Tao and Desire

Buddhists and Taoists alike speak of the sage as one who has no desires, though the latter also speak of him as one whose "joy and anger occur as naturally as the four seasons," and here may lie a clue to the problem. For is it even possible not to desire? Trying to get rid of desire is, surely, desiring not to desire. Any project to suppress desire would obviously be contrary to the spirit of wu-wei, and implies that "I" am some separate potency which can either subdue desire or be subdued by it. Wu-wei is to roll with experiences and feelings as they come and go, like a ball on a mountain stream, though actually there is no ball apart from the convolutions and wiggles of the stream itself. This is called "flowing with the moment," though it can happen only when it is clear that there is nothing else to do, since there is no experience which is not now. This now-streaming (nunc fluens) is the Tao itself, and when this is clear innumerable problems vanish. For so long as there is the notion of ourselves as something different from the Tao, all kinds of tensions build up as between "me" on the one hand, and "experiences" on the other. No action, no force (wei) will get rid of this tension arising from the duality of the knower and the known, just as one cannot blow away the night. Light, or intuitive understanding, alone will dissipate the darkness. As with the ball in the stream, there is no resistance to the up when now going up, and no resistance to the down when now going down. To resist is to get seasick. 

Tao: The Watercourse Way, Alan Watts

yang and yin

The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng mutual arising or inseparability. As Lao-tzu puts it: 

When everyone knows beauty as beautiful, there is already ugliness;
When everyone knows good as goodness, there is already evil;
"To be" and "not to be" arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realised;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited;...
Before and after are in mutual sequence.

They are thus like the different, but inseparable, sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or pulse and interval in any vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that either one will win over the other, for they are more like lovers wrestling than enemies fighting. But it is difficult in our logic to see that being and nonbeing are mutually generative and mutually supportive, for it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent end of the universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from nonbeing as sound comes from silence and light from space. 

Thirty spokes unit at the wheel's hub;
It is the centre hole [literally, "from their not being"] that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the shape within that makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there. 

Tao: The Watercourse Way, Alan Watts

Taoist saw the Power of Heaven as both masculine and feminine, as symbolised by the Taoist T'ai Chi - the circle divided by a curved line into light and dark, or male and female, halves. Heavenly Power at work in the natural world, however - what Lao-Tse called "The Mother of Ten Thousand Things" - has always been seen by Taoists as mostly feminine in its actions. It is gentle like flowing water. It is humble and generous, like a fertile valley, feeding all who come to it. It is hidden, subtle, and mysterious, like a landscape glimpsed through mist. It takes no sides, grants no authority. It cannot be influenced or appeased by sacrifices and rituals. In dispensing justice, as in all things, it operates with a light touch, an invisible hand. As Lao-tse put it, "Heaven's net has wide meshes, but nothing slips through." Shying away from displays of arrogance and egotism, it communicates its deepest secrets not to high government officials, pompous scholars, or wealthy landowners, but to penniless monks, little children, animals and "fools". If it can be said to be biased in any way, it is in favour of the humble, the weak, the small."

The Te of Piglet, Benjamin Hoff

faydasız olanın değeri

Danimarkalı filozof Soren Kierkegaard çok etkileyici bir şey yazdı: "Dua etmeye başladığımda, kiliseye gider ve Tanrı'yla konuşurdum." Bu, tüm dünyada Hristiyanların yaptığı bir şeydir. Onlar yüksek sesle, sanki Tanrı ölmüş gibi onunla konuşurlar. Ve sanki Tanrı ahmak bir varlıkmış gibi ona ne yapıp ne yapmaması gerektiği konusunda tavsiyeler verirler. Ya da Tanrı yalnızca ahmak bir hükümdarmış gibi onu ikna etmeye çalışır, içlerindeki arzuları gerçekleştirmesi için ona rüşvet vermeye çalışırlar.

Ama Kierkegaard şöyle dedi: "Konuşmaya başladım, sonra bunun işe yaramadığını fark ettim. Tanrı'yla nasıl konuşabilirsin? İnsan sessiz olmalıdır. Söylenecek ne var ki? Ve Tanrı'nın daha fazla bilmesine yardımcı olabilecek ne söyleyebilirim? O her şeye kadirdir, o her şeyi bilir, öyleyse benim ona anlatmamın ne amacı var?"

