Daoist Gymnastics

Dao. Everything that is, was, and is yet to come. Dao. All. With no judgment or preference, dao begins, moves, and ends everything. It is beginning. It is movement. It is ending. It is in the rush and in the stillness. It is the air we breathe and the breath we expel. It is the thoughts in our minds and the words that we speak. It is both meaning and senselessness; in that way, it is my pain, and it is my suffering.

What makes conceptualization challenging for me is that understanding dao is not compatible with language. How can I describe dao above, seemingly perfectly fine (I get what I mean), and still not have captured what it is? A fun translation joke is that the first line of the Dao de Jing says, “the dao that you can dao is not the eternal dao.” The character in hanzi for ‘speak’ is the same as the character for dao. Interesting, right? I will try to explain why I'm talking about all this, but apparently, you can promptly forget it because it’s all bullshit. The dao I speak is not the true dao, but I’ll try to work it like the old man by the river anyway, and bring it close.

Long nights of reflection have revealed a dis-ease deep within me, obfuscated by an unarticulated fear. I wish for clarity, I wish to be unafraid, so let the words commence.

I am afraid of losing. I am afraid of being lost. I am afraid of living. I am afraid of the end of experience and of experience itself. So I am afraid of death and what it means to have life. It is because of biology that this unwilling spirit is here to begin with, and some nurture that it somehow remains. Not much more than that.

I have imagined my death as a means of escape. Escape from boredom, escape from living, escape from shame, escape from responsibility. All disharmonious and hollow attempts at peace. Zhuangzi imagined his death several times, and nobody could say he was crazy; he was wise. He was teaching us acceptance and non-attachment, virtues of those in harmony with dao. Do people live like that now? Unattached and accepting. Who lives like that? Show me that person in these United States.

Zhuangzi tries to speak to us. He tells us of his illness, his old age, and his passing. He tells us of the close companionship he shared with dear Qin Yi and how his friend only wept and cried out three times before growing calm and returning to his studies. He tells us how his other followers questioned Qin Yi’s loyalty and how Qin Yi told them, “When it came time to arrive, the master did just what the time required. When it came time to go, he followed along with the flow.” Zhuangzi is telling us that it's not the grief or the pain that reveals the attachment, but the rupture. The loss of your own self or life. You must not allow yourself to be disrupted.

Thinking about how many times I have been thrown from the Course throughout my life is overwhelming. How often have I lost my way, only to be found by drugs, toxic relationships, and self-destruction? How many years have I spent separated from the knowledge of my part in the whole? I have felt myself a foreigner in a strange land, with no part of body, no part of mind, no part of community. A crisis of identity at every turn. I suppose, despite my negative view, this is part of the whole, too.

Dao is mutually constitutive, existing in simultaneity. Multiple truths. Multiple realities. Just because something is beyond our perception does not mean it is not there, and just because we determine something to be good or bad does not mean that this is its inherent value. This phenomenon is the Singularity: “Seeing what is one and the same to all things...." Within the Singularity, it is said that we are never to feel as though we can lose something.

But I’ve lost. You’ve lost. We’ve all lost. How do we contend with the reality of this pain? Epicurus said, “death is nothing to us,” and yes, maybe our deaths, but what of the death of loved ones? How can the same thing be said when we feel that loss so viscerally? What can remove our pain? What can prevent suffering? Well, the acceptance that, according to the Dao, our loved ones have transformed. The promise that we will be transformed. I’m mixing ideas here now, but it helps me self-soothe to think about the Daoist notion of transformation and the Epicurean calm surrounding death. Epicurus was an atomist, meaning he believed that all things are made of atoms. It reminds me of the Dao. The Singularity. He also said that when a person dies, their “soul atoms” are separated from their body and moved into something else. A transformation similar to the one that you can read in Daoist texts: "dao generates one, one generates two, the two generates three, the three gives birth to the ten thousand things." As for those ten thousand things, they flourish, decay, and transform into another. Note, this is not reincarnation; it’s recycling. The Self that persists in life ends in death, and begins anew elsewhere.

The meaninglessness of all this is what calms me. I’m reminded of Camus’ Sisyphus. The absurd hero. This titan of banality pushed a boulder up a mountain for all of eternity, only for it to roll back down so he could start again. Camus likened this fate to life and said that “we must imagine Sisyphus happy” despite this trying existence. Living is absurd. Humans existing in this world is absurd. Struggling daily to survive while being aware of our imminent demise is absurd. Camus insists that, yes, considering suicide is rational, but that what we should do instead is create meaning for ourselves to make life worth living. We must see the universe's lack of absolute meaning or purpose and accept it in its vastness. See the ebb and flow of life and consider ourselves happy in our place amongst the Singularity.

