Numbness

Bruce Frantzis says that in Taoism the belief is that your life is going in one of two directions: either towards life or towards death. You are either becoming more alive or you are dying inside. This has nothing to do with age, although it can refer to what is happening in your physical body.

Take your physical body. What is death? Death from old age (as opposed to sudden death) which includes any of the number of illnesses which develop in old age, is really just the body shutting down. The body can’t go on forever, eventually it begins to shut down: your vision goes, your hearing goes, your movement, your organs don’t work as well as they used to, eventually this causes you to get sick and you die. This can also be true of your mental state: your mind goes a bit, your memory goes, people become senile, etc.

OK, so that’s the road to death. We are all on it, for sure, but like I said that is about age, and this discussion is not about age, it is about everything else in your life: your physical-, mental-, emotional-, etc health. People can be virtually emotionally dead at the age of 16. People can be mentally crippled and feeble at the age of 30. It’s not about age.

Right, so the most sure-fire symptom of shutting down and dying is numbness. Not pain, as you might expect, but numbness. Chances are that pain is definitely there, but because you are numb you don’t feel it, so numbness is the most prominent symptom.

People become numb for millions of different reasons. Here I am especially talking about emotional numbness, because physical numbness can sometimes be treated fairly easily, and isn’t too much of a problem physically if you live a fairly ‘healthy’ lifestyle, and mental numbness is extremely difficult to recognise for yourself and is certainly very serious; but emotional numbness causes people to do a lot of things which everyone will be familiar with and is really worth recognising and looking for inside yourself.

Let’s take an extreme example: self-harm. The explanation for self-harm has almost become a cliché: I want to feel something. People say they don’t feel anything, and they want to feel something, even if it is pain. This is exactly the same as people creating dramas in their life, because they need something to be going on; it doesn’t matter if it is destructive, it doesn’t matter if it’s painful, it doesn’t matter if it makes you cry, all that matters is that something is going on. This is exactly the same as people seeking attention, good or bad: I don’t feel anything, so I need someone to give me something, whether it is love, hate, anger, contempt, jealousy, sympathy, you name it. And so people do whatever they can to get someone to give them one or more of these things, so they can just feel something.

And the reason that most people, if they become numb and are desperate to feel anything, will seek something negative is because it is much easier to feel pain that it is to feel joy. Cutting yourself is much easier than trying to thread the needle of your own happiness. Getting someone to hate you is much easier and much less effort than getting someone to love you.

So if we look at numbness we can discuss something like leprosy, which causes nerve damage. Contrary to what most people think, leprosy doesn’t actually make your limbs fall off – the reason people lose their limbs is because they might get a cut or something but because their nerves are damaged they can’t feel it and so the cut or the burn might go untreated and become infected and by the time they notice it the limb has to be amputated.

So numbness means that you don’t get the pain signals which are your body’s natural way of telling you that there is something wrong that you need to sort out. And emotions work in pretty much the same way – if you are emotionally numb then if something hurts you then you don’t feel it and so you don’t think to yourself that you need to do something to sort it out and so people end up doing the same hurtful things to themselves and others over and over again.

You can be forgiven for thinking that well great if I don’t feel the pain of things then I’m not gonna get hurt, this is sort of where the saying ‘ignorance is bliss’ comes from. And that’s all well and good but ignorance isn’t really bliss, it just seems like bliss. The problem is that if you are numb to the bad things in life you are also numb to the good things. So this is where people can’t get enthusiastic about anything, there isn’t anything they feel passionate about, they don’t care about anything, they can’t care about anyone, they can’t trust people, they can’t love people, they can’t accept love, they can’t feel content, they can’t feel satisfied, nothing they do means anything, nothing in life means anything to them, and this is really a pretty sad state of affairs.

There’s a good saying from a book by Paulo Coelho that says ‘You are sad. That proves that your soul is still alive.’ And in life things happen that make you happy and make you sad and no one’s life is entirely happy all the time and if it was then it would get pretty boring but if you don’t feel any of it, if you don’t feel the highs or the lows well then I think that’s not really living, that’s just existing.

If you are not gonna feel any of the highs or lows of life, if you’re not going to feel anything in life, well then you might as well be a rock or a tree for what it’s worth.

The Myth of the Silver Bullet

When it came to light that Ashley Cole had cheated on Cheryl Cole for the second or third time, and that she was leaving him, I remember reading an article in one of the newspapers, and one of the comments in it really stayed with me. The female journalist said that she hoped that this would be a lesson to many of the young women out there, that you can look as close to the ‘perfection’ that modern beauty culture tries to aim for, but even then someone can still break your heart (or something like that).

Now she wasn’t saying that all men are bastards, rather she was hoping that young girls would see that being beautiful will not solve your problems, and so maybe we should all spend a little less time and effort thinking or hoping that it will.

It’s interesting when you look at what people think about their lives: if only I had this or that then everything would be fine. If only I was rich then I would be happy. If only I lost x amount of weight I would look good and everything in my life would work. If only I had this job. If only I lived in this country. If only I was with that person. If only I could do this or if only I could do that then everything would be great.

