{~} dao
道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。
the way that can be followed is not the constant and unchanging way.
the name that can be named is not the constant and unchanging name.
daoism is a body of thought and practice concerned with 道 (dào, どう). dào translates, variously, as
- way, path
- speech
- method
and defines the Way of nature, the force underlying all being, even subsuming non-being. from Laozi:
I do not know what put great Dao into being. I think it existed before the gods.
dao is the way of nature which is singular, immuable (常), and omnipresent. it is the One, the unity of the entire world. the existence of dao allows for the existence of all else: life, death, flow, pain, beauty, experience, thought. all that is could not have been otherwise, because it has always been part of the absolute dao, the path taken by the universe (that is, "being" itself) throughout its whole life.
dao is ultimately impossible to fully describe. it is to be lived, to be aware of, as much as one can and wants to. it is both matter and energy, it is the principle that lies beneath all things. it has no consciousness and is thus fully gives way to its unconscious.
conceived of as having a name, it is the source of all things.
how religious is this?
some strains of daoism (a philosophy which spurs a great variety of thought by its deep roots in intuition, experience and observation) have more religious aspects. my own strand of daoism is closer to what is called by some observers "philosophical daoism"; it does not suppose any supernatural entity, although i do believe that all things have, as beings (in the ontological sense), some sort of consciousness, which is, like dao itself, unknowable.
how does this help me live?
life is rife with feelings of incompleteness, emptyness, incongruence, fatality, and isolation. civilisation extrudes these essential feelings.
daoism puts forth a way of concieving the self and one's life as fundamentally (as opposed to superficially) in tune and colinear with the rest of the world ("nature"). it becomes then a question of accepting the passing of things, the facticity of facts, and their impermanence.
once achieved, this
The reason why heaven and earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves. This is how they are able to continue and endure.
how is it not saddening to see the world as determinate?
determination does not mean the world is a clockwork orange. oranges are closer, processually speaking, to clockwork than to dao. dao is not simply determinate in the physical sense (a single state can and will result from X beginning state): it does not restrict the ability to choose, nor the uncertainty of our fate at any given moment... or does it? think of the future as something not written, but already going-to-have-been-written.
thus, with total freedom (within the limits of a situation), one acquires the peace that comes with feeling like you are both yourself, everything, and nothing.
there is a beauty both communicable and intuitive to a flow of the world which is harmonious, always in equilibrium, nothing ceasing to me, everything new being consecrated by virtue of having ever been.
How pure and still the Dao is; it seems it may continue so always!
is daoism naturalistic?
retrospective approaches to daoism often colour it with Confucian and Buddhist superstitious or esoteric discrete quality. i do not understand daoism to be anything else than a profoundly subjective metaphysics, focused on experience. it proceeds from logical, defensible premises and seems, to me, perfectly in agreement with both the state of scientific consensus and a profound philosophical sense of what it is to exist consciously.