I was thinking a little about dualism the other day, carrying on from my previous post a little. Dualistic thought is covered early on in the Tao Te Ching, and from what I’ve seen around the internet and in my own writings and views, can be given negative connotations.

I’m coming to another viewpoint now, put simply, that dualism in neither good nor bad in itself; it simply is. We can’t get by without it, and it is vital to our existence that it’s there. We make value judgments every day in order to function and survive, for these judgments we need dualistic thought. The problem, as I see it, is when we get so caught up in our world of dualism that we forget that it’s only a set of arbitrary concepts.

Consider light/dark, it’s a great dualistic metaphor for things, not least good or evil. In the Taiji symbol it gets used to point out the mutual dependence of things, night and day, etc. But it’s a bit lost on a person who was born blind, similarly, a dualism based on silence and noise is lost on a person who was born deaf. As soon as you start factoring in people who don’t experience the world quite the same way we do, it all starts to get a bit more iffy.

Our dualisms can be biased by our subjective viewpoints; hot/cold is another dualism, but the exact definition varies from person to person. It seems to me that each time we “define” a dualism, we simply rope of a chunk of grey area and hope for the best.

I used to think dualistic thought was a negative thing, then realised that this was itself dualistic thought. I have to admit, I found that quite amusing for a while.  So this leads me to my current contention; Dualistic thought is necessary, not particularly desirable or undesirable, just there. The most important thing is to see it for what it is, necessary, but ultimately an illusion.

I wrote previously about going easy on yourself, I’m going to wander off in a different direction with this, and let off a little steam about something I’ve been thinking about recently: past and future roles.

We tend to straitjacket ourselves into roles, which when you get down to it are just concepts and conventions, roles which are really defined by our past. As long as we recognise this and don’t fall into the trap of reifying them, I can’t see anything wrong with this, we need to do this to a degree to operate in society.

But when considering our future, should we go with the roles again? Again, to a degree this is necessary to operate, subject to the same caveat as above, see the trap and avoid it.

I think it’s more important to be you performing the role, rather than the role performing you. Let me try and explain it better by example. I wrote SitQuietly not because of some idea about being a so called “great programmer”, I wrote it because of my interest in both meditation and programming. I was looking idly for a project and also couldn’t find the software I wanted, which led to a “That looks like a fun project” moment. My point is it should be a passion, an enjoyment, not an ego trip.

Which comes back to some thing I wrote previously about, not trying to exert ego. If your focus is on being the big “I am”, rather than doing a good job at something you enjoy doing, then you’re not bringing your full potential to bear and you also need to touch base as the role is starting to play you. I remember something Bono mentioned in the book “Bono on Bono”, when he came to particularly difficult record company exec, he worked with them by getting them to remind themselves why they got into the industry in the first place.

OK, let’s bring this one home, as well as going easy on ourselves, I think we need to go easy on the future. Are we doing our thing to be a certain something, because of some imaginary glorious future, like a restless cowboy always riding into the sunset? If that’s how we’re operating, how can we ever be happy, when we place our happiness constantly out of reach then shoot ourselves in the foot trying to get there?

Dogma

1. A doctrine or a corpus of doctrines relating to matters such as morality and faith, set forth in an authoritative manner by a church.
2. a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof

Most organised religions are dogmatic to one degree or another, I personally consider dogma to be a fairly bad thing. From my perspective dogma gets in the way when trying to follow The Watercourse Way, what happens when your dogma tries to take you against the flow? It breaks. The problem is that dogma is inflexible, the eventual effects of flowing water on inflexible things in it’s path are well documented, eventually they have to give.

For me, part of the flow of Taoism is accurate correspondance with reality, if a doctrine or dogma contradicts reality, which is most likely to be in error? There are numerous examples of religious doctrine contradicting what science has revealed about the world, how then can anyone be expected to believe in a doctrine that is full of holes? Such doctrine does have wisdom in it, but that wisdom is not in the literal interpretation. Something religious dogmatists would do well to consider in my view.

This is the reason I stopped putting my faith in religious doctrine and one of the major reasons I find Taoism such a good fit.

Wait, aren’t they the same? In my opinion no, spirituality provides a basis on which all religion is built. Spirituality is the cake, religion is simply the icing. To continue the analogy, you can change the icing on the cake, even take the icing away, the cake remains fine. But if you take away the cake, the icing is left in a mess, with nothing to hold it up.

Coming from an Anglican background, I’m no stranger to organised religion. As I’m due to marry into a Greek family, I’m going to have at least a passing acquaintance with the Greek Orthodox Church, but I can see the commonalities on the spiritual side.

