Living Tao

Our world is not what it used to be. Everything is faster; life is more sophisticated. As we build machines to make us work faster, we demand our brains think faster to keep up with it. Our mental health has a lot to keep up with.

The industrial revolution of the 1800s sent us racing for resource extraction and ambitious productivity so that we could fuel an endless desire for material comfort, convenience, and amusement. Those desires were there in our history before then, to be sure, but we used fewer resources because of knowledge constraints and population. Our early conservation of resources cannot be solely credited to moral integrity, even if somepeople practiced some moral integrity sometimes.

Comfort and convenience might give us a sense of security, but it is a delusion and not sustainable. We fight wars over this need for comfort and fake security — on a global scale, an intrapersonal scale (such as addiction), and every scale of interpersonal between. “Bigger, faster, stronger” is often assumed to be a good thing, a value worth working for, without so much as a thought to the contrary. Yet, the satisfaction does not last. The struggle for comfort and security continues, no matter how much we have, no matter how much we produce. That struggle will always continue, personally and globally, if we seek happiness through these false comforts.

Our material life is not what it used to be. Is it better? Is it worse? Advances in medicine, the combustible engine, autos and airplanes, computer and internet — there are comforts for those who have means. But is it freedom? Freedom from what? And what about those who are left behind? If your neighbor is worse off, do you really feel better about yourself? Modern comforts: bigger, faster, stronger. What are we running from? What are we fighting?

We have replaced one set of obstacles with another.

We have instant access to information that seems infinite, even if the biggest questions are still not answered and the limits of our knowledge are more apparent than ever. With so much generation of information, we wonder more and more what truth is. We have longer life expectancy, and we have anesthesiology for surgery. But we also see more cancer, new viruses, new challenges in mental health, and so on.

Still we suffer. The content of our suffering — the object of our suffering— may look different. But the root source is not. We suffer because we live in this world from the perspective of our self. Intellectually, we may pretend to ourselves that we are not self-centered and can see the world from someone else’s eyes. But our actions say otherwise. We still get in a car. We still consume for pleasure and comfort. We still fight for a delusional sense of security that is not lasting.

Have we as humans lost our innocence? Materially speaking, life used to be simpler, but it would be dangerous to equate that simplicity with innocence. For as much of human history as we have recorded, we have been brutal to one another. We have exploited weaknesses in others and subjected one another to power. Slavery was a normal part of everyday life. The violence and oppression persists. We are just as motivated by self-interest and national interest as ever before.

Simplistic or not, the suffering continues.

As long as we act in self-interest, we will continue to suffer. Even if we are kind to others within a certain immediate sphere of our life, it is still a matter of degree and context. Expand the circle out far enough, and it becomes difficult to hold ourselves to that same level of altruism. Turn up the pressure, face a threat to your safety, and it’s harder to be nice and compassionate. What is easier: deliver clean socks and care packages to tent encampments in your home city, or understand the environmental, social, economic, and historical sources of suffering of someone who murdered your family member, and have compassion for that person without condoning the act of suffering they passed forward from themself to others. That action in its essence — the passing of our suffering onward to others — is something we all have done, even if not on the scale or magnitude of a murder. On the level of its essence, we all have done it.

Some people describe the “old days” as a time when things were simpler and people didn’t expect as much from life, materially. My friends in China, of an older generation, say that the early years of post-revolution China were a time when neighbors were selfless and looked out for each other, despite not having enough to eat. My grandparents in the United States recalled the Great Depression of the 1930s, when people expected less for themselves and worked hard for a common value greater than their own personal gain. 

In our ambitious struggle for sophistication and perceived comfort, maybe we have lost a sense of the sacred. Maybe we have forgotten humility. Maybe we have lost our innocence (if we ever had it). Maybe we lost something when simplicity was buried in the layers of pavement, foundations, airports, and monolithic server warehouses.

Innocent or not, the suffering continues.

We could mourn the loss of innocence. We could mourn the loss of simplicity. We could mourn what was lost in the mad race for sophistication.

Or we can look into the past, identify the values and essence of those things we have lost, and seek to re-create those values and essence in the new forms and structures of today.

A short story from my personal life:

The first day I met the person who would become my wife, we sat in a teashop called the Tao of Tea. I told her that, based on my own understanding of my personality and temperament, I thought I would be a better fit in a different time period, when life was slower and simpler. Her response surprised me. She suggested that maybe, in a past life, I had already figured out how to live in those times. Maybe my new challenge was to figure out how to be that way in today’s more sophisticated and complex world. It is easy to be simple and mindful when the world around you is simple. The next step is to be simple and mindful when the world is not. That is harder.

This is my first time to make a blog, and this is my first post. It is something I have thought about for years. I used to believe I had to write the perfect essay before sharing something with others. I have recently chosen to let go of that expectation of perfection, because I could spend my whole life waiting and never be ready. No longer will I wait. In all its messiness and imperfection, I will begin to share.

I intend to sometimes use principles from the Tao Te Ching as a central theme to guide and organize my writing. I consider myself a lifelong student of Tao. As much as possible, I will share stories from my personal life to show how I apply Tao teachings in a practical, daily way. I may also draw from Buddhist scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, Confucian classics, other spiritual literature, and psychology and mental health, when the essence of it embodies an element of living with Tao principles. I do not always live in alignment with Tao principles, but my chosen value is to cultivate in that direction as much as possible. I may share my thoughts on certain theories I have learned, but always with the primary intention of practicing it and applying it in life. The Tao is more meaningful to me if I am actually living in accordance with it, or trying to, which is why I have named this blog Living Tao.