The Dangers of Meditation

I rarely hear people mention that there are dangers associated with meditation and spirituality in general, but I have come to the conclusion that there are genuine risks associated with spiritual practice. I don't want to blow them up beyond their importance, but I think that it is important to know that they exist.

I've come to this conclusion partly from observing others directly, partly from reading on the subject and partly from self-observation.

Over the years, I've watched some pretty wild psycho-dramas unfold amongst people who are engaged in spiritual practices. One of the most bizarre involved a conflict between a Daoist priest and martial arts instructor that eventually resulted in an official complaint complaint being lodged with the police about "grand theft temple treasure"----for a framed poster that you can buy in China town for ten bucks. (I'm sure there were amusing anecdotes told in the coffee room of the police station.) In a more serious vein, many are the tales of broken hearts from the sexual misconduct of North American Buddhist teachers, at least one of which became a fairly well-known book: Shoes Outside the Door.

On a more serious note, I've noticed a couple folks who went "over the deep end" while obsessing about religion. I suspect that these folks had problems that existed long before they became involved in spiritual practice, but contrary to what some people might think, spirituality seems to have not only not helped these folks, it may have helped induce the madness that descended upon them. One person I know, for example, was very religious and went to the point of living in a Catholic intentional community. She had to give all of that up though, as it became clear to both her and her therapists that the schizophrenia she began to manifest was tied to religious symbolism. (She related to me a memory of being in a mental hospital, tied up in a straight jacket, while nurses and porters held her down so a doctor could inject her with sedatives. At the time, she said she was convinced that she was Jesus Christ.) Heavily medicated, she now avoids any sort of religious involvement like the plague.

My personal experience is that any insights I have gained from the practice of meditation and contemplation have been paid for by the development of a strongly introspective character that isolates me from other people. Lately this separation was brought home to me when I took an acquaintance out to the local farmer's market. She was totally enthralled with every vendor and asked for free samples from each and everyone. All I could think about was the fact that every free sample came with a disposable plastic cup or spoon that was instantly tossed into the trash. Moreover, I noticed that she was totally oblivious to this---to me---obvious problem.

I wouldn't trade the insights and sensitivity that I have gained from the practice of Neidan, but it does come at the price of losing one's ability to totally lose oneself in the sorts of child-like pleasures of ordinary people. The problem isn't so much that I can no longer get involved in things and enjoy myself, its just that those things that I do enjoy are rarely the same things that the general public does, and vice versa. This creates a barrier between the introspective spiritual seeker and his neighbours. Of course, this phenomenon explains the tendency of spiritual seekers to become hermits,recluses, anchorites and monastics.

In a way, these issues are pretty much the same as those experienced by anyone who decides to live a "counter cultural" existence. Many of us know people who "dropped out" from mainstream society and in return mainstream society dropped onto them like an anvil. Most of this comes down to the fact that society "protects its own" and people who "follow the rules" tend to have a support system to help them get over the rough spots. I once had a high-school friend explain this to me by saying "If you just do what THEY want, life can be pretty sweet."

But once you decide to make your own rules, you have to assume more responsibility for your life.

Consider, if you will, someone who decides to be self-employed instead of working for a large business. It becomes the individual's responsibility to line up customers, deal with suppliers, find some way of dealing with downtime due to sickness, etc. In contrast, people who work in a large, unionized business only have to think about what would happen if they get laid off.

Take this one step further and try to live without the discipline of either customers or bosses (which amount to much the same thing), and you end up living an economic carnival ride. I have an acquaintance who did this sort of thing for years until he ended up at an advanced age spending a Canadian winter in an uninsulated summer trailor with nothing more to eat than half-rotten pumpkins. (He escaped that scenario by giving up his confirmed bachelorhood to get married to a woman of financial means.) Many folks following the same path end up in much worse straights---they live on the streets of our cities. Indeed, there is a very popular book and movie titled "Into the Wild" that chronicles the way the wilderness killed a young man who attempted to drop out of society and live as a wilderness hermit.

In its way, anyone who treads the path of internal alchemy---taijiquan, "sitting and forgetting", etc---is even more of a rebel than the counter-cultural type who tries to live without "the man" breathing down his neck. That is because he is casting a critical eye towards the way his mind operates and the deepest level of assumptions that govern his life.

And once you start to look deeply into how the mind operates, and seriously question all of our assumptions, we can end up falling down Alice's rabbit hole.

