Protect Your Noggin

What do you do when, after a righteous battle, you are the victor facing a defeated foe? Or, what if, after a midterm election, authoritarians, grifters, and fraudsters face the consequences of their injustices? This chapter has for a long time been frustrating to us. It seems to suggest that in the wake of a calamitous war, the sage should always give up the right to prosecute and seek retribution from their enemy. We spend a moment also reflecting on how this relates to Jesus' teachings about forgiveness and loving one's enemies. But we are also worried that an insufficient response to corruption has long term consequences that are unacceptable. With references to the conflicts with Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, and America versus itself, we reflect on Lao Tzu's advice that we should focus on mending things rather than trying to get a perfect peace. We think his wisdom wins out in the end but it doesn't go down easy for us.

Flow like water. If you've been studying the Tao Te Ching with us, this image and indeed concrete wisdom is familiar to you. But in this episode we discuss why it has been incredibly practical and arguably life saving wisdom for us. When things get tough, having a minimalist but life affirming strategy is a great treasure.

We catch the audience up on our summer long quest for a new van for our adventures. Discussion of the Tao Te Ching's concept that a world with simultaneously extreme poverty and extreme wealth is unhealthy and that it is in the best interest of the super rich (albeit not for immediate capitalist aims) to avoid crushing the poor. Recorded in Hualapai Mountain Park on Labor Day.

This is a sort of book report Jeff brings after reading Sarah Allen, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Chinese Philosophy Culture). We discuss how in ancient China, the root metaphor of water was the focus itself. It's not as if water is a metaphor for an abstract reality. Its flow is the flow. Meditating on water is to glimpse the Tao, not an object lesson for some ideology.

It is important to be flexible rather than brittle in life, in our families, at work, and when it comes to entire nations. After discussing several recent events in the world news and our lives, we discuss the principle in Tao Te Ching 76 that flexibility is related to youth and life but rigidity is associated with death. In other words, we should bend rather than break as we exist in the wins of time. We introduce but do not fully tease out the thesis of Sarah Allan, that we who are conditioned by Western thought should avoid realizing that nature (and water in particular) does not serve as an illustration for divine and abstract realities, but rather is the root metaphor itself and arguably even the root reality.

It seems to many that we in the USA are on the precipice of something like a civil war. But then, when asked, the vast majority reject the idea of political violence. What conditions might exist where that changes, according to Tao Te Ching chapter 75?

Tao Te Ching 74 starts by suggesting that people don't naturally fear death. Then it suggests that nefarious leaders try to instill a fear of death in those they dominate in order to control them. We discuss how this applies to contemporary times. Then Jeff shares some of the emerging research he's doing into the extent to which early Taoism applied, evolved, rejected, or ignored archaic Chinese mythological frameworks. He'll come back to that theme after this summer's reading agenda and report back. The question in practical terms is this: when the "Mysterious Mother" or the "Great Carpenter" are mentioned, are these to be taken as deities? Are they symbolic?

We start with a parable about being at peace with reality and not overreacting. Then there's chapter 73 of the Tao Te Ching that says that the Tao will ultimately bring everything along in its cosmic net. In other words, nature ensures that things are brought to balance in the end. The question is, will we be around to see the righting of injustice? As Bob Marley said, it is our duty to fight the Armaggedeon THIS TRIP. That is, don't wait for a reincarnated existence or heaven to bring about a just world. Chapter 73 calls for a quiet, patient courage that does not give up hope. And we are holding on to the idea that the world isn't hopeless, even as the super wealthy and powerful have so far succeeded in serving up children to the Moloch, so far without much of a reckoning. Part of the solution, it seems, is to call upon all our friends who believe in goodness truth and beauty to NOT give up hope, even during our precarious times. Content warning: we discuss SA and violence and other wretchedness.

The similarities and differences between the perspectives of Aristotle and Lao Tzu on the nature of happiness and how this relates to the ways in which we might navigate our precarious times. Inspired by Tao Te Ching chapter 72. We also spend some time discussing how this is all related to the Zen parable about the Master of Tea Ceremonies and a Ronin.

Drawing from Tao Te Ching 71, we discuss the ways in which dogmatism can lead to madness but recognizing truths, even the truth that we do not know things with certainty, can bring us to a place of sanity. We talk about a poet named Theodore Beza who traded in his love of classical poetry and creating new versions of it himself to concocting a contorted and arguably monstrous dogmatism known as hyper-Calvinism (and the weird dogma of supralapsarianism). If you are in need of letting go of unhealthy ideologies and allegiances, this may be just the episode for you.