Trey Smith
Earlier this evening, Shawn wrote the post, Is Tao Everything?. The final sentence to his post strikes me as odd.
If someone said reality is everything, I could buy into that but I cannot buy into Tao being everything.For starters, reality and Tao are just mere words describing the world we can see/know and not see/know. If you could accept one, why not the other? It seems to me like a rather arbitrary distinction.
The other observation I will make -- one that may be fair or not -- is that Tao is not a thing. It is not an entity like a religious god. I personally wouldn't even describe it as a being or life form.
For me, Tao signifies the underling process or principle of existence. It isn't a specific entity that causes things to move; it is movement itself. It isn't that which decides who lives and dies, but life and death itself. It isn't something that created being; it is being itself.
So, when I state that I believe that Tao is everything, all I'm really saying is that everything IS everything and that there is some sort of thread that ties it all together. I have no idea what this thread entails. All I think I know is that my observations of life and death tell me that there is some underlying thread.
I'm with your points and could say more too. I'm limited by situation as my battery may not even last me to hit 'post'.
ReplyDeleteHow can Shawn be happy with the word "everything"?
Clearly though the root to his predicament is making Tao a thing.
Although my urge is to requote TTC V1 or the last proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I will come to Shawn's side to bring up what I think has been a missed point, that is the issue of "belief" in a concept.
ReplyDeleteTao makes sense to me, something I can accept, but as to knowledge and truth, I make no claim. The leap of faith here is no different from that in Christianity or any other non-scientific or non-logical tradition. Even the Tao of Physics followers must see that.
Tao is something that one must come to experience and apprehend on one's own, but that experience is not an objective truth that you can hand to others to whom it looks like a mere belief...which of course it is. Words fail.