“The fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves”. That bit of Shakespeare speaks to our modern paradigm. By modern, I mean the epoch beginning with the Renaissance (14th century) that followed the fall of Rome, i.e., the so-called Dark Ages. Note how these labels bias the view of cultural progress right away in favor of the modern.
I see such progress as two-steps forward, one-step backward deal. It’s not that the stars actually determine our fate as the ancients thought. The ancients simply lacked an empirical understanding of biology and the like that makes life tick, and so attributed cause and effect to the stars.
Similarly, karma is a practical way of accounting for the transference of genetic information from one generation to the next. The Bible also hints at this, “He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations” (Exodus 34:6-7).
The life sciences help us understand life better now; that’s the two steps forward part. This era also embodies the self-centric and even arrogant view that I, you, and we are in control. This one-step back illusion is no doubt aided by our increasing ability to control the physical world through science and technology. Iron enabled guns, mighty ships, railroads, followed by the tools which harnessing electricity enables… autos, airplanes, refrigerators, computers, atomic bombs, space travel, etc. (See And then there was fire, p.296)
Imagination: To our benefit and detriment
There is no way to know exactly what does or doesn’t conform to nature’s reality. Even so, all the great inventions come out of imagining a reality that was up to then an unseen facet of nature. However, every such leap in understanding includes numerous misunderstandings in which we often end up shooting ourselves in the foot. We understand now that people born blind, crippled, or schizophrenic are naturally handicapped. We know the cause is genetic and not a malevolent spirit, thanks to scientific breakthroughs. Yet, we still fail to understand that we are all naturally crippled, cognitively speaking… even though the Taoist teachings spoke to this handicap millennia ago, e.g., chapter 71, Realizing I don’t’ know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease. Ironically, imagination is both vitally useful and utterly unreliable. Unreliable because we blindly believe what we think.
Knower not think, thinker not know
Chapter 71 speaks to our over-reliance on imagined truths. The security of our certainty blinds us like a disease, as that chapter bluntly puts it. The stories that issue forth from thinking preclude knowing. Thinking requires tangible details: words and names. That kind of focus makes seeing the big picture impossible. The best that thinking can do is report back some elements of what we intuitively know. However, that reporting always ends up biased because it can never convey the full intuitive knowing. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, intuitive knowing is worth a thousand pictures.
Obviously, true knowing is a deep mystery. Thinking merely skims the surface of what we know. All the rest remains behind in the dark recesses of profound sameness, as chapter 56 so well describes. Thinking, for the most part, is also merely the smoke that arises from emotion’s fire… or embers as the case more often is.
Treating the disease.
How do we know when our thinking is not diseased? Diseased thinking is nothing more than the cognitive biases we drag into our perceptions. Chapter 71 tells us there is this disease and that to recognize that fact helps mitigate the disease. Fine, but this is only a first step. Reaching impartiality is the only way to experience thinking that is minimally diseased. Any thoughts of preference, of taking sides, of attraction or aversion, are indications of biased thinking. It couldn’t be simpler or more straightforward. It only requires courage to know and accept!
Why does this require so much courage? The survival instinct is my guess. Once we fully know and accept the cause of a problem, we innately feel impelled to do something to fix it. If we feel helpless to fix our most personal problem, we stick our heads in the sand and meddle in other people’s business instead. As Jesus said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. This can sound like “the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves”. Well it does, although here it is immutable natural instinct at fault. We are both at fault and yet naturally innocent. The way through this sort of conundrum is to realize the perfection of imperfection. The more you can do that, the more you can accept the problem as a non-fixable aspect of nature. In truth, problems are reality; solutions are illusions. That is a hard pill to swallow. This closely parallels chapter 3’s wéi wú wéi (为无为), Doing without doing. Chapter 29, 57 and 63, among others, also put it well:
Do without doing,
Be involved without being involved.
Taste without tasting.[63]
Oh yes! Genesis and core Taoist views of ‘knowledge’ share profound sameness, to use chapter 56’s language. And they do so bluntly. Granted, Genesis 2:17 is a lot more fervent: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die“.
Although, Chapter 2 and 71 certainly don’t mince words: Realizing I don’t know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease, and again in chapter 2 with, All under heaven realizing beauty as beauty, wickedness already. All realizing goodness as goodness, no goodness already..
These previous posts expand on this somewhat:
Religion… an Opiate?
Are you out of touch with nature?
The differences we see and get fired up over, are driven by innate tribal instinct. It strikes me odd that we don’t generally realize this. Alas, whatever ‘truths’ we learn from childhood onward blind us, plain and simple. It is an insidious disease.
Carl. Knowing and not knowing always brings me back to the creation story in the Old Testament. As a youngster, I was taught the story in parochial school. The older I got, the more I passed it off it as an event that happened many years ago, if it happened at all… My linear (alpha-omega) thinking failed to see the eternal Truth.
One way I proved knowing and not knowing to myself, I asked myself the following question: “What is my earliest recollection?” The earliest I remember was pre-Kintergarden. I can’t say a how old I was, but then I was a child still learning how to count. I remember sitting on the living room sofa with the early morning sun shining in on me as I watched our black and white TV. That’s was the moment I started to become acutely self-conscious and conscious of the world around me. Before that, nothing. But I was here… before I knew it. 🙂