Let’s Talk About Tao

Let’s talk about Tao baby
Let’s talk about you and me
Let’s talk about all is one and all the same that all may be
Let’s talk about Tao.

I know. Sometimes I hate me too, but these songs just come to me and I’m helpless in the grip of the muse.

So I had to teach Taoism! And I had no idea what the differences between Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism really are! So I bought a book. Cause that’s how I roll.

The book I bought was What is Tao? by Alan Watts and it is brilliant. I’ve read Alan Watts before, specifically The Book, and I found his description and laying out of Tao to be as accessible, careful, thorough, and educational as his life philosophies. Not to mention I’ve discovered that I have some serious love for Tao (and I’m guessing Zen too, but I haven’t got there yet).

But it’s a weird thing contemplating my existence as a post-modern Taoist. Why do you ask? What a fantastic question, I’m so glad you did. As a post-modernist I believe that language defines reality and, to a very large part as explicated before, knowledge is created simultaneously with language. For a Taoist words have value because they have meaning and society values words but Zhuangzi does not because he does not value what society values. American translation: once you discover The Way you won’t need language anymore because you’ll have evolved past it. You won’t need to understand or define things; you’ll just know them.

Obviously this business about “just knowing” goes against the grain for me. I’m all about knowledge and language being intertwined and what we know stemming very precisely from what we can create. (Again, language here is almost any form of communication--“there is no outside the text” as everyone’s second favorite Frenchman would say.) But it is that process of taking an emotion, an inkling, an intuition, a premonition, an electrical impulse in your brain and consciously making sense of it that, in my previous and possibly current opinion, allows for self-awareness, critical thought, and obtainment of knowledge.

The real question then is not who is right--according to this mind boggling philosophy I have stumbled into we can both be right as neither of us are actually RIGHT--but whether the possibility exists outside of my comprehension. What we have here is something a bit like death; there is no way to conceive of it as we have nothing in our consciousness or experience that is anything like it. Anything like it. We can make similes, therefore, death is like sleep, or state what is, we will know without language, but we don’t actually have any real knowledge of what that means. We can’t. It’s sort of like consciously and carefully contemplating the size of the universe and then imagining it getting bigger; your mind shorts out after awhile.

Now some are thinking “I can imagine knowing something without language” but I’m going to say “No. You can’t.” I’m saying that specifically because from our earliest memories we have moved past the pre-language state and so our minds are formed around creating meaning, a.k.a. language; furthermore, what is being discussed here, and I would put my not inconsiderable close reading skills behind this statement as evidence, is an evolution past language not a return to the infancy. Granted, simultaneously I would be simplistic and infantile in the perception of others, but if I did attain The Way their perception of me offers no real clue to what I actually am.

Mind boggling. So here I am, getting’ down with my post-modern self contemplating the origins of knowledge, the role of language, and what whatever comes next might feel like. Lucky for me I got some Memphis BBQ in the fridge--when considering The Way it is good to know the way to the BBQ restaurant. I’m just sayin’.