I've mentioned above about how several North American Buddhist teachers have been involved sexually with their students. This makes sense once you realize that a large part of what both teacher and student are doing is trying free themselves from their socially constructed sense of self through intense self-analysis. Becoming in tune with the "Buddha mind" and "seeing the face you presented before you were born" leaves the rules pounded into your head by the school nuns behind you. At that point, "there are no rules', and it is hardly surprising that this has tempted a lot of people into infidelity.

Oddly enough, the opposite result can also occur. If sitting and forgetting can free you of social constraints, the simple practice like "mindfulness" can create a whole new set of problems. If a person really gets into the habit of carefully observing each and every moment of her life, what happens to the joyful and spontaneous things? Sex can become impossible if you develop the habit of being completely aware of everything you do (this probably has something to do with the celibacy that most monastic traditions manifest.) Indeed, if you seek to leave the "animal" behind, it is hardly surprising that our animal instincts disappear.

As a result of learning these lessons, I've come to a few ideas about protection against the problems of spiritual practice. First of all, I don't encourage anyone to meditate, do martial arts, or anything else spiritual unless they have a pretty good grounding to their life. A steady job, a normal place to live, regular work habits, etc, are pretty good indications that someone is not going to go off the deep end. Secondly, if you do follow the path, it is really important to use routine and conventionality as "anchors" to keep you from flying off into the wild blue yonder. There is a reason why monastic institutions have such a love of order and ritual---it helps keep the number of monks who go crazy down to a bare minimum.

Ultimately, however, "yah pays your money, yah takes your chances". Society is quickly going to Hell in a handbasket and lots of conventional people live lives of total lunacy. People who pursue a spiritual path are adventurers seeking a better life, and anything worth having requires taking risks. Just don't forget that lots of adventurers end up freezing, starving or being eaten by cogars.

So be careful!

Negative Meditation

I've been rather coy about stating what meditation exactly is, and I'm going to continue in that vein for this post too. I will end up offering a definition, but I think that it might help make the one I eventually give a lot more intelligible if I continue to offer suggestions about what it isn't. This actually isn't a very odd way to pursue this issue, as it is a path that has been very well-trodden by others. In fact, it has a name of its own---the via negativa.

With that in mind, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that certain practices that people do not associate with meditation are actually forms of meditation---but ones that are harmful to those who practice them.

Video Games

A lot of people take exception to video games because they are often so violent. It might be that this is a problem, but the thing that I find most damaging about them is the way they draw in people's concentration to a tighter and tighter form of concentration, speed people's responses up, and, cause people to manifest stress.

I think that this happens because video games are a perfect "Skinner Teaching Machine". These sorts of mechanisms give anyone who plays the game immediate feedback about success or failure. They also immediately escalate in lockstep with a person's increased skill at playing the game. By doing both of these things, they speed up and intensify the player's concentration the same way an engine does when it has had its governor removed. In effect, the mind races faster and faster until it begins to fly apart.

I first noticed this phenomena when I was a student playing one of the very first video games: Space Invaders. I found that after playing the game for a while I would end up holding onto the joystick with the "grip of death" and by the end of some of the higher levels I was almost having heart palpitations. (The soundtrack had a beat that was just like a heartbeat that kept speeding up as you advanced in levels.)

Since then I've noticed similar problems with other games. A few years back I got a copy of Populous for my desktop computer. It is a "god" game instead of a first person shooter, so it involves a different type of concentration than Space Invaders, but I found that while I didn't end up tight and panting after playing it, I did find it incredibly addictive. Ultimately, I found my quality of life degrading yet I found it almost impossible to quit. I ended up having to break the CD that it ran off of in half in order to stop wasting hours of time playing it. (I have a younger friend who said that it spread like the flu through his residence when he was at university and wasted enormous amounts of time.)

I am including video games as a form of meditation because they are based upon developing a specific type of consciousness---which is a large part of meditation. But they accentuate a negative, obsessive form of concentration that is damaging both to the mind and body.

Commercial Television

Again, many people complain about television's content, but I am more concerned about its form. The problem is that television asks the viewer to become engaged with the programming but jarringly interrupts the narrative every ten minutes or so to put in advertisements that almost always a little louder and more manic than the actual programming. If a person chooses to pay attention to the show and try to watch and listen intently, the commercials are extremely jarring.

I remember reading a short story by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. where some misguided future government chose to homogenize people's abilities through various technical innovations. Dancers had to perform with weights tied to their legs and so on. People with very high IQs had to go through life with devices that attached headphones to their ears and which would randomly emit very loud noises. This startled the people and robbed these people of the ability to concentrate, thereby robbing them of the advantages of having more innate intelligence than the general public.

