Tai Chi Journal

What is the tao? (Part 2)

I wrote in Part 1 of this informal series of posts on the nature of the tao that the tao — the "way" of all nature, of all the "myriad creatures," and of the true Taoist sage — can be thought conceptually to pre-exist the Western concept of God as the personification of the metaphysical One or Unity. I said:

Investigating the tao is not to deny God; it is to investigate an impersonal principle from which even our concept of God proceeds. For the tao is emphatically not a person. Instead, the tao transcends the person-nonperson distinction ... as it transcends all pairs of opposites.

Meanwhile, our conception of God dwells heavily on distinctions between pairs of opposites, such as the "war" between good and evil.

So, even though investigating the tao is not anti-God, there does seem to be an important way in which it could be called anti-theology.

Consider: We heirs of Platonic thought in the West believe, first and foremost, in the knowability of reality: that what is truly real is not consigned to be ineffable, but that it can be known definitively. True, in order for that to be the case, Plato had to posit the existence of his ideal Forms, such as the Form of Roundness, on a metaphysical level above imperfect material beings. But once he did so, it followed that imperfect material objects were inadequate, insufficient ... but by their relation to the Forms, knowable and therefore manipulable in a utilitarian sense. If men were (in the belittling word used in the Lao-tzu) "clever" enough, they could think to master the (albeit imperfect) world.

So from the axiom of knowability comes the hope of mastery: that specific outcomes can be envisioned and brought to fruition. Instead of hopefulness as a present, immediate condition, Westerners are conditioned to "hope," in the sense of looking forward to some definitive future fulfillment.

That word, definitive, is key, I think. One dictionary definition of the word is "serving to provide a final solution or to end a situation." We are reminded of the passage in the Christian New Testament's First Letter to the Corinthians: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Cor 13:12).

St. Paul is here talking about a lot of things, including faith, hope, and charity or love. But beneath it all he is talking about knowability — how inadequately we know "now," but how perfectly we will know "then." In a sense, our "final solution" as Christians is the perfection of our knowledge and our very knowability.

Again, this Jewish son of Hellenistic Greek culture, born Saul of Tarsus and later christened Paul, is heir to Plato: the reality which is the God of Jesus Christ is ultimately knowable. Therein, he says, lies our hope for the future.

And therein lies the basic attitude of Christian theology — at least, the theology to which I as a practicing Roman Catholic am exposed. We Catholics are, it is quite true, told of "mysteries" such as the three-in-one nature of the Holy Trinity, Christ's being God and man at one and the same time, the Real Presence of the Risen Lord in the Eucharist. But the attitude is: these are only mysteries due to the inadequacy of our finite human minds. If our minds were like God's mind, our understanding of these mysteries would be definitive, in another of its dictionary definitions: "authoritative and apparently exhaustive."

Again, what is real can be spoken of authoritatively and definitively — if not always by us in the here and now, then certainly by us in the hereafter, when we see God "face to face." Meanwhile, we have the theologians to teach us our doctrine, settle our theological disputes, and keep us from gross error.

The Taoist attitude is completely different. It is that reality is in the final analysis ineffable and unknowable. We can notice certain tendencies, such as that the "weak" (water is its metaphor) tends to wear down the "strong" (typified by rock). But there are no hard and fast conclusions to be drawn about what will certainly happen, and when, and why.

When you come right down to it, as Taoists we have nothing that is certain but the here and now. If we are to be happy, or joyous, or hopeful — or whatever attitude we choose to visualize, even a "bad" or "harmful" one — it will have to come right now, right this second. We must always be rooted in this Earth at this moment. For this alone is our reality ... and we through our mindfulness create our response to it, "good" or "bad."

This ongoing creation-by-mindfulness of our personal reality evolves moment by moment. It is, accordingly, organic, emergent, and evolutionary.

Contrast that approach with what we as Plato's heirs do: we wage an ongoing fight to keep our material, corporeal existence from drifting ever further away from the Platonic ideal which, putatively, is the only "real" reality. Think, in this regard, of the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation or "confession." We as Catholics are called to steadily keep track of our "sins" — the ways in which our behavior falls short of the ideal — and to recite the list periodically before God the Father and our Father Confessor with the sincere intention of reform. That "reconciles" us to God's will, which when you think about it is a personification of Plato's Form of the Good!

Cast in a more positive light, this continual attempt to "match" the actual state of the material world to some putative ideal fuels "progress": both the positive kind which benefits one and all, and the negative kind that rapes the environment and has led to such things as, for example, the Holocaust, carried out by Germans in the mid-20th century in the name of restoring the state of affairs on Earth to a quasi-Platonic ideal of so-called "Aryan racial purity."

The Taoist thinks quite skeptically of "progress." To the Taoist, progress is built on quicksand. It is the product of cleverness, not true wisdom. It assumes that hope "for" the future is more real than hopefulness "in" the here and now. Hopefulness: it's not the assumption that things will turn out right in the end. It's rather the assumption that things as they are right now are just fine, and nothing needs to be "fixed."

It's interesting how this notion of the evolving tao as having nothing to do with "progress" — with "fixing" the less-than-perfect in the world and bringing it closer to the ideal — carries over into Tai Chi. In Tai Chi, there is indeed an ideal "form," such as the Yang-style Long Form I am being taught. But it is not a form which we can ever hope to master and be done with it. Not even in concept is there a "final solution" to Tai Chi imperfection. My Tai Chi teacher Brad has been at it for 22 years, and he says the ultimately mastery of the form is just as elusive for him, in a way, as it is for me as a rank beginner. The point is to do the form, as best we can, right here, right now. The hope of future mastery is at best a story we feed our minds while we're busy doing it.

posted by eric @ 7:17 AM