With all of this, I see a metaphysical immortality. The understanding that our animating force carries on within the energy of the universe after we die. Self, essence, is not eternal, but that which animates us is. If we look at the Epicurean view, the “soul atoms,” disconnected from the physical atoms, are akin to energy. Much like the First Law of Thermodynamics, these atoms are neither created nor destroyed. They are recycled into new forms in perpetuity. They do not hold the key to Self. That is somewhere else. Perhaps in the humors described by the ancient Greeks, the fluids of our bodies: our blood, phlegm, black or yellow bile. Or maybe we trust the philosophers of old and look to our stomach, liver, or kidneys. Or is it in the heart? Aristotle and his Peripatetics thought this was the case.

Anyway, an élan vital is tempting to find. Even contemporary philosophers and scientists reckon with this question, but what about it is so alluring? Why must we have something remain after death? Especially when the struggle of life can be nearly untenable? I wonder what we want to persist. What aspects of ourselves do we wish would continue in death?

I find the obsession with legacy in predominantly capitalistic cultures a veritable explanation for people's feelings surrounding death and dying. Many people fear being forgotten, so it makes sense that many try to “leave something behind.” An artifact with which to remember them. This artifact can be a child. It can be a company or a career. It can be a great accomplishment or work of art. Perhaps a well-loved novel or scathing editorial. Whatever the medium, people strive for their artifact. For this reason, people rage against the flow of their life; they push and force their way through. They go where they've been taught to think to go, chasing legacy, ultimately doing nothing but grinding and lacerating themselves against the many sharp edges of social expectation.

Laozi also spoke of this phenomenon in the parable of the butcher Ding. Butcher Ding was so in tune with the Way that he never dulled his blade when he carved his beef. For years, he worked cutting and slicing, cutting and slicing, and never once needed to sharpen his edge. He moved fluidly through the meat, bone, and gristle of the ox in a single, swift motion, bisecting the body. He accomplished his task without force, never expending his blade—what a lesson we might learn about the nature of existence and thriving in such a complex world.

This piece started in 2018, after an academic paper of mine was published, and I felt dissatisfied with its accessibility. Not necessarily the access people had to it, but its readability and the opportunity people had to connect with what I was saying. As a paper, it was full of jargon, abstractions, and redundancies that I think can turn people off to reading. I wanted to create an essay with the same message that didn't read as someone's college thesis.

This has been that effort.

I chose the subject of the paper, per usual, to answer the only question I could pose to myself at the time: how do you deal with death? I had already lost so many people to accidents, health issues, and suicide; I knew there was only more to come. I knew I couldn't stop death, so the only problem I thought I could address was the grief. I thought I needed to make that stop instead, and that by studying global histories, beliefs, and traditions, I could help that process. I believed it would free me from my limited and fearful perspectives, offering access to other viewpoints and expanding my understanding. I thought this would allow me to intellectualize my emotions around death and dying and mitigate the amount of grief I felt.

I was right, and I was wrong.

I was certainly freed from my limited perspective (just maybe not all the fear). I was exposed to other views and values, which did reshape my understanding of death and dying. And I would say I was even able to intellectualize my emotions a bit, which helped me sit with them more comfortably. But I also didn't make the grief stop; I only stopped wanting to make it go away. I learned that I don't want the grief to leave; I want it to change. To evolve as I do. To morph into living memory that informs how I relate to others, how I love.

I wanted to share this vantage with people, all people, not just academics. I've struggled to finish it, though. Eight years in my drafts, untouched for the last two, until this challenge. I have edited what was already there for general correctness, but it is still unfinished and still meandering. As with my beliefs on most subjects, including the matter at hand, thoughts are still fermenting, clarity is still brewing.

As I said, the fear is still present, and I haven't fully reconciled with it. Dealing with the inevitable deaths of my most beloved ones is the remaining challenge for me. It is less debilitating to think about these days, but I still don't like it. If I could die before everyone I love, that would be great. But, alas, I know that is not how it works. I know I will lose more loved ones. I know some will be a surprise, and some I can be prepared for. None will be easy, though.

I don't know how to finish this essay because it feels just out of my reach. The words are there, the theory and the beliefs make sense to me. My logical brain connects all the dots. It's the emotion throwing a wrench, yet again. When I wrote the paper, it felt aspirational. Something to work toward. Something to achieve. Now, nearly ten years later, when my emotions still won't play along? I feel hypocritical. What if my partner died? Could I really say I was undisrupted? No. I couldn't. I would be adrift. I would isolate. I might waste away. I could grieve so hard that the entire world would collapse into me, the black hole of pressurized pain. I've had a good amount of time to bring the Dao's calming beliefs into my being, but still imagining my loved ones' deaths gives me a fit.

How can I write such words again with any certainty when I have yet to embody them? Is it enough to write it with good intent and hope to one day align the behavior with the values? Is writing it part of the process of internalization? Do I just need to give it more time to really settle into my being? Or maybe I just don't buy it anymore.

I don't have the answers to any of these questions either. So, I will go ahead and add them to the list of reasons why this one has been and will remain in the drafts for a bit longer. I suppose I still have some more living, and thus more learning, to do.