We can look at these people who are at the top of the ‘if only’ celebrity-tree and see whether this is actually true. People think to themselves: other people’s lives are so good because they are more beautiful than I am. Look at the praise they get, look at how many people want them, their lives must be perfect. OK well let’s take Cheryl Cole. She was (for some unknown reason) proclaimed as the most photogenic woman ever to have lived (or something like that, I remember a friend of mine objecting strongly when he heard), so: she is beautiful. Top of the FHM lists and all that stuff. Everyone agrees: hot. And on top of that she has loads of money, and fame and all the trappings and lifestyle that those things give you. Great. But still she couldn’t avoid being hurt by someone that she loved. Take Catherine Zeta-Jones, recently diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. I seem to vaguely remember her topping some sort of beauty list about 10 years ago. Also she has money, fame, rich husband, the works. Still, her life isn’t perfect, or even that great (I wouldn’t wish a mental disorder on anyone).

So you can see how the belief that if only I looked a little better or if only a few more people wanted me or if only I had more money then everything would be fine is not really true. You can look perfect, you can be wanted by everyone who sets eyes on you, but it won’t make your life perfect, it won’t protect you from all the stuff that can hurt you. It seems a bit silly to think that well my life would be perfect if I had a £1000, when there are millionaires and billionaires in the world who aren’t happy, who are getting hurt and angry and sad the same as everyone else.

What is this really telling us? I suppose it is telling us that there is no silver bullet, no magic bullet, no external thing you can point to and say truly that if you had that then everything would be fine. This is where myths about fountains of youth and buried treasure and magical weapons and dragon scrolls and mystic pearls come from. They make great stories, but the truth is you can be as rich as you like or have as many magical weapons as you like, but real problems in the real world that are inside you can’t be solved that way. It would great if they could, it would be fucking great, because losing a few stone and toning your abs or your ass or even making a million pounds are infinitely easier than the stuff you actually have to go through to sort out the stuff inside you and make your life better.

Now you might be thinking to yourself well I know that’s not true and I don’t think that. Well in truth it is likely that you don’t consciously have such an explicit thought such as if I get that then everything will be perfect, but the thought or the expectation or the conditioning is probably deep inside you, and you can see the symptoms that are produced from that if you look into the little actions you do every day, and the motivations for what you want and the things you do. If you look deep enough you will probably see some ‘silver bullet’ expectation is at the bottom of something that is driving you on, something you feel like you should do or that you have to  do.

It can be a terrifying thing when you realise that there isn’t a simple outside solution to solving your problems, because we have all been brought up believing it because our parents believed it and everything in our culture says if you only buy this thing or only buy that thing then you will feel better, your life will be better and everything will be grand. Wear this deodorant and you will get all the girls and (by implication) your life will be great, because getting loads of girls is what makes a good life. Drink this pro-biotic blah blah drink and you will feel better, you will be happy and bouncy and vibrant. All you need to do is drink that little elixir and the good bacteria will sort you out. Great. But it doesn’t work. This is exactly the same as the Neo-Taoists who for about a thousand years have been trying to make an elixir of immortality from various herbs and metals and what-not, because living forever is great. Again, it is something outside you, point to it, that thing over there, yep, that thing, drink that, get that and you will be fine.

I said it can be terrifying when you really realise that it’s not that easy because the true scale of the task comes into focus. The real amount of effort you have to put in if you want your life to get better is truly daunting. One of the hermits in the Zhong-nan says ‘you have to spend your life’, as in literally spend your life the same way you would spend a tenner. And your life being the most valuable thing you own that’s quite an investment to make.

I said it can be terrifying but it can also be liberating, because you know there is no other choice. If you realise that the only way out of prison is to dig a tunnel through the centre of the earth and out to the other side then you have no choice if you really want to get out of the prison, it doesn’t matter how long a tunnel you have to dig, how long it will take you, how much effort it will cost, you simply have to do it. There being no choice can sometimes allow people to summon tremendous courage – look at those people on 9/11 who went out onto the ledges at the 70th and 80th floors to try and escape the flames. In their normal lives when there is a choice they would never dream of doing it, but knowing that they wanted to live they had no choice but to go out of the windows because the stairs were blocked and the building was on fire. I am not using that as an analogy really because of course all of those people died, but it is proof of the power and the courage that can come from not having a choice. In realising that you want to make your life easier and happier, and realising that there is no other choice other than facing up to yourself, you can go forward, you can forge ahead. Sometimes (a lot of the time) you want to turn back, or just stop, or go back to the times when you believed that there was a silver bullet, because that was easier, or at least it seemed easier. Spending your life, facing yourself and everything that you are doing and have done: there is no bigger commitment than that in the world. And there is nothing more frightening: the phrase in Taoism is ‘jumping into the dragon’s mouth’. You will get bitten.

Of course this all seems pretty dreary talk, but if everything is perfect in your life and you have no problems then you don’t need to do anything, you don’t need to talk about it, it’s just fine. But the truth is that virtually everyone has problems, and everyone struggles in their life, so something needs to be said about it and something needs to be done about it if you want things to change.

“I can control when the fruit will fall” – Kung Fu Panda wisdom

Let me first start by reiterating that this is all bullshit. Talking about stuff is great fun and is interesting and can be useful but ultimately action is required for anything to actually change. Philosophical musing is not a substitute for practice. This has been made painfully clear to me recently and no doubt I will continue to be smacked around the head with it in the future, because it is fair to say: I don’t got it. In fact I am thinking of getting ‘Easier said than done’ tattooed on my forehead and my arse in order to cover all bases and to help me never forget it. Anyway, control.

Controlling stuff feels fucking good. You feel strong. And we are taught from an early age that being in control is good. If you control things then you are in power, and you are better than the people that you control. Do this do that, people do it = instant ego boost. Great. Problem is that controlling stuff has a lot of downsides which aren’t as immediately obvious as the ‘upside’ of getting people to do what you want and getting an ego boost.

