The Front End and the Back End
I teach a type of Daoist meditation called Zuowang, literally sit-forget. Zuowang is a base or a view, it is not a method. What does that mean? It means that it is a demonstration of the cosmology we live in. The cosmos is out there, probably, but we experience it through whatever it is we are. What are we? A body and a story? A body, yes, with sensory inputs. And a mind, right? What is a mind? It’s an organizer. A categorizer. A namer. A map maker. A memory bank. A vision creator. That’s a long enough list for the theory of “no method.” But let’s add emotions just for fun. What do they do? Emotions are the plus-ten minus-ten interface between mind and body. If you name something you give it an emotional resonance. You rank that thing on a positive or negative scale. You also put it in loose emotional categories of theatricality like envy, love, lust, comedy, disgust etc…
So back to the argument, how does Zuowang as a “non-method” demonstrate the cosmos we live in through our body-mind. Well, okay, Zuowang is not a method but it starts out as a method. The method is being still for an hour every day. What happens? That is really hard to say. You could say, “Well, I wondered if puppies are really all that cute. I thought about hell. My shoulder hurt. I know I spaced out for a while then I remembered my third grade teacher was nice to me. Then I was on a raiding party in ancient Byzantium when I noticed my stomach bubbling and I played around with my tongue before remembering to be still again.” And basically that would be an incomplete approximate description of 3 minutes.
The way Zuowang describes itself is the same way Daoism describes the cosmos. Dao is a concept beyond words but can be approximated by dualities, like: Dao is everything known and everything unknown, Dao is the biggest things and the smallest things, Dao is all time and no time. The closest a person can get to a direct experience of Dao, using our body-mind-thingy, is called totally-undifferentiated-chaos or huntun in Chinese. As a person experiences huntun they will start to see, hear, feel, taste, & smell patterns forming in chaos. Staying with the experience, those patterns will start to reveal something called yinyang, namely, up inside-of-down, cold inside-of-hot, sweet inside-of-salty, hearing mixed-with-feeling. Stay with it, and whatever it is will begin to differentiate even more. Eventually it will become a specific thing, a person or an event with specific details. Keep noticing, and it will start to undifferentiate again, into more and more details; what color is that eggplant really? What is it all the way down to cell chemistry and beyond? Moving back through yinyang to pattern, then to huntun, and speculatively returning to Dao (which it never left). This can happen slowly or instantly. This can happen completely or partially. But one thing is for sure, it doesn’t require any effort, will power or concentration to happen. And this is also Daoist cosmology in a nut shell.1 What you experience when you are still (or trying to be still) is the same as the whole cosmos coming in and out of being.
See, there is no method here. It is just a view of how things are. Or rather a demonstration of a view of how things are. It is also the meaning of the title of Daoism’s most sacred book the Daodejing.
Why would a person want to commit to doing this everyday? Daoism, I am afraid, doesn’t have much of an answer for that. The Daoist answer is because you want to. Because you have some kind of an appetite for being still, some kind of curiosity about it or affinity with it. It is not for everyone.
Why does it need to be taught? What is the role of a teacher here? If Zuowang were a method, as a teacher, I would just keep repeating the above paragraphs over and over until the student got it. But that isn’t the role of the teacher. I teach art and art appreciation. For example, I have a Daodejing Study group that meets once a month in which all the participants agree to practice Zuowang everyday and study a chapter of the Daodejing. I use the studying of the poetry of the Daodejing, which was created with Daoist cosmology, as a way to continuously bring participants back to the view. I create feedback loops.
Why use poetry or art as the vehicle? First off because we are not nihilists. I want my students to be stronger, smarter, richer, funnier and better looking. But I want them to do that on their own, in their own unique way. It is not a selling point. It is just how I treat people I like, and I only teach people I like.
Doing something open-ended in the real world, like art, avoids the positivist paradox. The positivist paradox is that if we identify the thing as a “thing” it runs the danger of becoming a method. Let’s call it method creep. By keeping the focus on art, the “method” becomes like “a shadowy presence”—or to quote chapter 17 of the Daodejing—less than known.
The best are less than known.
The next type are loved and praised.
The next are feared.
The next inspire revolt.
The Zhuangzi, another important Daoist text I sometimes teach, sets all that up in the first chapter, so that when you get to Chapter Two you are thinking, okay, maybe I have some appetite for stillness, and I don’t want to be a nihilist, but what will happen to me if I do this practice everyday? What are the results? What is the fruition? How does having and demonstrating a Daoist view manifest in an apparently infinite cosmos, culturally, aesthetically, ethically, etc…?
Answer: By becoming aligned with Dao. This quest for alignment is the basis of another non-method method called the Golden Elixir. This is an experimental tradition that begins with turning the world upside down and reversing everything you have ever been taught. There is no path that can be followed. This is perhaps the greatest point of confusion in the entire cosmos because Daoists over the last two millennia have committed Golden Elixir recipes to text and artistic representation countless times. But each time it is different. Why? Because the whole point is to discover your own ingredients and devise your own recipe. I could tell you to open your central channel, but there is no procedure for that. It just happens.
In parts 3-4 of this essay series I will explore some of these “traditional” Golden Elixir recipes, and what we might “get” out of them.
Irreducibility
The cosmos, as an observed phenomenon, is characterized by irreducibility. As Stephen Wolfram’s theory describes it, anything we can observe has the quality of infinite complexity. In fact, the act of observing is normally to simplify what we observe-experience into a map, a usable-functional model, or a description in natural language. That is, language, observation and comprehension are based in pockets of reducibility.
‘Irreducibility’ and ‘pockets of reducibility’ come from Wolfram. In 1979 Gary Zukav wrote The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which made the case that Eastern Religion was aligned with modern physics. But Stephen Wolfram’s essays on the computational cosmos are a much better fit.
This is why the cosmos can be re-made by returning to huntun, over and over, in an instant or over ten billion years. “This isn’t the same cosmos it was a second ago, and I’m not the same person I was when I was standing over there.” —Zhuangzi Chapter 2
Neither Wolfram nor Daoism are making a universal claim. The claim is a cosmological one.
[This is part 2 of a 5 part series on the Golden Elixir]
Golden Elixir inspired artists in old China used to make tiny dioramas, whole worlds created inside actual nutshells. Then other Golden Elixir inspired poets wrote poems about these nutshells. That’s where the expression “in a nutshell” comes from.