Category Archives: Tao

Amor fati

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The literal translation of the Latin phrase amor fati is “love of fate”; the Wikipedia article states simply, “It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.” Though the phrase has come for many to be associated with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, it has its roots in the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

For most of my adult life, I have had the obscure sense that there was a grain in the way things come to be, a natural falling into place that, if yielded to, would ultimately lead to the right end. At times, I have had no words for it, hardly dared to trust my own intuition; at other times I have sought, or been taught, to characterise it as the will of God, and my own role as that of surrender to that will. This, perhaps, is getting closer, as the Christian contemplative tradition has for many years understood, most clearly in the hesychast teachings of the Eastern church.

Over time, though, it has become clearer that – for me, at any rate – its most poignant expression is in the philosophy of the Tao. “The Tao is that from which one cannot deviate; that from which one can deviate is not the Tao.” (The Doctrine of the Mean, as quoted by Alan Watts) He goes on:

However, it must be clear from the start that Tao cannot be understood as “God” in the sense of the ruler, monarch, commander, architect, and maker of the universe. The image of the military and political overlord, or of a creator external to nature, has no place in the idea of Tao.

The great Tao flows… everywhere,

to the left and to the right,

All things depend upon it to exist,

and it does not abandon them.

To its accomplishments it lays no claim.

It loves and nourishes all things,

but does not lord it over them.

[Lao Tzu 34, tr. Watts]

Yet the Tao is most certainly the ultimate reality and energy of the universe, the Ground of being and nonbeing.

The Tao has reality and evidence, but no action and no form. It may be transmitted but cannot be received. It may be attained but cannot be seen. It exists by and through itself. It existed before heaven and earth, and indeed for all eternity. It causes the gods to be divine and the world to be produced. It is above the zenith, but is not high. It is beneath the nadir, but is not low. Though prior to heaven and earth, it is not ancient. Though older than the most ancient, it is not old.

[Chuang Tzu 6, tr. Fung Yu-Lan]

To “accord with the Tao,” then, is to drop back, sit still, pay attention. Cause and effect are the way things happen. They are one thing, really. The separation of the two words is quite artificial. There is a deep peace in knowing this, and more than a peace. Truly to embrace the coming-to-be of what comes to be is to love the way itself; and yet it is not something to be attained, not an achievement or an accomplishment. The path opens of itself. All one can do is be still.

A window on what is

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I find the study of phenomenology in my amateur way endlessly fascinating; it is all too easy to follow it down philosophical rabbit-holes, as I have done in several posts recently. But the contemplative life, related though it is to the practice of philosophy (as seen so clearly in some Buddhist schools like Yogācāra) deals in itself not with discursive thought but with direct experience; which is one of the reasons I have for so long been drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm, or to the Pure Land Buddhist practice of the Nembutsu – not primarily because of the nature of these practices themselves (repetitive prayer) but because of their extreme simplicity.

Now, phenomenal experience is sometimes characterised as a tunnel (Metzinger), a “benign user illusion” (Dennett, glossed so brilliantly by Susan Blackmore) or a mindstream (Yogācāra). The idea generally seems to be that what we experience from moment to moment is a transparent, essentially functional but ultimately illusory interface that the mind provides between reality and our (equally illusory) experience of a permanent self. Reality itself is far richer and stranger, and the self is “but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao” (Ho (PDF)). To say these things can of course provoke in the reader a myriad of misunderstandings, and to realise them oneself can cause a temporary existential disruption that is horribly like a classical bad trip. Misleading though many of its Perennialist assumptions may be, one of the best accounts of what is at stake must be Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Donald Hoffman finds the same position in Erwin Schrödinger:

[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

Last year I attempted, as I periodically do, to explain to myself how this paradoxical relationship between overthinking and contemplative practice could possibly work. I concluded:

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

In the cloud?

