Charity and the Dao

I've gotten a couple obviously heart-felt responses to a throw-away remark I made in my last post, so I thought it would be a good idea to put some time and effort into parsing out what I really believe on the subject. So here's the result:


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I have also developed a very jaundiced view of most forms of altruism---most of which strike me as being a the result of a form of blindness not terribly different from that which motivates most venal acts.

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Like most peripheral comments, this one doesn't explain itself in much detail. But it is not a position that I take lightly, that I adopted willingly, nor is any sort of personal innovation to Daoism.

I have always had a very strong charitable impulse. (In fact I still do.) This has not involved simply tossing a little extra in the collection plate at church or writing a cheque when the "United Way" comes calling at work. Instead, I have literally tried to live the life suggested by the New Testament where I give to the poor a substantial part of my financial worth and personal life. Amongst other things, this has involved inviting total strangers into my home.

One formative experience involved a young woman who I met at the university campus where I was an undergraduate. She looked hungry so I bought her lunch. When we got talking, she said that she was living in a tent at a local conservation area and that she had no work. I happened to be alone in a house that I was fixing up for the summer, so I offered her room and board for the summer in exchange for help. She gladly moved in.

It was a lesson in life. She was a very good looking young woman who had worked as a stripper until (so she said) that she had witnessed a stabbing that so frightened her that she quit her job. I assumed that the summer residency would be a "leg up" so she could find a job and get a place of her own. Instead, she decided that it would be a permanent arrangement. After I pointed out to her that she needed to get a job and that I was supporting her by doing the home renovation gig plus a graveyard shift as a minimum wage janitor, she called these "chump change" jobs. In contrast, she suggested that her career path was to get pregnant and live on child support (this was how she was raised.)

When I had to kick her out of the house it was very traumatic. She got a gig stripping at a local bar. Then she did get pregnant and ended up being an absolute disaster as a parent (I met the parent of a baby-sitter who was totally freaked that the government would not remove the child from her home.) The woman went through a period of heroin abuse and ended up in a somewhat stable relationship in another town. Years later I met her at a wake where it became pretty clear to me that she hasn't changed much since I first met her.

I met another woman when I was still attempting to live a "normal" (i.e. not as a Daoist recluse) life. She had a child from another guy and she had decided to devote her life to raising this baby. The pregnancy had been the result of some sort of minimal relationship but she refused to have an abortion. At the same time, she refused to let the father even see the fruit of his loins but was bound and determined that he was going to help support her and the boy for a long time.

This woman had been trained as a legal secretary and had actually worked in the field. But after having her son, she decided that it would be wrong to not exclusively breast feed him or wean him before the age of at least two. As you might imagine, this dramatically reduced employment opportunities. As a result, she ended up having to rely upon the state for subsistence.

I also had a relationship with a woman who worked as a waitress at a local bar and owned a house. She had a degree in fine art and a teacher's certificate. But there always seemed to be a reason why working at a regular teaching job simply wasn't good enough for her. (She did do a temporary gig at a special program teaching adults, but the funding disappeared and I don't think she even tried to switch to an ordinary program.) She had come from quite a wealthy family, but for one reason or another, she didn't get along with them and had severed all ties.

After I left this woman, she developed a form of mental illness that rendered her unable to make a living anymore. But because she had never been willing to work at a job with benefits, there was no long-term disability program she could plug into. And because she had severed all ties with her family, she ended up with no safety net, formal or informal, to plug into. When she goes off her meds, she sometimes comes to my door in a very agitated and quite confused state. I used to give her money, but I found out that the welfare agency is quite concerned about her but she refuses to allow them to help her.

My heart bleeds for these people. I always has bled for them. But I came to some significant decisions as a result of my lame attempts to help them.

First of all, they are in the mess they find themselves in not because of a cruel world, but because of the values that they hold dear render them incapable of thriving in the world around us. The first woman has an inflated sense of what she is worth in the world---to the point where she will live in dire poverty before she will demean herself by working for the less than inflated salary of a stripper. The second believes that the entire world should turn on a dime for her ovaries (e.g. refusing to have an abortion, expecting the man to pay child support, the government to support her extreme views on parenthood, etc.) The last painted herself into a corner by having such an extreme vision of personal freedom that she left herself with no "safety-net" for when she got sick.