One thing I can see is that spirituality can be done without religion, eastern philosophies tend to be a good way of starting on that path, also this tends to give a more understanding approach to other beliefs. Religion without spirituality however, is just a shell. People will attend church mainly to keep up appearances, it becomes a very ornate social club. The other very real danger of the spiritual disconnection is that the dogma becomes more important than spiritual growth. That’s when the real trouble starts….

Well, I’m going to stay off on my Sci-Fi tangent for a little longer.

I’ve come across a fan written Battlestar Galactica game, it’s based on the new series, not the old one and they’re making a lot of progress, the gameplay videos are awesome!

Here’s the link: Battlestar Galactica: Beyond The Red Line. Well worth a visit!

I’ve been a bit on the serious side lately, so it’s time for a bit of light relief! This one is courtesy of my fellow traveller on the watercourse A.V. Michaels, you can find his blog at Surfing The Tao.

If I were a Star Wars character, I would be: Qui-Gon Jinn. You’re very in touch with nature and greatly value living things, even the more inferior creatures. Your calm demeanor is admired by many and you don’t sweat the small stuff and things you can’t change. You’re kind, quiet, and strong. Take the ” Which Star Wars Character Am I?” Quiz by Always Two There Are

This is quite cool, as Qui-Gon Jinn is one of the Star Wars characters I admire.

I noticed that the Conservative party is making promises about their new environmentally friendly policies. They promise to lead a new green revolution in Britain.

Apparently, they plan to run council vehicles on Biodiesel, starting with a pilot project in Kent and claim to have the highest recycling and composting rates of any of the main three parties.

While I applaud any positive environmental commitment from any of the three main parties, I’m all to well aware of what happens in politics, these promises are all too soon forgotten.

I honestly think that if we’re to have a green Britain, the best way is to give incentives to the public to use environmentally friendly alternatives.

I think it’s time I took the chance to clarify my position on Creationism. I do oppose it, not out of blind hate.

My problem with it is twofold. Firstly, it fails to provide any evidence for it’s assertions, as a movement it wants the respectability of science, hance the term “Creation Science”, but doesn’t want to go through the method that brings that respect.

This leads to my second problem with it. The lengths that are gone to in order to distort science, befuddle the layman and raise a smokescreen. I have seen logical fallacies and distortions used quite blatantly in articles and essays by Creationists and have heard of intimidation against people who oppose them.

Just thought I’d get that off my chest!

I’m sat here watching our cats at play. I’m amazed at the way they simply play, anything can become a cat toy! Ours have a habit of doing fuzzy escape artist tricks as well.

It’s amazing, they simply sit quietly and watch the world go by, but come to some very clever conclusions. Mia, for instance has now worked out door handles. They’ve also worked out that if they get the timing and hang around the front door first thing in the morning, and when we get home at night they can avoid the effort of having to use the cat flap!

Sit quietly, pay attention, don’t let things get too complicated. I think there’s a definite lesson to be learned from them!

Happy Easter! Now as a secular non-Christian, I don’t take the Easter story literally. It’s more of an illuminating story as far as I’m concerned, positive, uplifting, but not literally true. So, from my own viewpoint, what message does Easter have for me as a Philosophical Taoist? What can a non-believer derive from a Christian story?

Well, to summarise my understanding of the story, Jesus overcomes death itself and changes things for mankind forever, however he must still ascend to heaven as his time here is done.

The message I get is one of the impermanence of things, all things change and no-one is exempt. Jesus changed things for everyone, people who supported him, even people who weren’t connected. In the Celtic legends, there is the story of a hero who at the time of the crucifixion felt it happen, and was so affected that he drew his sword and hewed down trees till the effort killed him, our actions change things, sometimes for the last people we’d expect!

There is another subtext here, stemming from the Crucifixion, Jesus has to die in order for the changes to happen. This highlights another Taoist theme, that destruction must proceed creation. Change is the creation of a new status quo, but the old order must be destroyed in order to be replaced, ths is true of every change, no exceptions. The death of Jesus is an allegory for that destruction of the old order, his rebirth for the birth of the new order.

Our third theme is his ascension into heaven, this is clearly a message that all things must end. No matter how powerful and important you are, you can’t resist change and you can’t stay on beyond your time. This reminds us to value our time here, whether you accept reincarnation or not, this incarnation is a one off and should be cherished as such, it’ll never come again.

The Easter story then, does have a message for Taoists, but then this simply shows that no matter who you are, there is a rich vein of spiritual wisdom that underpins all our beliefs.