Try clenching your fist for half an hour. You will find that you get exhausted, and that you are tense, and it ain’t exactly fun. Controlling situations and controlling people is a bit like this because you are clenching your will around a person or around a situation, but this is actually harder because ‘events’ and other people have their own motivations and their own impetus and their own desires and so they will fight against you in a way that your fist probably won’t because it doesn’t have a mind of its own.

So controlling stuff is exhausting because first you need to exert whatever force you need to exert to get control. Then once you get control you have to exert force to maintain control. And then comes with that the fear of losing control, and all the planning and thinking you have to do to try and avoid losing control. And then there’s the anger and frustration if you feel like you are losing control and if you actually do lose control. And then it starts all over again. Kinda tiring.

Also we can say that, especially in relationships, whatever is produced from that control will likely be completely hollow. If you hold a gun to someone’s head they will probably say and do whatever you want them to say or do. Is there really much difference between a real gun and an ‘emotional’ gun or a ‘mental’ gun? Or it might not be as immediate as a gun, it might be a slow drip-drip-drip of a kind of mental/emotional water-torture, in which case the person being tortured will probably tell you whatever you want to hear. And that sounds great but the problem is that a part of you will know that you are forcing all this to happen, and you will suspect that the other person doesn’t really mean what they say or do  and so you get angry and you try and force things a bit more. And in the end one person will break, and all the crap that results from that kind of breakage will probably result.

These are quite extreme examples, but the difference between this kind of control and the little, everyday things we do to manipulate situations and other people is only a matter of degree. And there is no peace when you are constantly running around, trying to keep all the plates spinning. I mean just look at people who become Presidents or Prime Ministers and how quickly they age. They are working virtually every hour of the day because everything needs to be dealt with or controlled in some way. Now I’m not saying that we don’t need people in charge of countries to keep control of certain things, but we have all agreed that someone should be in charge of the country. If we all try to be Presidents and Prime Ministers of our own little countries (our families, our relationships, any situation in which you want to take control) then we become Dictators, because no one agreed to let you control their life, deep down that is not what anyone wants.

Now, there are practices for giving up this desire to control, but really you have to recognise when you are doing it in order to start giving it up and so you need to think about it and gain some sort of awareness. For me it is a subtle feeling of strength in your thoughts about things, in your thoughts about people, like clenching a fist . I think if you can stop and just let the plates spin of their own accord (perhaps this is a bad metaphor, because some plates will smash and this has a negative connotation, but really in life some plates smash and some plates don’t and that’s just the way it is) then you can finally sit down and actually rest.

The only way you could really ever get full satisfaction from controlling things would be if you were Almighty God him/herself, and could control everything. But no matter how powerful you get you will never in fact become Lord of All the Universe, so your control will always only be partial, and that creates all the fear and frustration and anger and hurt that comes from the battle of trying to control the uncontrollable.

‘I can control when the fruit will fall’ says Master Sifu in the film Kung Fu Panda - then the peach falls on his head. The question is: how many peaches will hit you on the head before you start getting the message? Probably quite a few to be honest, but that’s ok – that’s part of the fun of the game.

Why spirituality needn’t have anything to do with ‘belief’

I was watching ‘The Big Questions’ last week and the discussion was about creationism. The programme got me thinking about why people take ‘theological’ or even ‘metaphysical’ ideas so seriously. Or really why people take beliefs so seriously. It reminded me of a passage from the Chuang Tse:

Imagine that you and I have a disagreement, and you get the better of me, rather than me getting the better of you, does this mean that you are automatically right and I am automatically wrong? Suppose I get the better of you, does it follow that I am automatically right and you are therefore wrong? Is it really that one of us is right and the other wrong? Or are we both right and both wrong? Neither you nor I can really know and other people are even more in the dark. So who can we ask to give us the right answer? Should you ask someone who thinks you are right? But how then can that person give a fair answer? Should we ask someone who thinks I am right? But then if he agrees with me, how can he make a fair judgement? Then again, should we ask someone who agrees with both of us? But again, if he agrees with both of us, how can he make a true judgement? Should we ask someone who disagrees with both of us? But here again, if he disagrees with both of us, how can he make an honest judgement? It is clear that neither you, I nor anyone else can make decisions like this amongst ourselves. So should we wait for someone else to turn up?

What I think is being said here is that ultimately we can never know definitively who is right and who is wrong, so what does it matter? If we have a debate about the ‘afterlife’, then neither of us can ever be said to be right or wrong because it is beyond our ability to prove or disprove. So in this way you could say that this type of discussion is good fun, but ultimately shouldn’t be taken very seriously, a bit like literary criticism. Talking about the meaning of books is good fun, and there is no right or wrong answer, but few people would think of starting wars or burning books over a difference of literary opinion. But people take beliefs very seriously. And certain atheists take other people’s beliefs very seriously as well, and get very hot under the collar debating the existence of God, for example. If someone asked me ‘Is there a God?’ I would tell the truth, and say I have no idea. I would also say what difference does it make? Is there a soul? Again, what difference does it make? People might cite some idea of ‘the meaning of life’ or whatever but I’m talking about day-to-day life, getting up and brushing your teeth and talking to your family and fucking your partner and taking a piss and taking the piss and all the other stuff that makes up the modern Western life. What difference does it make to that? Here I think we can make the distinction between an abstract ‘belief’ and lived ‘experience’.