I also used to give money to beggars on the street (there are a lot in my town.) I considered it a "blessing" to have so much money that I could do this. I never asked myself whether or not these folks were "worthy" because I thought that that was between them and God, and not something for me to concern myself with. I noticed very quickly, however, that the panhandlers figured out that I was someone who always gave and sometimes would give a lot. The result was that I found myself being singled-out for attention. In fact, people started coming to my door. The last straw was when I was having a little bar-b-que and a fellow who was obviously suffering from a very bad drug problem "gate crashed" the event.

The point wasn't that I am some sort of prig who wants to keep these people "in their place", but rather that they were beginning to threaten my hold on middle-class existence. Middle-class life requires a lot of things: financial security, home ownership, a secure neighbourhood, etc. Being connected with the "under-class" threatens all of this. If your neighbourhood starts going downhill, you end up with worse and worse people moving into the homes around you. And this raises the danger of crime, lowers the equity in your house, reduces your freedom from things like loud noises late at night, increases vandalism, etc. I am not a rich man, and the only reason why I own my own home is because I have been very careful and frugal. By involving myself with the desperate class, I was threatening my position. (I noticed this because my "good" neighbours absolutely freaked when my ex with mental problems started hanging around the house---they could tell instinctively that this was a bad thing for everyone.)

A man who jumps into the water to save another has to understand that he runs the risk of being dragged down and drowned himself.


I had a lot of conversations with my last partner over these issues. She grew up in Bombay and literally swam in an ocean of beggars from an early age. Like me, she is very concerned about poverty and has spent a great deal of her life devoted to doing "good works". But she doesn't have that same sense of guilt that I feel because I am not living the life that Jesus recommends. (Which is odd because she is the Christian, not me.) Her very wise answer to me, however, was to say "Are you doing this to help these people or to make yourself feel good?"

This really got me thinking and it turned out that I was just as much a victim of my values system as the people I have mentioned above. I thought that giving is a solution, when it clearly is not. This comes about because when I see them, I see myself. But they are not me, and I am not them. Unlike the first woman, I learned early in my life that we have to eat "bitter" in our lives. If we don't do it consciously through things like working for "chump change", we will do it unconsciously through things like heroin addiction. I also believe that whether or not we believe that our present society values children as it should, we have to make compromises with economic reality. I also have decided that "no man is an island" and we need to maintain good social ties with family and institutions (like a good job) if we are going to survive the groin kicks that life inevitably throws at us.

I wish that these people in my life had learned the same lessons that I have. And I still help with folks if I think that it will genuinely be of value. But until they decide to discard the values system that is holding them down, it will simply be pouring sand down a rat hole. And my belief is that Christian charity is simply yet another one of these destructive values that I have had to discard if I am going to live a life in harmony with the Dao.

Please note. I am not making value judgements about these people. They are just like everyone else---they have good qualities and bad. Indeed, I still love some of them. But their core values have rendered them incapable of thriving in the modern world. And until they make the decision to jettison these values and adopt ones that are a better "fit", they are always going to suffer problems. Short of having the state stand at their side and force them to make better decisions; or to give them so much money that they can be totally feckless and not suffer any consequences; there is nothing society can do to protect them from their dysfunctional values system.


Lest people think that I am some sort of modern nihilist, I would point out that I have read translations of Daoist texts who attempt to make this very point. As I recall (I don't have the text at my finger tips) one story involved a Daoist who opened a box that was filled with demons that personified all the impediments to realization. The last one was a child that represented all the altruistic impulses that tie someone to the "land of dust". It was pointed out in the commentary that this is the most dangerous demon that a Daoist has to overcome.

The world will not end---

I went to a family get together last week and while there I noticed something extremely surprising. One of my nieces handed my brother-in-law a copy of the Al Gorevideo "An Inconvenient Truth". Later on, I noticed that all of my family was engaged in a variety of animated discussions about global warming and the need to make big changes in our lives. It seems that after 30 years the penny has finally dropped with my family. Moreover, if I can believe the polls, it looks like the same thing can be said about the rest of Canadian society.

