I am forced to admit that I know very little about formal Taoism. I was talking with a better-traveled buddy one day and I was induced to expound on my ethics. One of my ethical anchors, a "subjective absolute" if you're as delighted by the patent absurdity as I am, is an idea which I term Balance. The idea that extremes of action or opinion - the blacks and whites - are bad as they are unrealizable. The optimum lies in finding and working that point of balance between opposed principles.
Buddy said that I was something of a natural Taoist.
Where I fall out of harmony is with this idea: >as being evidenced by the observable
processes of the physical world.<
My problem is I see NO reliable evidence for God in the mundane. (Or for that matter for the mundane in God, waht with I can't measure the Ineffable.) Nothing that'll win an argument. All I have seen is our human capacity for God-consciousness. This means I'm unable to dismiss the increasingly cogent idea that all we know of God is a construct of our minds, of the way we're wet-wired. Thus to me God becomes the Entheon, each&every person's private view of and relationship with the Divine.
(John Ott charmingly calls psychedelics "entheogens", bringers of the God within.)
I guess the kernel of my agnosticism is that even while I currently, provisionally believe this solipsistic idea of the Entheon, I can't and won't dismiss that there is a real Godness somewhere outside us. But -
where I am dead cold stalled is on the shoal of "the power of the Divine". All I have seen, and that includes the x to the Xth power phenomenon, is reducible to attitude. Our belief of and interaction with the Numinous powerfully molds our ideas of right behavior. This reaches into every part of our social life. Insofar as we restrict ourselves to what we see, think and feel - and the things we do deriving from these cognitive events - I accept the power of the Divine. But barring something Really F****** Amazing, I do not entertain the work or evidence of the Divine in the Mundane. "Energy" is a pretty word, but I haven't heard a convincing account of even a grain of ordinary matter or energy clearly altered by something not mundane. No crystals, no UFOs, no linen shroud. Sorry. |