The main thing I’ve always loved about Taoism is its practicality: if it ain’t happenin’ to you right here, right now, then don’t worry about it. In his book The Great Stillness, Bruce Frantzis talks about the Taoist view on the afterlife:

Taoist practitioners of the water school usually neither affirm nor deny the existence of an afterlife. They simply do not discuss this topic much because few (if any) have had reliable personal experience that conclusively resolves the issue one way or the other. Taoists are most clear, however, about the fact that we have a body and mind right now, and that Consciousness itself is knowable in this life through body or mind or both.

Here we can see the distinction between belief and experience. Taoist practice is all about what you experience, concretely – it is never about abstraction. Yes it can interesting or exciting to talk about spirits and psychic energy and all that jazz but ultimately that’s all it is, talk. Talk is cheap.

You suddenly wake up in the middle of the woods with a backpack lying next to you. You have no idea where you are or how you got there. What’s the first thing you do? Well, aside from panic (there are many moments of serious panic in dealing with your spirituality). Do you starting running in a random direction? Shout out? Scream? Curl into a foetal ball and pray that you suddenly wake up in a bed of roses?  Well it seems to me that the first practical thing to do is to dump everything out of the backpack and take an inventory of what you’ve actually got, right here, right now. Not what you wish you had, not what you could’ve had, should’ve had, would’ve had. Those things aren’t real, only the things in the pack are real. In the pack most people have got:

• a brain which thinks
• a heart which feels (I am differentiating between heart and mind because thinking about an emotion isn’t the same as feeling it)
• a body which perceives
• a sense of individuality or consciousness, what you might call your ‘subjectivity’ (most people will have this, unless they are psychotic)

I grant that there are certain people with medical conditions who do not have these four things, but by and large the vast majority of people possess these four things to a certain extent. So that’s what’s in your pack. In Taoism they would say that there is quite a lot more going on inside you that you aren’t able to ‘perceive’ yet, but since we can’t perceive them let’s not worry about it, because they aren’t ’real’ to us at the moment. These four things are real (or even if they are illusions they are so integral to our existence that they might as well be real) and so this is what you start your spiritual journey with. The Taoists don’t see any reason to make it more complicated than that.

The first step of Taoist practice is to start trying to feel your body, and relax. That’s it. Feel tension: relax it. Now obviously there is a certain amount of flexion required in muscles to keep you upright and move you around but virtually everybody has tension which is not useful. For example: tense shoulders. What purpose is that tension serving, other than to cause you discomfort?

Most people will have no trouble believing that they have a body. Most people will have no trouble believing their perceptions, what they see and hear and feel. So Taoism is not about abstraction, it is about what is real for you right now. You don’t start dealing with things like ‘energy’ or ‘psychic forces’ until you can actually perceive them as a lived experience, so even these esoteric things do not require ‘belief’, they eventually become a reality to you. Until that time, don’t worry about them.

So if people have genuine experiences for themselves then it isn’t a matter of faith. People who’ve had ‘out of body’ experiences didn’t need to believe it, they just lived it. It is real to them, so that’s fine. ‘Psychics’ experience whatever they do, it is real for them. If people kneeling in a church feel something concrete in their prayer then great.

The difficulty comes when people mistake abstraction for reality. In Taoism this means just about everything. For example: thoughts about the future. The future isn’t real. Say you have a job interview tomorrow that you are very nervous about. Why are you nervous? Because you have mistaken your abstract idea about what the interview is going to be like for the reality which, of course, hasn’t happened yet. So why worry? This also extends to every interpersonal relationship. People mistake what they think other people are like for what they are actually like, and when these two things come into conflict there is frustration, anger, fear, misunderstanding, jealousy, etc etc etc. Yes, the ability to reflect on the past and hypothesise about the future is one of the things which makes the human animal so successful and downright miraculous, but confusing what is abstract with what is real is one of the great problems of the human mind, because it causes so much unnecessary tension.

Now I am not saying that people shouldn’t ever believe anything, or shouldn’t ever talk about abstract things, but once again the problem is taking things too seriously. Take real things seriously of course: someone holds a knife to your throat and demands your wallet, by all means take that seriously. But being constantly afraid of the possibility of being mugged isn’t the same as actually being mugged, so why all the fear?

I am  aware that because of institutional religions, beliefs do have a concrete effect on people’s lives – for example things like Catholicism and contraception in the Third World. These things do need to be looked at and discussed, and people should take action where they feel it’s necessary, but getting angry over a discussion of ‘heaven’ or the existence of God is about as silly as getting angry over a discussion of Great Expectations.

I am also aware that the word ‘spirituality’ implies a ‘spirit’, which would require ‘belief’. I don’t think this is necessarily the case. For me ‘spirituality’ is just life, and a person’s ‘spirit’ is just the fact that they are alive and existent. What more is required than that? Everything that I ‘believe’ is based on my own personal experiences, and I am constantly trying to remember that my ‘ideas’ about the way the world is shouldn’t be confused with actual life. I think Taoism is just about making life an easier experience for you and everyone else in the world. For me this is what spirituality means, and it doesn’t need to be any more mystical than that.

A Lighter Shade of Grey: Morality, the Ego, and Limitations

The world is not black and white. In fact, there is virtually nothing in the world which is purely either black or white. Never more is this the case than with morality. The question of morality, I think, can be viewed as a flux between the two poles, just as in Taoism everything in the universe is viewed through the flux between yin and yang.

My aim here is not really to talk about morality as a ‘system’. Morality systems tend to take a black and white view. Take the classic example of the ten commandments: killing is wrong, period; honouring thy parents is good, period; stealing is bad, period. In this view there are things which are right and things which are wrong, all the time. Now this is usually countered by the story of the man who steals bread to feed his starving family – is that wrong? Some will say no. The next question after that is: so what’s the point in the commandment then?