In a same way, I think that the commercial interruptions of commercial television damages a person's ability to concentrate and "get into" drama. I rarely watch tv any more and I have found that when I do it very quickly gives me a headache. I think that if anyone does watch a lot of tv, they will inevitably have to learn to not pay much attention to their surroundings or else suffer a similar problem. I suspect that some of the many people I meet who seem to have the attention span of a gnat have developed this as a response to watching too much television.


Black Berries and Cell Phones

Where I work all the middle managers have been given blackberries and are forced to constantly wear them so they can always be "on call". At risk of biting the hand that feeds me (RIM is just down the road and pays a lot of taxes that in turn support my job), I would argue that this is a very bad idea.

I rarely have a conversation with my boss where he doesn't have the vibration function go off on his blackberry and he has to interrupt what he is saying in order to respond to it. Almost invariably, it is an email---quite often spam. Either way, the poor man simply doesn't seem to have the time to create a whole idea without being interrupted.

This is not only a bad idea, but unnecessary. My boss is a very low level manager in a second-rate academic library at a not-quite first-rank university. There is absolutely nothing that happens in his work life that cannot wait until he checks his email or telephone answering machine. It is just a question of status---his boss (and him, to be honest) want to think of themselves as being so important that they always need to be on call.

What is really bizarre, is how the university students have bought into cell phones. They constantly answer the darn things, even though it strikes me that university students are, as a class, the group of people who are the least likely to actually need to be chained to one of these things. Maybe they are cheaper than a land line, but surely they could turn the things off once in a while!

In my next post I'll talk about some non-meditation, meditation that is actually good for you.

Emotions and Meditation

In my last post I tried to explain my understanding of meditation and how the idea came about that one develops miraculous powers by regular practise. This post will be about the relationship between emotions and meditation.

I think that this is worth its own post because I regularly meet people who seem to think that all "meditation" is, is a method for channelling very strong, "positive" emotions. There are a lot of sources for this belief, but the two most common ones seem to be from the Christian and Buddhist religions.

The New Testament has some pretty strong passages that teach the important of "love". A very beautiful translation of a letter from St. Paul is often quoted to emphasize this point.

The Way of Love

13:1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

And it is true that love is very important to being a realized human being. But there is a very important point that I would like to make about it.


I often meet believers that act as if "love" is some sort of "thing" or "essence" that a human being hold in their hands like a talisman. Sometime I even meet people who seem to be "love intoxicated" and who walk around with a weird smile on their faces and who's answer to almost every intractable human problem is "love". In fact, the Beatles even wrote a song that just about sums up this world-view.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game It's easy. There's nothing you can make that can't be made. No one you can save that can't be saved. Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time - It's easy.

All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need. Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need. There's nothing you can know that isn't known. Nothing you can see that isn't shown. Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be. It's easy.

All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need. All you need is love (all together now) All you need is love (everybody) All you need is love, love, love is all you need.

Now consider, if you will, the subtle difference between these two passages. St. Paul talks about a person's abilities distinct from their love: "if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing". He is not saying, like Lennon and McCartney, that "all you need is love". It is faith that moves mountains for Paul, not love.

Philosophers make the distinction between what they call "necessary" and "sufficient" qualities. The former is what popular parlance would call a "deal breaker", but it doesn't necessarily mean that it is "the whole deal". For example, Air is necessary for human life, but it isn't sufficient---we also need things like food and water. People suffocate without oxygen, but they can also starve, die of thirst, freeze, etc. St. Paul is saying that love is necessary, whereas the Beatles are saying that love is sufficient. This is not an exercise in hair-splitting, but rather something with very important consequences.

Love is demonstrably not all we need. We also need wisdom, equanimity, creativity, and a whole suite of other important qualities in order to live a full life. Moreover, love can be a tremendous source of dysfunction in people's lives. Having quoted St. Paul and the Beatles, now lets look at the lyrics of a song by Bessie Smith:

Careless Love :

Love, oh love, oh careless love,
You've fly though my head like wine
You've wrecked the life
Of many a poor girl
And you nearly spoiled this life of mine

Love, oh love, oh careless love
In your clutches of desire
You've made me break a many true vow
Then you set my very soul on fire

Love, oh love, oh careless love,
All my happiness bereft
Cause you've filled my heart with weary old blues
Now I'm walkin' talkin' to myself

Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Trusted you now it's too late
You've made me throw my old friend down
That's why I sing this song of hate

Love, oh love, oh careless love,
Night and day I weep and moan
You brought the wrong man into this life of mine
For my sins till judgement I'll atone

People routinely talk about "falling in love" or being "full of love". But what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that what people do when they are "in love" is better than when they are not? No, it doesn't because we are all aware of the situation where someone is quite selfishly in love. Infatuation---which is what being "in love" means---leads to all the sorts of crazy self-destructive behaviour that Bessie Smith is referring to.

