Looking Back to 2005: The Taoist in Us All

To date, over 3,300 posts have graced this blog. Most have been penned by yours truly, but Scott Bradley has written 253 in his own right and there will be many more from him in the days, weeks and months to come! (Note: I simply format his original work.)

It is the nature of blogs for readers to come and go. Some regular readers hang around for a long, long time. Others tarry on a site for a while and then disappear. Still others discover a blog much later on in its tenure. In the case of this blog, very few of our regular readers (no more than a small handful) have been around since TRT was first launched in January 2005. Consequently, most of you have not read the writings from the early years.

While I have written -- I'm guessing here -- tens of thousands of words over these nearly 6 years, I often forget what I wrote in bygone posts! From time to time, I go back to see how my thought has evolved on certain topics and themes over this timespan. For the next week or so, amongst posts written in the present tense, I will share some of my past ramblings on the topic of Taoism from 2005 - 2008. As always, I hope this provides readers with some food for thought.

The Taoist in Us ALL
Original post date: February 25, 2005

A great deal of what each of us encounters in this life is frightening. I don’t mean that things are necessarily life-threatening or life changing, but so much of what we experience is of an unknown quantity and what we fear most is anything unknown.

Every corner we turn COULD present us with particulars we are not prepared to deal with. An off-handed remark COULD turn someone against us. An action we decide to take or not take COULD have deep consequences. It is all the coulds that make our lives an adventure.

To try to shield ourselves from the unknown, we try to clothe our psyches in some form of certainty. Most people find this solace in the form of religion.

Religion helps many not to feel like a tiny speck in an endless ocean. It provides a set of fairly rigid rules for believers to follow. It paints a world, full of a multiplicity of hues and shades, in a starkly black and white fashion. Most religions promise that a future paradise awaits those who muddle through their ephemeral lives here on dear old planet earth.

In the end, however, what each of us chooses to believe or not believe will have little lasting impact. We are all part of some ultimate force or reality and this force or reality defines our destiny. It will take its course regardless of whether or not we acknowledge or comprehend it.

This is the very essence of Taoism.

Don’t get caught up in the word tao. It’s just a word, no better or worse than any other. All it signifies is that we are each part of a universal something. It is this incomprehensible something that impacts our lives far more than we may care to admit or realize. And it is this great unknown that we will never understand as long as we live in our current form.

In the end, we are ALL Taoists.