Oddly enough, I didn't really know how to take this. Probably as a result, I went through a period of depression (or as the Jesuits would say "desolation".) Yesterday I finally finished the A.C. Graham translation of Liezi and it finally dawned on me that I can walk away from environmentalism with a clear conscience. This is not merely an empty realization, as I went to a meeting that night and bowed out of a commitment that I had made to take on a position of responsibility in an upcoming very important political campaign.

As a Daoist, I have always believed that it is insane to wear yourself out in the pursuit of personal gain. I have also developed a very jandiced view of most forms of altruism---most of which strike me as being a the result of a form of blindness not terribly different from that which motivates most venal acts. For example, I once took it upon myself to try and help a homeless young woman only to find out that she was the author of almost all of her own misfortunes and any help that she received from family, friends or the government only served to "enable" her self-destructive behaviour. In retrospect, I realised that my attempts to help were motivated by my own equally dumb conditioned responses. (Namely, the folly of putting yourself into another's shoes. In actual fact, most people are very different from each other and empathy is almost always delusional.)

But I have always thought that the environment is different. It strikes me that it is a crime against nature and future generations to damage the ecosystem. In retrospect, I now realize that I was also afraid that we would end up killing off the human race. A lot of people I meet in the environmental movement say that this wouldn't be such a big deal, but I have always believed that they were simply lying to themselves to appear "cool" or to simply win a debate. Perhaps this fear of human extinction was a form of displaced fear of my own mortality, but either way it was my primary motivation for the huge effort I have put into ecological politics for the last two decades.

But now I realize that the extinction of the human race is probably not a real consequence of global warming. A population crash is possible, and people are already dying from the effects of climate change. But extinction is simply not in the cards. Instead, the fight is for both the plants and animals; and the individuals who will suffer greatly from things like hotter heat waves, longer droughts, and the flooding that will happen when the polar caps melt. (Good bye Bangladesh--.)

This is sad, but it is not really all that different from other human disasters. Plagues, famines, wars, and so forth have been the lot of humanity ever since it first became civilized. (These were all grim realities when the Daoist masters Laozi, Zhuangzi and Liezi were writing.) I have done my bit at trying to raise people's consciousness and it is now up to them. I will now turn my back on the environmental community. My duty is done and I can now pursue my true love, which is following the Dao.

Desolation, Consolation and Depression

I identify myself as a Daoist, but I have learned a great deal from a variety of the world's religious traditions. For example, I spent several years meeting and talking with people from a local Jesuit retreat centre. They introduced me to a form of spiritual practice known as the Ignatian Exercises. These are a faily involved series of practices that are taught by the Jesuits and involve a process of detailed introspection. I never actually entered into the Ignatian exercises myself, either because of ego or because that is not my particular path, but I did gain a fair amount by entering into a conversation with people who teach using that tradition.

Primarily, I learned a great deal about the nature of depression, at least as it has manifested itself in my life. The way the Jesuits describe it, all of us are prey to "spirits", both good and bad, that constantly try to influence the choices we make in life. The best way to understand this is to think of the cartoons we often see of a little devil whispering in one ear and an angel in the other. The idea is that when we are depressed (or what the Jesuits would call "in a period of desolation"), the evil spirits predominate.

I certainly can say with certaintly that that is exactly what happens when I am depressed. It is as if a chorus of voices is constantly repeating in my ear "I wish I had a better job", "I wish I wasn't a fool", "I wish I wasn't single", "I wish I wasn't crazy", etc, etc. The thing I learned from talking to the spiritual advisors was that this is a very predictable syndrome that St. Ignatius has carefully analysed and spelled out in great detail. And the processes that we go through when we are in a period of desolation can be predicted and tactics can be mapped out for dealing with it. Some of these spiritual "rules of thumb" include things like not making any decisions, continuing or increasing one's meditational practices, and, reminding oneself that a time of desolation is usually followed by a deepening of one's wisdom. (For anyone who's interested, this link gives a Ignatian gameplan for surviving desolation.)

This last point is of greatest importance to me, as I have gotten to the point where I expect to gain some insight when I go through one of these periods of distress. Perhaps this will end up in retrospect as being some form of hubris, but it does seem to me that every time I have gone through one of these spiritual "troughs" I have found myself looking back on it and thinking that I have learned an important lesson. (The technical term for these gains in insight is "consolation".)