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Thomas Metzinger suggests that the global neural correlate of consciousness (the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related (Wikipedia))

…is like an island emerging from the sea—as noted, it is a large set of neural properties underlying consciousness as a whole, underpinning your experiential model of the world in its totality at any given moment. The global NCC has many different levels of description: Dynamically, we can describe it as a coherent island, made of densely coupled relations of cause and effect, emerging from the waters of a much less coherent flow of neural activity. Or we could adopt a neurocomputational perspective and look at the global NCC as something that results from information-processing in the brain and hence functions as a carrier of information. At this point, it becomes something more abstract, which we might envision as an information cloud hovering above a neurobiological substrate. The “border” of this information cloud is functional, not physical; the cloud is physically realized by widely distributed firing neurons in your head. Just like a real cloud, which is made of tiny water droplets suspended in the air, the neuronal activation pattern underlying the totality of your conscious experience is made of millions of tiny electrical discharges and chemical transitions at the synapses. In strict terms, it has no fixed location in the brain, though it is coherent.

Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

Now this is, as Metzinger would be the first to admit, highly abstract language to describe the warm, luminous immediacy that is the lived experience of phenomena. The scent of a lover’s hair, the golden light of sunset, damp air on the skin at dawn – an information cloud hovering above a neurobiological substrate? And yet how else could one experience these things?

Oddly enough, for me at least, Metzinger’s technical language comes closer to expressing what might be thought of as one’s soul than any Cartesian plug-in ghost. The beautiful world that is our necessary home is as much the gift of who we are as it is a place “out there”; we are not, and never have been, visitors. Like everything else, we are just what causality does: “the self is but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao. It is an extension of the cosmos.” (David Y F Ho (PDF))

Cause and effect

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Things have consequences; they are themselves consequences. Sometimes it’s easy to forget this – sometimes things seem merely to be chance, or else they are the result of someone’s action, out of their – or God’s – “sovereign will”. But those ideas are never true. The “chance” occurrence had causes. The cliff fall came about because of heavy rain falling onto fissured and unstable ground – someone was injured because they hadn’t heard the Coastguard warnings, and were walking too close to the base of the cliffs…

Fate? Karma? The will of God? What do these things mean, except attempts to explain to ourselves how things beyond our control could happen to us, or to those we care about? Karma actually seems to me to come closest: the idea that cause and effect are ineluctable – what is sown will be reaped. Karma, though, is usually more naturally understood in its human, ethical dimension:

The Buddha defined karma as intention; whether the intention manifested itself in physical, vocal or mental form, it was the intention alone which had a moral character: good, bad or neutral […] The focus of interest shifted from physical action, involving people and objects in the real world, to psychological process.

Richard Gombrich, Buddhist Precept and Practice.

The Chinese concept of the Tao – “[t]he Tao can be roughly thought of as the ‘flow of the universe’, or as some essence or pattern behind the natural world that keeps the Universe balanced and ordered” (Wikipedia) – seems to me closer to the metaphysical implications. To harmonise one’s will with the Tao, to accept the way things come to be, is to cease to swim against the current, to follow “the watercourse way” (Watts).

The Stoics frequently talked about ‘living in agreement with nature’. This, in part, means that it is within our nature to be social, cooperative beings who want the best for others, and for people around us to thrive. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, said, ‘All things are parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with nature.’

Bridgid Delaney, Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in chaotic times.

To live in harmony with nature in this sense requires a willing abdication of knowledge and willfulness. Alan Watts again:

[P]eople try to force issues only when not realizing that it can’t be done—that there is no way of deviating from the watercourse of nature. You may imagine that you are outside, or separate from, the Tao and thus able to follow it or not follow; but this very imagination is itself within the stream, for there is no way other than the Way. Willy-nilly, we are it and go with it. From a strictly logical point of view, this means nothing and gives us no information. Tao is just a name for whatever happens, or, as Lao-tzu put it, “The Tao principle is what happens of itself [tzu-jan].”

This is of course, as I suggested in a recent post here, very close to what has been called, in Christian contexts, “quietism” – which has widely been criticised as heretical, due to its rejection of doctrines around free will and supernatural determinism.

But (and I quoted her in the linked post) Jennifer Kavanagh explains:

Welcoming uncertainty, embracing it, does not mean commending ignorance or trying not to know; it’s not about the rejection of knowledge. It’s not about the negation of the intellect, but its enhancement. It is a recognition that cognitive thinking cannot reach everything, an understanding that the scientific and spiritual approaches are not incompatible, just different, complementary, dimensions. Not either/or but both/and.