Is killing always wrong? Some will say yes. What about killing Hitler to stop the Holocaust? Would that be wrong? Is it justified to take one life to save many? That’s easy to say when one death saves millions of lives, but what about taking a million lives to save a million and one lives? Is that justified? With these sorts of questions we enter the grey area which isn’t covered by the commandments and the rules. There simply cannot be enough rules to account for every human situation, but if there were then they would no longer be rules, they would all be exceptions.

A single ‘guideline’ which is a common theme across most religious and spiritual traditions is the infamous ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you’. In other words, if you wouldn’t like to be mugged and beaten up in the street, then don’t do it to other people. In Taoism this reaches a new level: ‘Whatever you do to another person you have just done to your own Consciousness.’  At the highest level of the human being, the Taoists believe that there is no fundamental difference between the ‘stuff’ which makes up you and the ‘stuff’ which makes up the other person, so literally whatever you do to someone else you are also doing to yourself.

This is a generally good guideline; however, in many ways it is unrealistic to most people. People don’t think whatever they do to another person would ever happen to them, so why worry? And also people don’t really know what they would like to have done to them and what they wouldn’t like – everyone is different. Some people actually think they like to be treated like shit, so by that guideline they would have no trouble treating other people like shit. It’s not ideal.

So what to do with this morality question? Well I believe we can talk in terms of ‘shades of grey’.

Let’s take black and white as our two poles, and everything on the spectrum between those two poles as various shades of grey from lighter near the white end to darker near the black end – these shades represent the various levels of ego ‘involvement’ present in any action. Forget about good and bad, right and wrong. By ‘ego-involvement’ I generally mean selfishness, because the ego is necessarily selfish, but ‘selfishness’ has a negative connotation for most people which I don’t want to bring in here. This is not about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ actions, because in truth there are no such things. In any case, the darker the shade, the more the ego is involved in an action.

Let me say as well that I don’t believe there can be a purely white, or a purely black action. ‘Purely white’ would suggest that there is absolutely no ego-involvement at all. Firstly, 95% of people who claim not to have an ego are either delusional or liars. I do, however, believe it is possible for human beings to destroy their ego, and so it is possible to act without any ego involvement, but the people who achieve this are rare indeed, and such actions would not fall onto this spectrum between white and black which I am describing – they would exist elsewhere, outside of the realm of ‘normal’ actions, in the realms of action, non-action and fourth time.

So there is no ‘pure white’ and neither is there ‘pure black’, which would suggest total ego-control and a complete lack of any altruistic considerations, or in other words, considerations of the other. I do not believe such a mind-state is possible for the rather flimsy reasons that I believe that somewhere at the core of the human animal there is something which is essentially open and beyond selfishness, and that no matter how low a person may sink or how disturbed their mind may be, this part of them still exists within, and still exerts some influence. Also for philosophical reasons which I don’t have the knowledge to argue for properly, the human subject is necessarily constituted in some part with relation to ‘the other’, and so complete and total disregard of any consideration of the other is fundamentally impossible.

So there are no actions at the respective ends of this spectrum, but we can talk about actions that are near either extreme. Most people will be able to easily name something at the extreme ‘dark’ end: rape, murder, etc. These can occupy anywhere on the spectrum but are most often grouped in the darker shades. At the ‘lighter’ end, we can name things such as a fireman entering a burning building to save another person’s life. (I am naming these emotive or ‘spectacular’ acts as examples simply because it is easier to appreciate the immediate motivation and effect of these actions.)

I think virtually every action (if we exclude those ego-less actions which I talked about earlier) in anyone’s life can be plotted on this kind of diagram. So what has all this got to do with anything?

Well as with all of this when we are discussing the beginning of spirituality we are always talking in a way about making life easier. Now I am deliberately not saying that we are looking to make life ‘happier’ or ‘better’ (even though that is what I personally think we are looking at) because ‘happiness’ and ‘better’ are extremely subjective attributions, whereas ‘easier’ is a little more clear-cut. If we look at someone who is trying to conduct an affair, for instance, and is having to always be aware of leaving traces and needing to remember lies which they have told to cover their tracks, we can say this person’s life could be ‘easier’ if they weren’t having an affair, but we can’t necessarily say that they would be ‘happier’ because they might not believe that to be the case. So we are talking about making life easier, smoother, or in Taoist-speak, more harmonious.

In general the lighter the shade of your actions, the easier your life is going to be. This has nothing to do with ‘should’ or ‘should not’. It is not about punishment or reward. It is not even about karma, necessarily. So how does it work? In simple terms, the universe is always trying to return to balance. Any ecosystem that is not influenced by human beings will be in balance. This is primary school biology: if there are more rabbits in a field in one year, then there will be more foxes, then as the number of rabbits goes down again the number of foxes also goes down. The number of rabbits would never exponentially rise unless the number of foxes decreased. There is always a balance. It seems like this is common sense and that it couldn’t be any other way – this is true, because this is the way it is in the universe we are in, we don’t know anything else. Something happens, something else happens in reaction to that – there is a balance, yin-yang. And so if the universe is trying to get back to balance, if human beings are also trying to achieve balance, then we will be going with the universe rather than against it. In Taoist thought, since the universe is the same thing as you, if you are going against the universe then you are also going against yourself, which doesn’t seem terribly productive. If you are ‘going with’ the universe then you are trying to be congruent with the way things are, not the way people imagine things to be, or the way they want or expect them to be, which is almost invariably not the way things truly are.

