"The Thing About Daoism is..."

or, How to Be a Loser in a Society of "Winners"

Housekeeping

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you can check out the sessions tab if you are serious about getting real help to apply any of these concepts i write about in your own real life, right now.

The more you actually engage with the work, share it, investigate it, the more it becomes something other than a decoration worn around the wrist of a fickle shadow collecting foreign treasures. More than makeup on a shadow. More than puppets for the master.

I’m also offering an in-person polestar group in Portland this fall, if there is enough interest and reciprocity. Please share if you’re so inclined.

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“But, Actually…”

For all the mytho-poetic rhetoric around hermits, enlightenment, non-action and immortality, Daoism is fundamentally about none of that whatsoever.

At least, not in the ways that materialists think.

…and if you think that somehow, you’ve escaped materialist philosophy, well, that’s how they got you.

It’s baked in.

Materialism, Scientism, Theism… all of these are synonyms for the same kind of worldview. A way of perceiving and interacting with the world based on lies. These lies are concocted by culture, based on a myriad of co-factors. Not the least of which is how we interpret the phenomena of the 5 senses. The stories we make up about our sensations.

This is why i harp on worldview and “right story, right view” all the damn time.

We have a serious worldview mismatch going on.

That mismatch IS the upstream pollution that leads to downstream diarrhea. As in, we drink from the poisoned well.

I’m gonna be a bit hyperbolic and say that most, if not all, of our serious issues are because of this mismatch. Collectively speaking, this is pretty definitive. Personally speaking it can get a bit weirder.

This is the decolonial pivot so to speak. The “dark night”, the “meaning crisis”, etc etc. (Whiteness/Colonial philosophy loves these catchy names that don’t actually say anything btw.)

One of the major issues is that we here at the warm, comfy end of colonial imperialism think in terms of cause and effect like it’s a simple video game. We even say appropriated shit like “That’s KaRmAaaa.” when we generally have no clue what karma’s about.

We are for the most part, solutionists (so add that to the list of terms above that mean the same thing). We crave solutions, cures and rewards. Life is a transactional dominance game, a finite game.

So, when someone says they practice daoist cultivation, or buddhist practices, or “occult”¹ practices, the very first thing our ghostly egos want to see is the proof of what that cultivation has accomplished, in the form of a solution, cure or reward that can be measured, quantified and sold.

This is eugenics & ableist & capitalist thinking, so, also add those to the list.

We want to know what method produces what result, because we care deeply about this magical result. The result which cures, solves, saves or rewards us.

and on and on, the hamster wheel spins.

BUT DARE, MY LIFE IS HARD AND IT SHOULD BE EASY! I NEED IT TO BE EASIER!

The truth is your life is ‘easier’ than 99% of all humans that have ever lived before in history, and that’s also including all the genocidal atrocity that’s going on currently.

I’m not some libertarian fanatic who preaches “meritocracy” either (add those to the list). This survival-of-the-fittest version of meritocracy where the underlying subtext is that the strong & powerful & rich get to decide what merit really is.

The human bodymind system has an enormous capacity for adaptation, which also means that feelings and perception also adapt. If we shovel a bunch of ill-gotten gains and comfort at the human, the human will adapt to that eventually as normal, which means that comfort won’t subjectively feel as comfortable, relative to whatever else is going on deemed uncomfortable. The goalpost moves. Who moved it? Nature did. Nature moved. Via the innate capacity to adapt.

Daoism can be considered the philosophy of adaptation.