It might be argued that this problem is just a result of the English language's use of just one word, "love", to describe a wide variety of emotions. In Greek, for example, there are a wide variety of words that describe a complex pallet of the emotion: "eros", "agape", "philia", etc. So the crazed stalker who will not leave a person alone because of their infatuation is simply someone who is in the grip of one particular type of love, probably eros. And, if we accept this line of argument, "eros" isn't really the sort of "love" that the Beatles are talking about.

I'm not sure if this distinction holds, though, as there are also equally unbalanced manifestations of other types of love. For example, it is possible to be so in the grips of religious love, agape, that a man is willing to do terrible crimes. For example, what were the hijackers of 9/11 but people who were in love with their understanding of God? Even if someone has not allowed their ideal of "love" to convince them to commit mass murder, it can get them to do some pretty crazy things that they would never do if they thought about it coolly and rationally.

Another distinction that philosophers would make is that between a substance and a quality. The former is a "thing" whereas the latter is something that we would say about it. An apple is a substance, whereas "red" is a quality that an apple may manifest. I would argue that "love" is a quality of human intention, not a substance. A person may bake bread with "love", but the love in this case has no existence without the actual bread.

This too might seem like hair-splitting, but it isn't. If "love" is something in and of itself, then it is possible to be "filled with love" without any reference to a specific activity. But if it is instead a quality, then our love only becomes manifest in how we are relating to a specific thing. And this, I believe, is an absolutely essential difference when it comes to meditation.

It is because people who walk around "intoxicated by love" are truly intoxicated---but not by love. That is, they are "emotion junkies" who have become intoxicated with the feeling they get when they are "in love". People who have fallen "in love" will know what I mean when I talk about the physical feelings that one gets from the experience. They are very similar to those of being intoxicated with a mild narcotic, like marihuana.  And the emotion junkies are not really experiencing "love" at all, unless it is "love" of being "high" on love. 

And this is where I get back to meditation.

When we meditate we can learn to manifest a great many different emotions and feelings. It is possible to learn how to turn on and off emotional feelings pretty much at will. If anyone doubts this, consider a scene from an episode of "The Simpsons" I once saw. In it, Bart needed to manifest tears in order to convince his mother that he was indeed sorry for a deed he had done. Just before he met her, he said to himself "OK, think about the day your cat died!" And indeed the tears did well up in his eyes. After his mother backed down and he was left to himself, he kept crying and said "Too effective! Oh poor snowball!" In the same way, it is possible to learn how to crank up one's positive emotions and waft through a large part of one's life in a emotional "high".

But is it "love"? It certainly isn't if it is an act designed to manipulate your mother. Nor is it if it is a life strategy that allows you to keep from confronting the difficult complexities that face you here and now. In fact, in some ways it is the exact opposite of real love because the real focus is not the "other", but rather the self. Bart Simpson triggered his emotions by thinking of his dead cat, but the situation was really all about weaselling out of the punishment he deserved.  In the same way, someone who is high on the concept of "love in general" is not connecting with the person or situation in front of them here-and-now, but instead is trying to avoid the reality that confronts them.   They are exactly like Bart Simpson, cranking up their emotions in order to avoid punishment.  

In contrast, real love is a subtle quality of our lives that exists pretty much outside of strong emotions.  It is not a strong feeling of the self, but instead a total "giving up" of the self in favour of the other.     

I remember the first time I recognized what real love is---and it too involved a cat. I got up in the middle of the night for some reason and was walking around my home in my bare feet. I stepped in a puddle of vomit and the absolute first thought that came into my head was "My cat's sick". Not a personally-directed feeling of "Yuck!", but an outwardly directed concern for another being. Totally spontaneous without a single moment or iota of self-examination according to some sort of external criteria. At that one spontaneous moment I was living wholly as someone who was concerned about the other as a subject in and of herself instead of as a secondary character in my own personal drama.