But what is harmonious and what’s not? That’s an extremely difficult question, because the answer is constantly changing. In a way this is almost the same question as what is right and what is wrong? There is a different answer in every situation, but as a general tendency we can say that actions of a lighter shade are more likely to be harmonious than those of a darker shade.

OK, but how do I know to what extent I am acting under the influence of my ego? Again, a very difficult question. Usually we have a sense of when we are acting purely for ourselves and when we are doing something for someone else, but the kind of subtle awareness required to intimately know your own internal motivations takes a great deal of time and effort to develop and use. So to be honest a lot of the time you are shooting in the dark.

This doesn’t seem like a great answer, does it? Well it’s not, but any disappointment about that is due to the expectation that we should know what’s better, what’s worse, what’s right, what’s wrong. But no one ever said we had to.

We can get better at recognising harmony as we increase our awareness, which is the purpose of Taoist practices, and so it becomes easier to work out how to make life ‘easier’, until we get to the point where you know yourself and your situation to the extent that Bruce Frantzis says “you don’t have to do anything to be happy, it would just be terribly obvious how to do it all the time.” In this sense, this is a much easier way to live a happy life than having to negotiate lots of fraught relationships and personal regrets and blackspots and having to dodge threats from other people and having to avoid this place or that place.

In general, ease in life is linked to limitations. I’m speaking metaphorically, but if we consider this literally for a moment: two guys are walking along a beach, they are both naked but one of them is also draped with heavy chains which wrap around his arms and legs and head and body. Which one of them is gonna have an easier time walking along the beach? In a very simplistic sense, lies and anger and grudges and regrets are the same as these chains. They create limitations.

The guy who is having an affair can’t ‘just answer’ his phone – he has to look at who it is that’s calling and think about whether he can talk freely because of where he is and who he is with. He can’t just walk freely along the beach, he has to think about pebbles and shells and crabs and all manner of things.

The guy who starts a fight in a club and gets banned can’t go back there again. His mate asks him if he wants to go out on Saturday night, but he has to think about it, because there are certain places he can’t go. He can’t ‘just’ go out. He can’t just walk along the beach.

Now the guy who kills someone – well if he is caught and he goes to jail then we can obviously see what limitations there are on his life now. He can’t ‘just go’ anywhere. All of this is talking about freedom at every level of thought and action. Most of us don’t even consider how free or not-free we are – we get used to dodging and hopping along the beach frantically, we get used to stepping on the shells and cutting our feet or some of us get used to not going anywhere at all because we are so weighed down, or any step we take is likely to cause us pain because our lives have become so tangled and fearful and dangerous. We accept this as ‘just the way I am’ or ‘just the way my life is’ or even ‘just the way the world is’. In a way it seems ‘easier’ to say that, but in truth we are just keeping things difficult for ourselves, or making them even more difficult.

Of course, as ever, I will return to the fact that people do the best they can, and external circumstances also put limitations on people because let’s face it the world isn’t perfect. This is why what is most harmonious is different in all situations, but if we can lean towards a lighter shade of grey, then we can at least stop putting so many limitations on ourselves and on others, and then maybe the limitations which are put on us by others will also cease to be so ‘limiting’, or will cease to arise at all.

‘Why so serious?’ – Seriousness, Sincerity, and the nature of Change

In general, people take life very seriously. Even when people are laughing and joking, deep down the serious things are still lurking. Even those people who seem supremely laid back take things seriously, they just don’t take so many things seriously, but when something that they do consider serious turns up, then you will definitely see their serious side.

So, why so serious?

There are many reasons why people take things seriously. Generally the foundation of it is the same maya, or ‘delusion’ in Buddhist terminology. People believe that the world they perceive is solid and real. We believe that our selves are solid and real. We divide everything into categories and think that everything is different and fixed. And all these principle delusions give rise to the million different issues which arise in people’s lives.

Seriousness also arises in fear, and people’s desire to control. People believe that if they are serious, in other words: tense, then they are taut, ready for action, aware. Seriousness keeps us alert, we say. Taking things seriously means I am giving it my full attention, and therefore I am most likely to be able to affect the outcome that I want, and avoid the outcomes that I don’t want.

So which things in life are serious, and which are not? Well I’ve taken the liberty of compiling a comprehensive list:

Things which are serious:

Nothing.

Things which are not serious:

Everything.

Now as a disclaimer let me add that just saying things aren’t serious doesn’t stop people from taking things seriously. Even ‘knowing’ that something isn’t all that serious doesn’t stop you from taking it seriously. Few of us have such comprehensive control of our thoughts and emotions. Also a common reaction to these kind of statements is: so nothing really matters then? This is a common confusion between seriousness and sincerity. Everyone is fairly clear on what seriousness is, but what do I mean when I talk about sincerity?

A quick google of sincerity brings up the following definition:

1. Free from pretense or deceit; proceeding from genuine feelings.

2. (of a person) Saying what they genuinely feel or believe; not dishonest or hypocritical.

The first definition is my main focus here. As I said above, if you do not take things seriously then people do not believe that you are sincere. The two seem interconnected. Without seriousness one cannot be sincere. If you don’t put on a straight face then your words carry no weight. ‘Seriously now…’ we say, and the joke has to come to an end. Can we joke around but also be sincere?

