I Wont Deny The Fact That Ive Read/listened To Poetry And Cried Tears At The End. Yep Im Male And I Said

I won’t deny the fact that I’ve read/listened to poetry and cried tears at the end. Yep I’m male and I said it. I think you have to be a certain kind of individual to not connect spiritually with art that lives on such a tender frequency. It’s odd how the West equate emotion as a feminine trait and violence as a masculine one. Isn’t violence a total submission to emotion too? See as men we are encouraged by the culture to boast about who we beat up or who we slept with but never who we helped or who we loved.

Anthony Anaxagorou: Poet & Writer: I Won't Deny 

Submitted Posts

Just a quick update. There seems to have been some issues with people submitting posts as of late, where I've only received a title without an entry. I'm typing this entry through the submitter to test this function. If you have submitted a post to the blog, please try it again and make sure the body is attached.

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly. -Buddha

I don't always quote the Buddha, but when I do, it's for Daoist philosophy.

Introductions and Context

I first read Lao Tzu’s Dao De Jing pretty soon after starting college. My mother bought me a beautiful hardbound copy of Dr. Ralph Alan Dale’s translation from Barnes & Noble and I finished it quickly within the month. My subsequent readings have been slower, more sporadic, and often in small selections. I think I was just a bit too young to really “get” anything out of the book when I started, and ended up with an admittedly superficial knowledge and understanding of how Daoism is supposed to work.

The other night, on a whim, I decided to pull out my old copy again and give it another one of my random readings, much like I would a book of poetry or an anthology of short stories. I wasn’t really intending to do much with it, to be perfectly honest. But as I read on, late into the night and early into the morning, something felt distinctly different. I felt like the intention behind the words was just a bit clearer, like I could see how it was supposed to work after all. It wasn’t any kind of Enlightenment, by any means; Lao Tzu is a notoriously difficult writer to understand. But you could say it was definitely some sort of start.

That’s what brings us to this blog. I want to use this as a place to discuss and exchange ideas about Daoism, what it’s about and how it works and whether it’s really worth it at all. It’s my own personal expression of the philosophy, to write and explore what the words mean, to put out my ideas and interpretations, then have them challenged and explored by others in turn. I browsed around Tumblr for a bit looking at the “daoism” and “taoism” tags, and I couldn’t really find the sort of interpretive dialogue I was looking for. I’d like for this blog to be a hub for that sort of thing.

Tumblr is also an interesting spot for experimenting with Daoist philosophy, as the Reblog tool seems to be a perfect mechanism for “teaching without teaching.” If I write something that resonates with you, please reblog it and share it with others and encourage them to do the same. It is my belief that this sort of behavior, by simply exploring the Dao on our own, while being watched and hopefully emulated by others, is way that we can both spread the principles of Daoism without actively campaigning to have it taught from every corner of the planet.

So what qualifies me to engage in this endeavor, exactly? Well, to be perfectly honest, absolutely nothing. I’m a mostly normal guy, with normal interests in films and music and art and such. I’m not a scholar and I’m not a monk by any stretch of the imagination. I’m definitely not the perfect Daoist. I’m just one person who is looking to explore the Path, and I have a lot of ideas I’d like to talk about. Hopefully by doing that exploring here, I’ll meet other like-minded individuals and we can all learn and grow together. This is, I believe, the main intention of the Dao.

Never assume that sitting still is the same as doing nothing.

Students will often come to a teacher and complain that their meditation practice is going poorly, they are bored or easily distracted. When asked about their practice it becomes clear that they are not meditating at all. They are sitting quietly in a room staring at a candle. Sitting quietly is a...

Thoughts on Opposites

In regards to bomjumaku's article on the cross, here are my musings on duality and unity.

From a purely Daoist perspective, there aren't really any opposites or duality. Such things are just convenient labels for us humans, but have no meaning in respect to the actual Path. Everything just is as it exists within the Dao, thus eliminating the imperfect descriptions of whether things are Good or Evil, Light or Dark, Yin or Yang. Yes, even the infamous Daoist symbol of the Yin-Yang is simply the best attempt of our ancestors to define the state of Being Unified. To follow their own analogy, it should really be simply one plain circle of gray, or maybe purple, something completely different from Black and White. This is known as the Wuji, the ultimate or empty circle. But because just a plain circle looks really dumb and doesn't explain anything, the originators did the best they could to teach the concept better without actually teaching it (but of course, by doing that, they are still teaching it after all).

So we come to the Yin-Yang. I get the feeling from television and the internet that a lot of people use it without actually knowing what it means. So if you get it or already understood it, congratulations! For everyone else, here's the basic rundown. Do you see how there's a black dot and a white dot in the opposite-colored field? This isn't just for aesthetics, it means that nothing is pure on either side. Nothing is totally dark, and nothing is totally light. A lot of people like to deal in absolutes, especially in popular media, but nothing is actually that simple or clear. To try and talk about history or politics this way is to invite disaster and often prevents us from discussing things honestly or fairly. Rorschach was wrong (and yet somehow still right), and we're all supposed to understand that by the end of Watchmen. This is part of what makes him such an interesting character, and I think a big reason why he's the fan favorite. For someone who sees things completely in Right and Wrong, he himself is all mixed up and conflicted, lost in his own gray area that drives him crazy. If we really want to be able to exist in peace and have conversations about Big Important Things, we must accept that things simply are as they are, and will never be wholly good or wholly bad.

Now, let's take another look at the Yin-Yang. Do you notice how those two fields of black and white aren't actually rigid against each other? There isn't just a straight line separating the two halves; the curve represents the two sides flowing into each other, one after the other in a constant flow. This, to me, indicates the illusion of thinking of the two as separate entities or concepts. They are both part of the greater whole, unified as a single entity. This is what the Wuji represents, a single essence that simply is. Contained within it, of course, is the system of Yin and Yang, but the main point is to recognize that it's not a dual duel between the two, but a partnership. People like to talk about how Yin represents the Feminine and how Yang represents to Masculine, but to me this is missing the point. The two simply exist in harmony with each other, and you cannot have one without the other, as they are a single unit.

Of course, this won't stop people from using it as a convenient Chinese cure-all for symbolism, and it certainly won't stop people from using it as a label for any given two-part analogy. And that's okay, because duality labels are still convenient and useful for us. But we do all need to recognize that the duality is an illusion. The concept of opposites is only true in strictest of languages, where something is either Good or Ungood. But for everything else, it's better to think of things in terms of different (and often completely non-polarized) qualities. Like Pathik says, separations are illusions.