As I wrote this blog entry, I was going to make some sort of statement to the effect that what I am talking about is not clinical depression. But I'm not sure if that is correct. I have only gone through one period that would be described as such. It was awful. I felt miserable for weeks, lost a pile of weight, made all sorts of crazy statements, sought clinical help, and reached out to all my friends in wild desperation. But the end result was a real acceptance of a great many things that had niggled away at my soul for a very long time. Perhaps the problem with depression is not so much the desolation, but how individuals and society respond to it. Maybe some people get "stuck" in the middle of their desolation experience without finding some way through it to the wisdom it may give us.

I admit that I am not a psychologist, so I simply am not qualified to speak on clinical depression, but I wonder if I had been prescribed prosac if I would have made it through my period of extreme desolation to savour that little taste of serenity that came out the other side.

Just what exactly is religion?

As I mentioned before, I've been working through Joseph Campbell's mind-blowing, four volume magnum opus The Masks of God and have been recently reading about the transition in Egyptian society that ended the practice of human sacrifice. One of the citations he uses is that of an eye-witness account by a British officer who saw a 16 year old Indian woman voluntarily submit to being buried alive with the corpse of her husband. The account mentions that she not only agreed to the procedure, but that she sat with her back to her husband's seated corpse, put her hand above her head and continued to gesture for the burying to continue after her head had been covered and she was already slowly suffocating.

Campbell used this citation to point out that we should not project our modern ways of thinking into the minds of the ancients who were buried alive in the tombs of ancient Egypt. He did not see these archaeological sites as evidence of some ancient mass murder, but rather that of evidence of people bye-and-large voluntarily going to continue their service to their master after death. The point being that their consciousness was so in the grip of their mythic world-view that they did not feel that they were being murdered but rather that they were entering a new life.

Of course, people do not feel this way anymore. (Indeed, the British officer who observed the Indian woman's act of sati felt extreme revulsion and tried to talk her out of it.) And in the same way, we moderns feel extreme revulsion at many of the things that this officer would have taken for granted, such as slavery or sending young children into battle as drummer boys or "powder monkeys". The point is that contrary to the modern mythology that states that "all men are created equal", there is a significant difference in people's consciousness from one time in human history to another.

People often fail to understand this point, which is why we see dramas on television that portray ancient peoples as if they were exactly the same as you or I. (Think about those BBC shows like "I Claudius" or the "Brother Cadfael Mysteries.") In actual fact, I suspect that if we were able to speak to a Roman Emperor or a Medieval monk we would find that beyond the barrier of language, there would be a huge difference in the the way that they see the world from that of the average modern Westerner. (I noticed one example of this extreme difference when, as an undergrad, I was studying medieval philosophy and read that St. Augustine was the first historical figure who is described as being able to read silently. It appears that until his time the only way people read was out loud. Think about what that says about their interior lives!)

These differences also occur between modern cultures. I recently came across an account of the failed American mission to Somalia (think "Blackhawk Down") and was struck by the extreme difference between the American and Somali vision of warfare. The American soldiers were appalled at the way women and children were used as "human shields". One army ranger mentioned having to shoot a woman with a baby in her arms because she pulled a pistol on him once she got close enough to shoot. In contrast, a Somali leader is quoted by saying that the Americans are very brave but too unwilling to let people die. He knew that once a helicopter was shot down their comrades would fight foolishly in order to try and save its crew---no matter how badly that exposed their position and how many soldiers died in the attempt. (Of course, the current fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan could furnish similar examples.)

To get back to the point that Campbell was making, he believed that the role that religion plays in our society is directly connected to the form of human consciousness that is manifest in its adherents. Moreover, the form of individual human consciousness that is manifest has a huge impact on what form a society can take. So the evolution of human society is also the evolution of human consciousness is also the evolution of religious systems. Both individually and collectively, we are what we say that God is.

This position makes a lot of sense to me. People who believe in retribution believe in a God that supports the credo of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". And people who believe in mercy support a God that says "turn the other cheek". The point is that they are externalizing their values and projecting them into the metaphysical realm.