Now as I mentioned in the introduction to this essay, a great deal of the misinformation about emotion and meditation seems to flow from Christianity. When I wrote that, I wasn't referring to the quote from Saint Paul----which is not only great literature, but not substantially in disagreement with what I have written above. But there are forms of popular religious practices that are designed to be not much more than an attempt to ramp-up the emotional feelings of individual believers and put them into the habit of getting regular emotion "fixes".

Consider, if you will, the Christian tradition of "passion plays". These are dramatic performances that are specifically designed to get people emotionally cranked on the violence and pathos of the crucifixion of Christ. This dramatic tradition stretches back hundreds of years in Christianity and have recently undergone a tremendous rebirth, including the extremely popular movie by Mel Gibson, "The Passion of the Christ". It is very hard to understand exactly what role these dramatic performances could have other than to inflame the emotions of those who view them.

Another form of emotionalism is the "visualizations" that many Christians are taught to manifest when they meditate. Often this involves some sort of gruesome picture of an actual, physical human heart surrounded by thorns and pierced by a spear wound. Sometimes the heart is presented by itself, but often it is part of a full picture of an especially sentimental representation of Jesus. While contemplating this representation, it is often suggested that some sort of prayer be offered that is also extremely sentimental and emotional in nature. For example, I pulled the following off the internet pretty much at random:

You, O Lord, I see in life. In everything surrounding me that is of You, I see beauty, wholeness, peace, joy and most especially love. Yours is a love that transforms, that reaches into the inner landscape of my soul. There is no mountain high enough or valley low enough that can keep Your Love from reaching me. No matter what I do or where I go, You will always be there, loving me, leading me home. You lead me to the desire of Your Heart, an inner Communion with You in Your Heart. Your desire is for an intimate, profound relationship with me and with each of the hearts and souls, which You created for the purpose of Love. As I sense Your Loving Presence in Life as a child, I awaken to Your Heart and am moved.

Buddhism also has a tradition that involves the artificial creation of strong emotions.  This is called the "Metta", which is usually translated as "loving kindness towards all beings". Like the sacred heart practise of Christianity, it is aimed at creating a strong emotional experience that is aimed at no one in particular.  It does this through the practice of trying to progressively create warm feelings towards oneself, one's friends, and eventually one's enemies.

There is significant differences from Christian practice, though, in that the Metta practice is focused upon the individual instead of an external God, and, that it exists in a wider Buddhist context that is very strongly oriented towards promotting self-awareness. As such, it should be viewed more as a temporary expedient---like a seditive for someone suffering from a psychotic episode---rather than a completely sufficient meditative practice. People who have a hard time controlling their anger will be told to follow the Metta practice until such time as they are ready for a less emotional meditation technique.

The problem for Westerners is that when they go to a introductory workshop on Buddhist meditation they usually do not tend to get much beyond the first level of practice. Moreover, the Christian context they come from prepares them to think that this sort of emotional "first-aid" is the total treatment. This means that they are ready to walk away from their limited experience with the belief that, like Lennon and McCartney would say, "All you need is love---".

In actual fact, meditation is something completely different. But that is the topic for another post.

Miracles Explained

I've offered to give a couple workshops on meditation for my local Unitarian congregation, which gives me a bit of an incentive to write something about the subject.


As I see it, there are two sides to trying to explain an issue: what it is, and, what it is not. I'm going to start this discussion by describing what meditation isn't, because by doing so I hope to make it a little easier to understand just exactly what it is. And the first part of understanding what meditation isn't is to drop the some of the wild claims that are associated with it.

A significant, although minor,  fraction of the people who talk about meditation (especially Daoist) believe that if one masters it they gain the ability to have weird, supernatural powers. I suppose most of this comes from popular literature being filled with "mystic" teachers who have psychic powers. The character "Yoda" from the "Star Wars" trilogy comes to mind, but ancient literature is also filled with enlightened masters who were about do amazing things because of powers they gained from meditation. Take for example the Indian epic poem, Mahabharata. It has several examples of heroes that seek out religious holy men, or "sadhus", in order to gain magical powers or weapons that they can then use in their great war. It isn't surprising that the popular literature adopted this trope, because if you study most of the great mystical traditions you will find reference to miraculous powers that can be gained from intensive practices. The Yogic tradition of India calls theses "siddhis".

Personally, I don't really have a strong opinion about these things. I have had some very weird experiences while meditating that are pretty hard to explain away as just "hallucinations". But having said that, I think that the vast majority of references to miraculous powers are very easy to explain as manifestations of ordinary physics, human psychology or human society.