I would like to put forth a tentative definition: Sincerity is taking things seriously without tension. Sincerity is acknowledging that things matter, that things are happening, but it can be done without the solidification and tension of seriousness. Sincerity is in this moment, now. Seriousness stretches out across the past, the present, and the future, and since these things are delusions as well, we could say that sincerity is true where seriousness is false.

From as early as I can remember I have been irreverent. My default reaction to sombreness and seriousness is to be irreverent. I think perhaps this is why I can engage so readily with Chuang Tse. The characters in the book of Chuang Tse are invariably irreverent about everything. Anyone caught taking anything seriously is instantly shot down. The only people who are revered are personages such as Lao Tse, who may not necessarily be irreverent, but who is capable of being sincere without seriousness. The things which are not taken seriously in the Chuang Tse may shock certain people, or even offend them. Indeed, in the book people often express surprise and shock at the irreverence of the sages. For example, let’s look at the most serious thing that most people can think of: death.

Chuang Tzu’s wife died and Hui Tzu came to console him, but Chuang Tzu was sitting, legs akimbo, bashing a battered tub and singing.

Hui Tzu said, ‘You lived as man and wife, she reared your children. At her death surely the least you should be doing is to be on the verge of weeping, rather than banging the tub and singing: this is not right!’

Chuang Tzu said, ‘Certainly not. When she first died, I certainly mourned just like everyone else! However, I then thought back to her birth and to the very roots of her being, before she was born. Indeed, not just before she was born but before the time when her body was created. Not just before her body was created but before the very origin of her life’s breath. Out of all this, through the wonderful mystery of change she was given her life’s breath. Her life’s breath wrought a  transformation and she was born. Now there is yet another transformation and she is dead. She is like the four seasons in the way that spring, summer, autumn and winter follow each other. She is now at peace, lying in her chamber, but if I were to sob and cry it would certainly appear that I could not comprehend the ways of destiny. This is why I stopped.’

For now we can ignore Chuang Tse’s pronouncements about “life’s breath”, which may seem to some esoteric, and talk in ‘matter-of-fact’ terms. Here we have the usual reaction from Hui Tse: he assumes that because Chuang Tse is not taking his wife’s death ‘seriously’, in the usual manner of mourning, then Chuang Tse must not have cared about his wife. Because Chuang Tse is not being serious, his feelings must not be sincere.

Most people will say that they simply cannot understand Chuang Tse’s reaction. They will say that it is impossible not to be sad at the death of someone dear to you. Now I am not saying that people shouldn’t be upset when people die, I am simply looking at why people take life so seriously – should and should not don’t really come into it. Similarly, just reading the Chuang Tse and agreeing with it does not mean that you will act the same way if you should experience a loss. Emotions don’t work on philosophical or intellectual grounds.

So what is the reasoning behind Chuang Tse’s actions?  Chuang Tse talks about change, transformation, and destiny. If we leave destiny aside as ‘simply the stuff that happens to people in their lives’ because again for some that is an esoteric or charged word, we can concentrate on change and transformation. This returns me to the point I made right at the beginning: we think everything in life is solid and fixed. In fact, everything is constantly changing.

So in what ways is everything changing? Well Chuang Tse points to the classic example of the changing seasons. Another parallel which I find particularly useful and resonant with death is that of night and day. Night follows day. You can’t have day without night, because then it wouldn’t be ‘day’, it would be something else. So you can’t have life without death. Even things which are seemingly ‘immortal’ such as the sun and the earth will one day eventually die, and be destroyed. Even the universe, so the scientists say, will probably either crush back into a tiny dot again or keep stretching until it becomes a lifeless void. Whether the universe will ‘die’ or not is not important, the important point is that the universe is constantly changing – so we can see that even the thing which incorporates everything in existence is changing. So why do we cling to the idea that things should not change?

When someone dies a change has occurred. On the most basic level this is what has happened. Now there are a million different energetic, emotional, physical, psychic, and karmic ties which are also affected by a death, which is what produces the reaction, but at the most basic level this is what has occurred. I am not trying to belittle the feelings which people have when someone dies, of course not. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ reaction, there are just different reactions.

So how can we be like Chuang Tse? Well, let’s just say that that is a much larger answer than simply reading the book and trying to ‘think it’. But ‘thinking it’ is a start. If we can examine the way things change, and realise that most things are not as fixed and solid as we perceive or assume them to be, then we can start to let go of the tense ‘grasp’ we try to have on things, we can be less serious, and be more sincere.

For example, if you look deep down at people’s behaviour, sometimes they are more concerned with the ‘seriousness’ than the thing that they are serious about. For example, tyrannical Health and Safety executives that insist on the strictest and most arbitrary enforcement of the rules: do these people care more about people’s safety, or enforcing rules? The energy of our ‘seriousness’ can outweigh or even block the energy of our ‘sincerity’. Oftentimes, if a person has let go of their seriousness then their sincerity will shine through. It will be a simple and pure sincerity, not clouded by a million different conditions and agendas. They will not be apathetic, they will not be disengaged. Things will matter to them, but there will not be that aspect of ‘grasping’, of tension which so often accompanies people’s attitudes when they are dealing with something that matters to them a great deal.

In general (I am tempted to say in every case) relaxation is better than tension. It is better for you. It is better for accomplishing what you want to accomplish. It is better for everyone around you. Again, I reiterate that I am trying not to say ‘should’ and ‘should not’ – there is no such thing. But there are things which are smoother than others, lives which are easier, lives which are happier. And there are also things which are true and things which are false.