Where does Daoism fit into this? I suppose that folk Daoists who believe in the actual existence of a realm of Gods would also be in the same camp as the folks that Campbell is talking about above. But from the very beginning Daoism has also had a very strong tradition of calling all of that into question. Laozi warns that the Gods treat individuals like "straw dogs". Zhuangzi's radical skepticism about how much anyone can know about anything also draws into question the idea that we can know much about the ultimate "rules and regulations" of existence. So if we just talk about those Daoists who inhabit the stratospheric limits of the faith and have gotten beyond all the folk beliefs, it might be that they are beyond all of this need to believe in someone "out there" who reinforces all their beliefs.

But there is another level to this. When the scales fall from our eyes and we realize that we are players in a game we can get angry and try to toss over the board and scatter the pieces hither and yon. This is the way of the angry atheist like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. But if we aren't willing to be perpetually angry, what then? We still have to live our lives and get along with the other people. I would suggest that because the Daoist believes that the best way to get on with life is to try and find the way things work and then "go with the flow", then she would recognize and accept the role that religion plays in the formation of human consciousness and society-as-a-whole, and "play the game" to the best of her ability---but all the while reminding himself that it is indeed a game.

We are the stuff that dreams are made of---

I've been very busy doing construction on my "heavenly cave" over the last few weeks and have let this blog slide. This involved some pretty hard physical work of a sort that I used to do when I was younger, but which now I find quite hard to do. In particular, I had to shovel three tons of gravel, move and set 60, 50 lb slabs of cement, put in a retaining wall, dig a trench for a weeping tile, and, smash a hole in a 1 foot thick reinforced concrete retaining wall. (My whole body ended up aching by the end of the week!)



One thing did strike me, however. During my "coffee breaks" I was slowly reading through the A.C. Graham translation of Liezi and I found myself thinking about the fundamentally dream-like quality of life. The chapter that Graham titles "King Mu of Chu" contains several stories about people who found it hard to separate their dreams from reality---including the famous question of Zhuangzi about whether he was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who is dreaming that he is a man.



Of course I've heard about these stories for years and I've also had the experience of having a vivid dream only to wake up to "reality". But in the middle of shoveling the gravel off the sidewalk in front of my house and wheeling it onto my patio, I had the sudden revelation of the purely episodic quality of existence. That is to say, that at that particular moment of my existence I could not only look back on the dreams that I had had the night before and question their reality; but I could also look back at the work I had done the day before in exactly the same way. When I did so I found that the notion was immensely liberating. It meant that when I shovelled the gravel I was just shovelling gravel----I was no longer digging a trench, carrying concrete, sawing wood, or anything else. Nothing else mattered, just the task at hand.

People who look at religion from the outside in usually assume that the mystical experience resides in altered states of consciousness, visions, miracles, and so on. But in actual fact, the really important stuff of spirituality comes down to gaining insight into how complex and mysterious the "mundane" is. The revelation that one only lives through the individual "task at hand" and not in the totality of what one calls their "life", is probably the most profound thing that a person can learn. If we meditate on it and integrate this insight into the way we see the world, then it cuts away our fear of death and allows us to identify with the entirety of life instead of our own petty theoretical existence.

Of course, however, this truth cannot be given to another through mere words on a page (or blog), all one can do is point the way and hope that others will make the effort. Then someday, and in his or her own individual way, another person will have the same insight. And then perhaps they will try to explain the experience to another----.

Why scholarship is important

There are a lot of really bad translations of Daoist texts being published and since most readers simply don't know a lot about how to read an ancient text, a lot of misconceptions are being fed by these books. There is a whole scholarly field devoted to the systematic study of books, which is known as Hermeneutics. I thought I'd spend a little time introducing the reader to a couple ideas that came to me while reading the Liezi.


Let's look at a short passage from the Eva Wong translation:

"The Book of the Yellow Emperor says, "The Valley Spirit that does not die is the Mysterious Female. It is the foundation of heaven and earth. It continues forever and cannot be used up." Because the valley is hollow, it can hold the spirit, it can embrace, and it can nourish. Because the valley is empty, it is not subject to birth and death. To transcend birth and death is to enter into the Limitless (wu-chi) and be at one with the origin of heaven and earth.

The Gate of the Mysterious Female is where all things are created. And yet heaven and earth are said to be born from the not-born. This is what is meant by "that which is not born gives birth to everything," for the Mysterious Female is that which is not-born. Its origins belong to the realm of non-differentiation, where there is neither birth nor death. Because it is never born, it never dies. Because it never dies, its energy lasts forever. It is in heaven and earth, and heaven and earth do not know it. It is in all things, yet all things do not recognize it.

If we understand that birth and death are part of the natural order things, we will know that our lives cannot be controlled by our own efforts, and coming and going are not our own doing. At birth, we take a shape and form; in growth, we undergo development and change; and when our course has run out, we dissolve and return to where we were before we were born.

If we know the order of things, we will understand that when intelligence and wisdom have reached their zenith, they will begin to fade and decay. The rise and fall of shapes, colours, thoughts, and feelings are not subject to control. Because we don't know whence they come or where they go, we can only say that everything that is born comes from the not-born. (Eva Wong, Lieh-Tzu, Shambala, 1995, p.27)



Now let's look at a more scholarly translation of the same text, this one by A. C. Graham


'"The Book of the Yellow Emperor says:

The Valley Spirit never dies:
It is called the dark doe.
The gate of the dark doe.
It is called the root of heaven and earth.
It goes on and on, something which almost exists;
Use it, it never runs out. 1

'"Therefore, that which gives birth to things is unborn, that which changes things is unchanging."'


(Birth and change, shape and colour, wisdom and strength, decrease and growth, come about of themselves. It is wrong to say that it brings about growth and change, shape and colour, wisdom and strength, decrease and growth.) 2

(1) This passage is also found in the Tao-Te-Ching, ch.6.
(2) If these obscure sentences are rightly translated, they must be a critical note by another hand.

(A. C. Graham, The Book of Lieh-Tu, Mandala/Harper-Collins, 1991, p.18)


At first glance a reader might say that the Graham translation is more "choppy" and the Wong one "reads better". But I would like to point out that in the Graham version there is a lot more information about the text being conveyed to the reader. In effect, we learn from his presentation there is very little in the quotes that actually comes from Liezi himself. Instead, what we have is part of the Dao De Jing which has been attributed to The Book of the Yellow Emperor, plus a couple lines that seem to be some marginal notes that ended up getting included in the text through a copying mistake.

What we learn from these two pieces of information is that this text is not a complete document that came directly from a realized Daoist master, but rather a result of a collaborative process that included several people. Bits and pieces came from previous books and there are actual editing mistakes. For the modern reader this is incredibly important because it reduces the likelihood of a naive reader making a fetish out of the text.

In contrast, the Wong translation not only glosses over the fact that the text is largely quoted from the Dao De Jing, it is heavily laden with interpretation that seems to come directly from Ms. Wong's own version of Daoism. Of course, she is entitled to her understanding of Daoism; but Graham seems to be suggesting that the original text is much more terse and metaphorical than her translation would suggest.

People who elevate religious texts to the level of revealed WISDOM cease to see the authors as being fallible and rooted in a specific historical context. As a result, they tend to assume that every single word of the text is literally true in a way that the original audience and the authors themselves would never have. As a result, they cease to read the book "against the grain" in an attempt to find out what makes sense to them, and what does not. Fortunately, for Western Daoists this doesn't lead to fundamentalism of a sort espoused by Osama Bin Lauden or Jerry Falwell, but it does mean that they stop seeing the texts as being practical guides for the here-and-now and instead see them as some sort of "cosmic statement" about "ultimate reality".

Realized men do not want people to follow them slavishly, or to put their writings on a pedestal. Instead, they want folks to make the same sort of effort they did, and find their own particular wisdom. Reading a bad translation of an ancient text over and over again without learning anything in the process is simply one more way in which people fail to find their own spirit. It might be best to not look in books at all. But if we do, then the serious student of Daoism should be availing herself of the latest scholarly wisdom---if for no other reason than to free herself from her lingering infatuation with a specific text.