First of all, it is really important to understand the role that trickery has played in traditional spirituality. Any society that values holy men is bound to create a reason why people would want to mascarade as them. People want to believe, and if they do, they are quite willing to give wealth, power, and other forms of gratification to anyone that they believe has some sort of pipeline to God. And the quickest way to get people to believe that you are the "real deal" is to manifest some sort of super power. And the easiest way to do this is through some form of trickery. For example, take a look at this Christian evangelist who has already been exposed. I suspect that a great many of the miracles that have been presented in religious literature really boil down to this sort of thing---even if was not much more than a shaman figuring out how to confuse his followers with false teeth that he whittled out of basswood (complete with fangs and designed to show that he had transformed into a half-man/half-animal) and a bullroarer that he swung around his head to make an unearthly sound.

There is also a half-way sort of trickery that may actually have not been conscious. This involves learning how to do things that are perfectly explainable without recourse to miracles, but which most people would consider impossible. One example that everyone knows about is fire-walking.
This used to be a major mystery to people and was seen as evidence that someone had a magical power. But now it is a simple parlor trick that is routinely done by people at business retreats as a trust building exercise. The issue comes down to simple physics: even though a hot coal is very warm, it is a very poor conductor of heat. In contrast, the human foot has a lot of sweat pores on it, which give off moisture, which is very good at cooling the foot in such situations. The interior of the foot is also very good at cooling itself because of the flow of blood through it. So as long as the person fire walking doesn't stand still, have a coal stick to her foot, or steps on a foreign object with different conductivity (such as a nail or other piece of iron in amongst the coals), she can usually walk over the coals with no problems.

This sort of thing can be taught without the apprentice shaman or sadhu knowing how it works. This means that they may very well actually believe that what they are doing is miraculous. In this case, they are not consciously deceiving the public, but none-the-less a deception is going on.

The deception can also be based on a confusion between different cultural assumptions. To cite an example that surprised me, in Arthur Koestler's book The Lotus and the Robot he gives the example of a sadhu who was widely reported to be able to walk on water.  Koestler made the effort to go out to the countryside and find the man. It turns out that in this part of India the only water that the peasants would ever see was that in the local village reservoirs, or "tanks". In this context, no one had ever learned how to swim and it was universally known that no one could survive if he fell into water over his head. Along comes this sadhu who had learned how to control his fear and relax, which allowed him to float and dog paddle around in the tank---which seemed like a bonifide miracle to the local peasants.

When this story spread beyond this very limited milieu, it was sustained by a conflation of cultural assumptions. Because these rural, landlocked peasants didn't know about swimming, their definition of "walking on water" was slightly, but significantly different from those in the outside world. The villagers defined "walking on water" as "being able to consciously move around in the water without drowning", whereas the outside world defined it as "being able to stand upright on water and walk exactly the same way we do on land".   The issue is one of different expectations based on different types of experience, which leads to using language in a different way.  Once one gets one or two steps removed from the actual event being reported, then people make assumptions that dramatically change the information being transmitted. 

Having said all of the above, I think it is important to make a significant point about the interaction between meditation and what people call "miraculous".  The original sadhu who learned that he could walk on hot coals (or float in a village water reservoir) was manifesting something quite amazing in that he learned to control his very strong fears of being burnt or drowned.  Moreover, he probably did some observation about the world around him and did some experiments to find out what would and would not work.   The ability to control one's fear, look at the world in a new way and manifest creativity are all qualities that one can develop through a regular meditation practice.  And if one makes the effort to be able to develop these qualities all through one's life, you can start to do things on a regular basis that will look pretty amazing to people who don't understand this fact.  

At risk of appearing to be bragging, let me illustrate with a couple examples from my life.

I have learned through observation and reading that monarch butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed.  I had a friend in my back yard one summer day and saw a monarch floating around, I told him that it would land on this particular plant (a milkweed), which it did.  He was absolutely dumbfounded that I could predict this.

Another time I was sitting at a table with a couple friends and one of them had the hiccups, which were really bothering her.  I told her that I was going to cure her, then started to could out loud backwards for long enough and with a threatening voice that got her beyond thinking I was joking to the point where she began to think I was getting "creepy" (which meant that she was taking me seriously).  All at once I yelled at her "your hiccups are gone"---which startled her. And indeed, they were gone.  The point was that I put her into a state of fear arousal and induced a startle response---both of which blanketted-out the feedback loop the neres in her diaphram were stuck in.   I could tell that both of my friends were very surprised and a little bit scared that I was able to do this.

If someone lived a long life in a community of people and chose to do things like this on a regular basis, you could see how they would begin to think of her as a "miracle worker".  But I would argue that these are nothing more than the fruits of being able to see the world more clearly and interact with it more completely as a result of meditation.  I believe that this is the root of most of the stories about the "siddhis".  I will admit that there are also very odd things that happen when you meditate.  But I would suggest that their oddity is more a question of our lack of current understanding about the world around us than evidence of some sort of supernatural.  If telephathy, for example, really does exist, I suspect that it will eventually be understood in a prosaic fashion---just like electricity and the periodic table---rather than be some sort of proof of an old man in the sky.   

A Response to Zhekai

My last post drew a significant response from a reader. Since it raises a lot of interesting points, I thought that I'd respond to it in some detail. His (I'm assuming the gender) statements will be in red, my responses in regular text.


Greetings.
I find it ironic that someone drawing on the wisdom of the Dao De Jing would criticise Christianity from such a modernist perspective.

Actually, I try not to "draw upon the wisdom of the Dao De Jing" so much as access the same source as wisdom as the people who's voices are recorded in the Dao De Jing. As I understand it, Daoism is an "inspired" religion, not a "revealed" one. The difference is that Daoists are taught how to connect with the world around them and find the truth that lies within it, not to follow a revelation that was given only once in the historical past and which can now be accessed only through an ancient and obscure book.

My specific Daoist practice consists primarily of following practices such as meditation, ritual, taijiquan, etc. Moreover, as befits someone who was initiated into a heterodox offshoot of the Quanzhen tradition, I have studied with a lot of people in other faiths---Buddhist, Catholic, Unitarian, etc. I also read a lot of books besides the Dao De Jing----the Daoist Canon is the largest of all the religions of the world. If a religion believes that someone can still gain wisdom from the wellspring of inspiration, then its scriptures will continue to grow just like any other library of literature. This is a very significant difference from the Abrihamic religions, which believe that the time of revelation has long past and no additions can be anything but heresy.

Oh, and I don't think what I wrote was a critique of Christianity per ce, just a form of very conservative Roman Catholicism.


I don't know enough about Mother Theresa to defend her, but I know enough about Catholicism to disagree with your criticisms.

For example, although it is wrong to baptise someone without their knowledge or consent, their is nothing wrong with the desire to convert people to the religion which you believe to be true.

If you say that it is wrong to baptise someone without their knowledge or consent, then you are agreeing with me that Mother Teresa was doing something very wrong. If the ex-nun is telling the truth, this is exactly what she was instructing her nuns to do.


In fact, it would be truly abominable if she believed in her religion, but *didn't* desire to share it with others.

So in fact, this motivation is higher than simply wishing to relieve poverty. You can disagree with her religious beliefs, but at least she is consistent with them.

There are a variety of issues here.

First of all, what does her religion consist of if it is possible to "share" it with another person by simply wiping someone's brow and mumbling some unintelligible words just before they die---and then telling no one else about it? This is a form of simplistic, "magical" thinking. My understanding of Christianity is that it is not about giving people a "ticket to heaven", but rather about changing the way people relate to each other in this world. This is why there is all that stuff in the Gospels about "the Kingdom of God", giving to the poor, etc.

Secondly, what does this deception say about Teresa's understanding of human dignity? It may be that a person can believe with all their heart that something is in another's best interests, but once one uses trickery or force to deny them the right to choose another option, you are denying them something exceptionally important. These dying beggars had only one thing left to them---their faith as a Muslim or Hindu---and Mother Teresa tried to steal it away from them. If she really valued them as human beings she would have to allow them the right to freely choose to die as Muslims or Hindus, no matter what she thought herself. That is what it means to respect someone else.

Yes, Teresa may have been, in some ways, consistent. But consistency is a pretty weak foundation to build respect upon. History is littered with thoroughly consistent fiends.

Moreover, I would argue that there is a basic inconsistency to the message of Teresa. She said that she loved the poor, yet she felt no responsibility to treat them as equals, nor any to defend them against the predators of the world that feed upon them, and even she admitted to her spiritual director that she felt like she was deceiving her nuns because she kept going on about the love of God in her public utterances while feeling nothing at all herself.


If you believe in the truth and value of Daoism, would you not desire others to reach an understanding or appreciation of it? If not, then how much do you really value and believe in it?

