Mostly stayed out of these kind of discussions, but I'm feeling philosophical today (I blame the Mayans).
The way that I've syncretized science and Taoism is that "the Tao" is essentially the combination of physics and determinism. It is the pattern of the universe, the natural cycles of the world, including even the birth and death of stars, orbital mechanics, etc.
It views the world as a homeostatic system--essentially, as long as we don't fuck it up trying to intervene, the universe will regulate itself.
It's not unlike the Christian assertion that there is a "divine plan" behind everything that happens, only in Taoism the plan isn't tied to any sort of sentience or "intelligent design". There's a reason for everything (often unknowable from our limited vantage-point). But that doesn't mean it's a
logical reason, more like chaos theory.
One of the core ideas of Taoism is one that Kurt Vonnegut summed up as "the problem with humans is our damn big brains". Because out of all animals we're uniquely able to construct social conventions and assign abstract values to things that wouldn't naturally exist otherwise, we subject ourselves to emotional anguish unknown in the rest of existence. We spend arduous hours of labor, we lie and cheat and steal and kill...all for something that has little inherent value. Or as Douglas Adams put it,
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
In a lot of ways, Taoism was the rebellion and reaction to Confucianism. Confucians said people are basically bad, and you need lots of rules to make sure everyone does what they need to, and if everyone would just follow the rules everything would be fine.
Taoism said people are basically people, neither inherently good nor evil, and that the rules were the damn problem. The more laws you make, the more criminals you make. The more wealth you hoard, the more you have to worry about it being stolen. The more you deny your inner self, the more stress you cause by trying to "fit" the mold society is trying to impose on you. Confucianism frowned on alcohol, because it caused "improper behavior". Taoism celebrated being tipsy (not staggering drunk...excess is frowned upon), because it helped you to shed all these social inhibitions and be your true self.
The end goal is to be happy
in this life, because there is no guarantee of anything beyond. And the way to that happiness is to learn to simply
be. I always use the example of a deer. The deer doesn't sit around and worry about being the fastest or strongest deer, it doesn't worry what its deer friends say behind its back, it doesn't fret that someone is nibbling all that grass it wanted, etc. Most importantly, it doesn't
try to be a deer. It just is. The problem is that as humans who have lost that natural ability to just be, we have to
try to get back to that. And in the act of trying, we're not being natural. (Which brings up the whole concept of
wu wei, or "acting without acting"). It's like seeing something out of the corner of your eye...if you look directly at it, it's gone. You have to learn to just be without trying. To accept whatever comes, to be content, to find your happiness in existence itself.
It ain't easy, and I'm far from good at it. But it's rung true to me for 20+ years now.
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Topic: Atheism/Religion Discussion (Read 184213 times)