Ve Kierkegaard şöyle devam etti: "Onunla uzun yıllar konuştum, sonra bunun aptallık olduğunu fark ettim. Bunun üzerine konuşmayı bıraktım, sessizleştim. Yıllar sonra sessizliğin de işe yaramadığını fark ettim. Sonra üçüncü adımı attım; bu, dinlemekti. Önce konuştum, sonra konuşmadım ve sonra dinledim."

Dinlemek sadece sessiz olmaktan farklıdır, çünkü yalnızca sessiz olmak olumsuz bir şeydir; dinlemek olumlu bir şeydir. Yalnızca sessiz olmak pasiftir, dinlemekse farkındalıklı pasifliktir; bir şey beklemek, hiçbir şey söylememek, ama tüm benliğinle beklemek. Dinlemenin bir yoğunluğu vardır. Ve Kierkegaard şöyle ekledi: "Bu dinleme olduğunda, o zaman ilk kez dua oldu."

Tao, The State and the Art, Osho

the elephant

The elephant was in a dark house:
Some Hindus had brought it for exhibition.
In order to see it, many people were going,
every one, into that darkness.

As seeing it with the eye was impossible,
(each one) was feeling it in dark with
the palm of his hand.

The hand of one fell on its trunk: he said,
"This creature is like a water-pipe."

The hand of another touched its ear: to him
it appeared to be like a fan.

Since another handled its leg, he said,
"I found the elephant's shape to be
like a pillar."

Another laid his hand on its back: he
said, "Truly, this elephant was like a throne."
Similarly, whenever any one heard (a description
of the elephant) he understood (it only in respect of)
the part that he had touched.

On account of the (diverse) place (object) of
view, their statements differed: one man entitled
it "Dal", another "Alif".

If there had been a candle in each one's hand,
the difference would have göne out of their words.

The eye of sense-perception is only like the palm
of the hand: the palm hath not power to reach the
whole of him (the elephant).

(Maulana Jalalu'l-Din, Mathnavi)

the elephant

You thus regard the Self as a limited entity, in the same way as a number of persons born blind perceiving the elephant through touching its different parts, come to have diverse notions regarding it (each one regarding it to be like the part that he had touched) and as none of them had touched the whole elephant, none had any idea of the elephant as a whole entity.

(The Chandogyopanishad, Sir Ganganatha Jha)

Upsilamba

Upsilamba! - the word carries me back to the spring of 1994, when four of my girls and Nima were auditing a class I was teaching on the twentieth-century novel. The class's favourite book was Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law. Even as a child, Nabokov tells us, Cincinnatus appreciated the fressness and beauty of language, while other children "understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences."

No one in class had bothered to ask what the word meant. No one, that is, who was properly taking the class - for many of my old students just stayed on and sat in on one of my classes long after their graduation. Often, they were more interested and worked harder than my regular students, who were taking the class for credit. Thus it was that those who audited the class - including Nassrin, Manna, Nima, Mahshid and Yassi - had one day gathered in my office to discuss this and a number of other questions.

I decided to play a little game with the class, to test their cruosity. On the mid-term exam, one of the questions was "Explain the significance of the word upsilamba, in the context of Invitation to a Beheading. What does the word mean, and how does it relate to the main team of the novel?" Except for four or five students, no one had any idea what I could possible mean, a point I did not forget to remind them of every once in a while throughout the rest of that term.

The truth was that upsilamba was one of Nabokov's fanciful creations, possibly a word he invented out of upsilon, the twentieth letter in the Greek alphabet, and lambda, the eleventh. So that first day in our private class, we let our minds play again and invented new meanings of our own.

I said I associated upsilamba with the impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who seemed excited for no particular reason, cried out that she always thought it could be the name of a dance - you know, "C'mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me." I proposed that for the next time, they each write a sentence or two explaining what the word meant to them.

Manna suggested that upsilamba evoked the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. Nima added in paretheses, Just so you won't forget me, although you have barred me from your class: an upsilamba to you too! For Azin it was a sound, a melody. Mahshid described an image of three girls jumping rope and shouting "Upsilamba!" with each leap. For Sanaz, the word was a small African boy's secret magical name. Mitra wasn't sure why the word reminded her of the paradox of a blissful sigh. And to Nassrin it was the magic code that opened the door to a secret cave filled with treasures.

Upsilamba become part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret langauge of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his readers to feel in the act of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones. It also became the code word that opened the secret cave of remembrance.

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi