Taoist Thought: A Trilogy
Think your way out of thinking
You’re brilliant and social, a bee with a big brain. That combination built civilization, and it’s also what quietly tips your life off-balance. The same naming and thinking that make us so capable lock us into certainties, snowball small worries into overreaction, and bury the clear, impartial self we were born with.
The Tao Te Ching has pushed back on that certainty for 2,500 years. Taoist Thought is a companion to it in three volumes: short, plainspoken essays that connect everyday situations, like work, worry and other people, to Taoist principles, loosening the grip of “I know” one observation at a time.
One journey, told three times
- Fear Is Your Friend starts from fear, the engine entropy gave every living thing, and follows it until it leads to the Tao.
- Living the Long Now starts from time itself: the gap between imagination, which is instant, and the body, which must live every moment.
- Returning to the Original Self starts from the opposite end, the Tao Te Ching’s warning in chapter 71, and follows it until it arrives, at the very end, at fear.
Fear and Returning are twin roads to a single destination. They close on the same pages, where fear and the Tao prove to be one. Living the Long Now retraces neither road. It takes up the one thing the other two only touch.
Read one essay, sleep on it, come back. The payoff isn’t answers; it’s a slow unlearning that lets you see life more clearly, beyond the stories your culture handed you. Redundancy is the method. These are books you live with, not books you finish.
For readers who suspect certainty is the problem, not the solution.
Fear Is Your Friend: [link / coming soon]
Living the Long Now: [link / coming soon]
Returning to the Original Self: [link / coming soon]