“When I was in my teens, I first became interested in [Brahman, the unified, underlying reality of the world]. And I very much, fervently, wanted to realize what it would be like to experience the whole world as a unity, and myself as being involved in that unity; of being it; of being the one self which is all. And, at first, I thought, well I suppose that this is a state of consciousness which, if one realized it, all the distinctions and outlines of things would disappear. And the whole world would kind of go *blewahhh*, into a great sea of cosmic jello, like this [camera lessens focus to generate a boundary-dissolving effect]. Or else, I thought perhaps that it wouldn’t be quite like that; but maybe everything would become suffused with a kind of omnipresent interior light, something like this [camera decreases contrast and increases luminosity]… But I couldn’t make it happen that way. And, you know, it was strange; there was one thing in my experience—I was living in London those days—which really stuck in my craw; one thing that I just couldn’t make disappear into this jello or this infinite continuum of the one ultimate reality, the true self behind everything. And that happened to be a London taxicab. I wonder if you’ve ever seen a London taxicab? They used to look like this:
They were upright; they were ugly; they were the most individual, impertinently definite things you could imagine. And I could not make these silly gadgets, which I saw all around me, disappear into the one. And suddenly it dawned on me one day—that to see the unity behind life, things don’t have to merge into jello. They don’t have to become suffused within a light. I saw it with that taxicab. I saw that that taxicab, by being the very upright, impertinent, stupid looking thing that it is, precisely as taxicab, it manifested the one underlying reality.”
—transcript excerpted from the seventh episode of Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life by Alan Watts, 13:33, emphases mine.
In the above video, particularly the excerpt transcribed from it, Alan Watts describes his initial experience of becoming aware of the fundamental ground of reality—which is dubbed Brahman, Tao, Dharmadhatu et alia, depending on the particular philosophical tradition whose terminology one might prefer. Here I’ll be examining it through the vantage point of Taoism, and thus refer to it as Tao.
I’m sharing this video with you, dear reader, because I had a similar illuminating experience to his some time ago.
I had mine when I was l familiarizing myself with computer programming. This discipline, in all its rigidity, requisite exactness and all-around logical squareness always seemed to me the complete antithesis to what I had idealized about the Tao—which to my mind seemed intuitive, smooth, flowing without friction; embodied in the graceful fractal forms of nature such as tree branches, river formations and wave patterns; felt instead of merely thought… I wondered, how could something so alive, wiggly and eloquently imprecise coexist with or generate something so dead and predictable with such a monstrous hunger for exactitude and abstraction as a computer?
In all its cold, rigid stiffness, I felt an intuitive discomfort trying to align myself with the computer and learn its ways. The way it does nothing unless exactly prompted to do so in precise terms by someone else seemed to stand for something fundamentally un-human and anti-life for me. It seemed like a perfect representation for the complete worst in humanity—the military, marching as though to the beat of a metronome with its mechanical exactness and straight lines ever towards nothing but bloody and gory destruction. And all these things in my mind combined to represent something wherein crystalized everything antithetical to my idea of the Tao.
Then, one day it started to click.
The felt smoothness, intuitiveness and softness of the Tao requires, to be discerned as such—or at all!—exactly its polar opposites. For Alan, its opposition was exemplified in the definite ugliness of the taxicab. For me, it was in the extreme exactness and logicality of the computer and all the ways it hung up against me.
Features pertinent to the Tao could not be recognized as such were it not for the existence of something entirely antithetical to them; and yet, curiously, the Tao embraces and gives birth to both.
Indeed, as Lao-tzu says in the second verse of the Tao Te Ching, all opposites generate each other:1
When people see things as beautiful,
ugliness is created.
When people see things as good,
evil is created.
Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low oppose each other.
Fore and aft follow each other.
Abstraction (the world of thought, symbols, “the mind”), though often shunned in this particular kind of philosophical atmosphere, is just as much an intimate expression of the Tao as the felt sense of reality, the level of vibration—however antithetical to it it appears, however far away from it it might seem. It only becomes a hindrance to the recognition of the Tao when one is too immersed in it, and ceases to remember to see it for what it truly is; when one forgets that the two opposites are implicitly one.
Similarly, straight edges and lines, though notoriously largely absent from the natural world but abounding in the human world, are not in a deep, incongruous opposition against the Tao—because nothing can be in a fundamental conflict with the Tao!
“The Tao is that from which one cannot deviate; that from which one can deviate is not the Tao.”
— Chung Yung, or The Doctrine of the Mean
The recognition of the polar unity of all opposites is one of the most central tenets of the philosophy of Taoism—it just almost escaped me to apply it to the whole notion of the Tao itself.
Thank you for reading.
Heraclitus—my favorite Western philosopher—knew this truth of the union of opposites too, and expressed it in many an obscure aphorism.