A Serious Note on Critical Interpretation

FREE POST: The Menu ain't The Food.

Housekeeping

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Disclaimer:

This article and my work are directed towards people who practice cultivation deliberately.

My writing is primarily written to and for people who can take responsibility for their own life. People who work to help others - their students, clients, communities, etc. As such it may “skip over” very beginner level skills and ideas. You can search the vast archives of articles, YouTube videos, podcasts etc for more content that may help you if you are a beginner at managing internal phenomena/symptoms/pathologies. It’s my intent that by setting a higher standard your natural upright qi will follow and align to the standard! My work is for everyone, but not everyone is for my work. Thanks for practicing with me.

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Interpreting Interpretation, or Critiquing Critique

1. The major statement I have to make is that Daoism is neither ableist nor patriarchal/misogynistic.

2. The second note is that any tool can be used in a number of ways, including harmfully.

Just because some people have used their interpretations of Daoism (and this can be applied to literally ANYTHING) to conduct themselves in ableist and/or patriarchal ways, does not mean that the philosophy itself is inherently ableist/patriarchal.

When we view things through our modern-centric, trauma-centric neoliberal-centric frame, suddenly it appears as though all things in the past also existed within that frame, as either with-us or against-us. The Us here refers to “our belief-identity-worldview.”

We moderns tend to think that all of life is a linear evolutionary path-of-measurable-progress. This is patently false. Nature is not linear nor is it progressive.

We ought to understand that maps are not the land they represent.

Menus are not the food.

Representations do matter, but not necessarily in the ways that traumatized social reactionaries want (both on the left and on the right).

We do not truly understand the psychological profiles of our ancestors, ancient or otherwise.

We do not truly understand the generational drifts that happened as cultures internally shaped and edited their own cultures from the inside. Not everything is colonial in the sense of an invasion and subjugation from “the outside”. The ideas and boundaries of outside and inside are extremely slippery.

We do not truly understand what things were like pre-historically for humans. We can look to still existing hunter-gatherer tribes for some clues, but they are just that, clues on a map we are drawing in the moment.

Maps. Representations and Interpretations that are largely based on our own states of mind and our own time-bound sense of reality. Every translation is a reflection of its translator — their internal state(s) and their external contexts/relationships.

In the case of Daoism, the pre-Chinese and post-Chinese all had/have agendas and ideas about what Daoism was and what Daoism should be, in regard to the governing of nation-states in a post-nomadic agriculturalist society that was intent on integrating disparate tribes and clans into a cohesive “nationality”. In present time this “looks” like P.R.C. Communism, an offshoot of materialist Christianity.

I guarantee you; you do not have much of a clue as to what this ‘internal editing’ was like over the course of thousands of years. The best that most of us can do is have an open mind and to know that we don’t know much — that we are dealing with representations, translations, approximations and interpretations of histories and cultures. Much of that culture is oral, not written. (Fun fact, most of women’s medicine has not been written down yet. Men’s medicine was written down [by men] because it largely stemmed from battlefield medicine.)

Of course, when we actually practice the heart of Daoism, we may get closer to the truth, but this can never really be proven to others. The proof occurs in the heart of the practitioner, and they can use their mind to be able to abstractly critique potential truths, in order to stave off belief and delusion. Yes, stave off belief.

The history of Daoism contains many Daoisms. Each representation of Daoism is like a shadow or a reflection of the true Daoism. We tend to work with these apparitions as mental models, and hopefully we understand that the “thing” we are wanting to practice lies beyond our capacity to apprehend it within an ideological framework or representational model. We use the maps to try and have a real relationship with the landscape the map represents. Eventually we discard or change the map as our real direct relationship grows and matures.

If we become “Map experts”, that is not the same as a true adept-practitioner. Critics are valuable but they are not as valuable as someone who really practices the thing and who also then critiques from the place of practice, not from reading academic thesis papers from non-practitioners or immature practitioners. This doesn’t mean we seek to censor them, but we cannot hold their statements as somehow equal to or greater than the long and indescribable road of nondual experience that Daoism represents.

In fact, all the religions of the world are still only transitional mental models that are not the real thing.

We can follow a religion and still never taste the nectar of reality because we are too invested in the righteousness of the religious institution and our felt sense of belonging to a special group. We worship their maps. Imagine the hubris, naivete and harm inherent in such behaviors.

In the so-called 21st century, many people are worshipping academia, feminism, gender studies, neuroscience, western psychology, etc. There is no difference between these people and so-called religious zealots or fanatics. All of these people cannot bear to feel uncertain, confused and adrift in the sea of chaos that is Nature. So, they tether themselves to a mental model that helps them feel “better” in opposition to their idea of “chaos”. (see Daoist huntun, likened to 9 tornadoes, the relative size of each is the difference between a human and a tornado. aka what is the size of a tornado’s tornado? and then scale that by 9… also the soup wonton, something that has everything in it.)

This may be where and how all practitioners start, but at some point, you have to laugh and let go of the concrete boat you are gripping so tightly. You have to form a real relationship with “chaos” Nature and all the “bad feelings” you auto-generate about it. Anything less might be excusable by the standards of society, but not at all worthy of being called true practice. If you keep letting yourself off the hook, you can critique all you like but don’t expect anyone to receive that critique with happiness.