So, ultimately, the Tao is about letting go. Letting go of the illusion of control. Letting go of the illusion of solidity. Letting go of tension. Letting go of grasping. Letting go of things. Ultimately this is what it always comes back to. Bruce Frantzis says that eventually, after you’ve let go of all the attachments to the bad things in your life, you then have to let go of the attachments to the good things as well. That sounds difficult. At the stage I am at now, which is at the very beginning, I cannot imagine such a process. But we all have to start somewhere, and at the very first beginning stages just thinking about where we are tense, and trying to understand how the world actually is, not just what we think or want it to be, seems to be better than nothing.

Emotional Behaviour Patterns

The human brain likes patterns. Language, mathematics, geometry, art. The brain searches for patterns all the time. One of the ‘effects’ of say, a Jackson Pollock painting or a book like Finnegans Wake is that when you look at or read it, you look for patterns, and are likely to find them, but you might well find different ones to the person standing next to you.

The brain is also lazy. It wants to do as little work as it can possibly get away with. And so it takes shortcuts. Studies have been done that prove that most of what we think we ‘see’ in our peripheral vision is actually just assumptions made by our brain. We don’t actually ‘see’ a great deal, our brain just fills in most of the gaps: ‘it was like that yesterday, it’s been like that for the past 5 years, it’s probably safe to assume that it’s gonna be the same today.’ So the brain takes shortcuts.

It is actually the brain’s penchant for laziness that allows people to learn things to an incredibly high degree. The classic example is something like sport. If you ever watch Ronnie O’Sullivan play snooker, he just seems to fall into the perfect stance for playing a shot. He just does it, again and again. His brain knows the pattern, it follows the same nerve fibres that it has done every other time before, and so he gets virtually the perfect stance every time, because he doesn’t have to consciously think ‘put foot here, put head in line with hand’, he just does it.

The brain likes to do things that it has done before because they are easier to do. When learning a new language, you will continually fall back into the pronunciation of your native language because your brain knows that, and wants to do it again.

Now I am going to take the brain as the same as the heart-mind, which in Taoist thought is the seat of the emotions. In truth it doesn’t matter where you draw lines, so we’ll stick with what we know (in keeping with the theme).

People, in general, do the same things over and over again. Emotionally speaking. Usually a pattern is set up in childhood, and someone will keep acting it out over and over again for the rest of their life, because the brain is pretty lazy, and just goes with the devil it knows. So you get called into the headteacher’s office, they shout at you really badly for something that you didn’t do, and then maybe for the rest of your life whenever someone accuses you of something you didn’t do you feel the same fear, the same humiliation, the same injustice, and become defensive, or angry, because now you are a grown up with fists and as we all know violence solves everything.

This is the same with relationships. People will re-enact the same relationship dramas over and over again, sometimes with clockwork efficiency. (A friend of mine told me about a guy and a girl who break up, and then get back together, and then break up, etc etc, and that they usually stay together for nine weeks, to the extent that he is predicting that they will break up again in nine weeks.) Now doesn’t this seem a bit mad? I’m sure if you look back on your own relationships, you will probably see a pattern. So why does this happen?

Firstly it is not just a case of reacting the same way each time, but also of the mind looking to create situations which fit the pattern. This is because, once again, this is what the brain knows. This is what you know. And yeah maybe it is always horrible and you always get hurt and you are never happy, but you know that it’s going to be horrible and you will get hurt and you’ll be unhappy. That’s ok. It’s the devil you know. The devil you don’t know, well, because you don’t know him he can grow to monstrous proportions. At least you’ve danced with the devil you know before, and yes it was horrible but you survived. If you dance with the devil you don’t know, then you don’t know how that’s going to be – it might be much better, but god it might be a billion times worse, so let’s go with what we know.

This is one of the reasons (just one, I don’t pretend to understand this complex situation) that people will remain in physically abusive relationships. People on the outside will say ‘why don’t they just walk away?’, but what is outside the door is the unknown, and even if what is inside the house is brutal and terrifying and painful, it is still somehow safer, because it is the known – the brain has done it before, and knows how it’s gonna be.

So how do you get out of destructive behaviour patterns? The first step, as usual, is to recognise your patterns. But, like a bad habit, deciding that you don’t want to do it anymore isn’t enough to make the pattern go away. The brain is so used to following those channels that it will do it unconsciously, so you always have to be vigilant. In the beginning you usually won’t recognise that you’ve just fallen into your pattern until after the event, which can be very frustrating. But gradually you move to being able to realise whilst in the middle of it, and then hopefully before you fall into it, and by then you’ll be well on your way to breaking it.

But these things take time. The brain is incredibly plastic in childhood, but then solidifies, and it can be more and more difficult to make it get off the sofa and change its behaviour. Remember that this brain is also you, so you are wrestling with yourself, which as any decent martial arts film will tell you: the hardest battle is to defeat yourself.

So there are a couple of big things going on here: patterns and fear. Generally the fear is the bigger issue, but it is a much more difficult issue to get to grips with so for now we will stick with patterns. Everyone has patterns – if we didn’t have patterns most people would be too exhausted to function, because they allow our brains to take shortcuts, which is not always a bad thing. But destructive patterns will lock you into a cycle of misery, to the point where you don’t even believe that it is possible for it to be any other way. But when you get a glimpse of what’s going on, and realise the ways you are stuck, then you also get a glimpse of how different things can be, and it is as if you have been locked in a cupboard all your life, and you see a crack of light and then gradually as the door opens up you step out and stretch, and see the sun, which you will recognise because you saw it when you were a tiny child, and you will laugh at yourself for having forgotten something so fundamentally life-giving.