unfortunate circumstances because we don't overly identify with them.
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This also goes for good fortune, as people often develop an unhealthy identification with moral luck or social success which in the end leads to conceitedness. An accomplished Taoist doesn't internalize either good or bad fortune because they are not personally invested in the outcome of favorable circumstances. Instead, they trust life and accept all circumstances impersonally as fate.
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They are free and easy to wander through life and not experience suffering. If we too can realize this then we are empowered to overcome our greatest fears. And in doing so we attain equanimity. This allows us to stroll through life effortlessly, as we don't try to own this life, essentially we don't cling to it. And because we don't own this life, when death comes we will be ready.
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