The Interior Life

I've been busy with lots of things over the last couple weeks, which is why I've been away from this blog. All of these things are very different: working on my patio, attending meetings, going to municipal committees to deal with neighbourhood nuisances, etc. All of this has kept me so busy that I haven't had time to keep up with my taijiquan and meditation (indeed, I could be doing that now instead of working on this blog.)

But through this I've been reading The Masks of God by



Joseph Campbell. I just got through his discussion of Shamanism and was struck by his contrast between the shamanic religions of hunters and the priestly religions of hierarchical civilizations. The distinction is that the shamanic quest is geared towards expanding the self and seeking deeper and deeper wisdom. In contrast, the priestly quest is that of submitting to the will of the collective society. I found this statement important to me because it resonates with my experience as a recluse.

Daoism is a tradition that has connections with shamanism---even to the point where there are still practitioners who become possessed by individual gods and spirits. Moreover, Daoism has always been a faith where wisdom is perceived to come from an isolated individual who pursues his own wisdom. (Indeed, one of the translations of the word Xian--usually translated as "immortal"--is "mountain man", or, recluse.) The great thing about Chinese civilization is that it allowed Daoism to continue as a minority religion even though it developed its own priestly faiths in the forms of Confucianism and Buddhism. In the West, the Abrihamic faiths destroyed anything else that threatened the ecclesiastic hierarchy---and routinely persecuted any mystical elements that developed within their them.

Of course it is one thing to say that a person has isolated themself to pursue wisdom, it is another to actually do it. One of the themes of shamanism is that of suffering. One of the metaphors that Campbell says is very common throughout the literature about shamanism is that of the shaman being "ripped to pieces" in a psychological crisis.

I have been thinking of this in the midst of the various projects that I have been working through. I find myself constantly thinking about just about everything I do. At its worst, this manifests itself in "analysis paralysis". But I am a very productive individual, so I probably don't have to worry about this becoming a persistent syndrome. The one thing I do find within myself is a huge fear of "not doing the right thing". I worry about the way I build my patio---trying to balance off my interest in not having too big an ecological footprint with my concerns about the other members of my housing co-op thinking I'm not "keeping up my share". I'm also constantly worried about whether or not I spend enough time meditating and doing taijiquan; or; whether I obsess too much about it. I wonder if I spend too much time on activism; and; whether the religious, spiritual side of life is not some elaborate superstition. I worry about whether the whole Daoism thing isn't some ridiculous exercise in cultural appropriation. I worry----well, I'm sure you get the picture.

I think many folks might simply dismiss the above as a form of neurosis. There is some truth to this, but it is also simply what it means to be a man with an "interior life". And the interior life is the means by which a recluse or hermit (or shaman) deepens his or her wisdom. In the outside world society goes to great lengths to avoid reference to an interior being. For example, if someone at a workplace starts to make reference to deeply held beliefs, almost invariably her co-workers will attempt to change the subject. If she is feeling sad about something, people will try to cheer her up. If it is something else, maybe political, then usually she will be quickly teased into shutting up or changing the subject. People don't talk about serious things and learn instead that social interaction has to be reduced to light banter. Eventually, people lose the ability to express deep feelings. Maybe some people stop having them. (We never really know because it is so common for people to have strong feelings yet not be able to articulate them because of the intense social conditioning we have internalized.)

I'm not about to say that this social conditioning is without its uses. Our society is probably too complex to allow much genuine human interaction. The trains would probably stop running on time if the engineers were allowed to spend more energy expressing their true feelings! (I do suspect that we perhaps have too little energy spent on deep thinking and feeling, though. I suspect that if we elected leaders with a little more interior life we would not be facing our global climate crisis.)

For someone who has specifically decided to follow the life of a Daoist recluse--in the early 21st century, in an urban, Canadian environment--this is a large part of the pain that I have to bear in order to gain the prize of wisdom. I must constantly be in the grip of a battle between my interior nature and the external conditioning that holds our society together. It means that I not only find myself stuck in internal disagreements about the right course of action, it also means that I am constantly battling with friends, family and neighbours about the choices that I have made. (And perhaps seeing battles that do not really exist---.)

Through my life I have come to the conclusion, however, that Socrates was right when he said that "The unexamined life is not worth living". Sometimes the pain really does feel like the flesh is being stripped off my bones, but a greater degree of wisdom is always the end result.