The contemplative embracing of this principle is perhaps most clearly seen in the practice of shikantaza, just sitting, watching for the way to open:

Zazen or enlightenment is not about finding a particular state of mind, for all states of mind are fleeting and cannot be relied upon. When you know who is sitting, you know sitting Buddha. This expression is a bit strange; why not say sitting like a Buddha? I prefer to say sitting Buddha because there is nobody sitting like a Buddha; there is just sitting Buddha. That Buddha never stops sitting, but we must awaken to her presence–not that sitting Buddha is either male or female…

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha.

Atheism and quietism

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Quietism is a term with an odd and surprisingly contentious history. It is used of both a tendency in philosophy and a direction within Christian contemplative thought and practice. (You can find well- linked Wikipedia articles on the philosophy here, and the contemplative term here.)

But I believe the insight underlying both these Western traditions of stillness and unknowing can be found far farther back in history.

Chao-Chou [Zhaozhou Congshen] asked, “What is the Tao?”

The master [Nan-ch’üan] replied, “Your ordinary consciousness is the Tao.”

“How can one return into accord with it?”

“By intending to accord you immediately deviate.”

“But without intention, how can one know the Tao?”

“The Tao,” said the master, “belongs neither to knowing nor to not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it’s like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?”

(quoted by Alan Watts in Tao: The Watercourse Way)

In the Zen practice of shikantaza (just sitting) there is nothing to achieve: no particular state of mind, no exercise of concentration, nothing to get rid of. In doing nothing there is perfect freedom.

None of this requires a supernatural dimension at all; that fact seems to have been one of the reasons Christian quietism was condemned as heretical. Unknowing is a fundamental admission, the very underpinning of scepticism. Stevie Wonder wrote: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…” Jennifer Kavanagh:

Welcoming uncertainty, embracing it, does not mean commending ignorance or trying not to know; it’s not about the rejection of knowledge. It’s not about the negation of the intellect, but its enhancement. It is a recognition that cognitive thinking cannot reach everything, an understanding that the scientific and spiritual approaches are not incompatible, just different, complementary, dimensions. Not either/or but both/and.

Unknowing, and the abandonment of the need to know, to possess knowledge, is in a sense the gate to the liminal lands I wrote about in my last post. It is also the starting point of the scientific method, and the heart’s defence against all kinds of creeds.

Atheism and the Tao

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The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao
The names that are given do not contain their true meaning
Within the nameless is the true meaning
What is named has a mother and she is the mother of ten thousand things
The un-seeable is always seeable within the internal to those who are not bound by desire
Those who live in a state of desire see only the external illusion of manifestation
These two opposites are born from the same source
The source contains its mystery in darkness
Within the darkness is the darkness that is the gateway to the mysteries

(Tao Te Ching, tr. Dennis Waller)

In all the translations of, and the writings about, the Tao (when spoken, ‘Dao’) there is an insistence that words and names are superfluous, that the Tao – while apparently having no objective reality of its own – can only be experienced subjectively. It is a philosophy, a pursuit of wisdom and a study of natural realities. Tao is not a religion: that is Taoism. We must, however, use words to explain how Tao came to be written down, what part it played in history and what its relevance is in the modern world.

(Pamela Ball, The Essence of Tao)

As Pamela Ball points out, the Tao is not a religious concept, any more than my much (over?) used phrase “the ground of being”, which I derived originally – if I remember correctly – from Paul Tillich via Richard Rohr. But in many ways they are both pointing towards the same truth: that the ontological source of all is, though quite literally inconceivable, able to be encountered.

So what has any of this to do with atheism? Well, it is next to impossible to approach this inconceivability of the utter beginning of what is from within the creedal framework of organised religion. (A few have managed it – witness Eckhart’s Istigkeit or Merton’s point vierge – but they are rare geniuses out on the perilous edge of their faith.) But without these constraints it seems more possible, if no easier, to find words for what has all too often been set aside as ineffable.

This is why experience, whether by a formal practice of meditation or by sheer force of circumstance (as in, for instance, near death experiences), will never be supplanted by even the most sophisticated reasoning. “I can’t find the words…” may be the beginning of wisdom.