Your language undoes your argument. I am interested in helping others "understand" and "appreciate" it, but that is totally different from wiping a dying person's brow, mumbling under my breath and keeping the whole process a secret from the community. Understanding and appreciation comes from a genuine, two-way back and forth interaction---one where both sides enter in with the chance of learning. Teresa entered into her relations assuming that she was in a position of moral superiority and refused to engage the people she dealt with as equals. This is not a way to spread understanding but rather one of imposing your will on another.

Another point you criticise was her attitude to suffering. The idea of sharing in Christ's suffering is a profound element of Christian theology. It may sound strange to 'modern' people, but that isn't necessarily a problem is it? ;)

The problem isn't that it "sounds strange", but rather the reason why it sounds strange. Again, it is magical thinking. The idea is that God requires a scapegoat to deal with the consequences of a set of rules and regulations that he set up in the first place. If God is all powerful, why can't he simply forgive people's sins without the whole idea of his son being tortured on the cross? The concept of scapegoating is fairly well-understood by anthropologists and has existed in a great many societies---ranging from the Jewish ritual where the term "scape goat" comes from to the Indian and African tribes that used to torture people to death in order to ensure a good harvest. It may be that there is something in humanity that creates this sort of activity in primitive human societies, but its presence in conservative Christian theology seems to be unnecessary in this day and age. I might also add that there is a very significant school of Christian theology that rejects this form of thinking.

Beyond my questioning of the scapegoat theology, I might also point out that what I was most repelled by was the way Teresa seemed to revel in pain. I'm no psychologist, but it seemed really unhealthy and masochistic in nature. It strikes me that a spiritual director should have tried to wean her off of this simply for her own good. But the issue becomes much more problematic when we realize that she was running an order of nuns who mission included dealing with the dying. People who are dying often have very significant pain issues, and it shows profoundly bad judgement (and a real lack of compassion) to have someone in charge who thinks pain has some sort of intrinsic value. This attitude explains why---even though there seems to have been lots of money in the bank---she ran homes for the dying where there was no better pain killer than aspirin on hand. There are people who get off sexually through sado-maschocism, but in that case it is consensual. What Teresa was doing was non-consensual, and as such, was criminal.

I appreciate your understanding that life is an 'ocean of suffering', but i disagree that her views are merely a 'coping mechanism' any more than meditation and detachment are.

My apologies if I was not clear enough in my explanation. Meditation, detachment, and diverting your gaze are all coping mechanisms. My concern about her "faith" is not that it is such a thing, but rather that it is such a profoundly awful one. I was arguing that her "leap of faith" removed any opportunity for her to grow as a human being and that it was why her life was one of such profound misery and has done very little to make the world a better place.

The image of the crucifixion is one of suffering and death - which were seen as unavoidable flaws in creation - meeting with the incarnation of the Creator himself, someone who is completely free of such flaws.

The whole thing is regarded as a 'mystery', which means it is true, but hard for us to understand. It is regarded as the key to life itself. I don't think this should be too hard to appreciate at least on a symbolic level, given that you are familiar with the concept of the Dao lifting up the lowly and lowering the great.


It is not "hard to understand", it is incomprehensible because it doesn't follow the rules of logic. There is a famous anecdote in physics where a person said of another's theory that it was so bad that it wasn't even wrong. That is to say that the theory not only didn't accord with experimental facts, but it didn't even make any sense. When you say that there were "unavoidable flaws in creation", you are suggesting that God is either not omnipotent or totally good. Moreover, you suggest that suffering and death are flaws yet then go on to say that the Creator---who is free of flaws---was incarnate. So what is it? Is incarnation unavoidably flawed? If so, how could Jesus be flawless? (The Muslims get around this by having Jesus commit one sin, he stole a pin.) If Jesus was flawless, then how is creation "unavoidably flawed"? And if death and suffering are flaws, then how could a flawless God end up suffering and dying on a cross?

With all due respect, this sort of theology is not much different than the sort of meaningless "speaking of tongues" that happens at evangelical revival shows. It is the result of strong emotions that are divorced from reason. As I pointed out before, it makes more sense to see this theological position as simply a manifestation of classic scapegoating behaviour. And again, there are quite popular Christian theologies that reject this "cross-tianity" in favour of a social gospel based on transforming society according to the teachings of Christ.

With regard to the Dao "lifting up the lowly and lowering the great", I don't know the context you are referring to, but my take on Daoism is that it is a very practical religion that is talking about the way the world really works. In the case of Mother Teresa I would suggest that one particular way this rule is operating is through the idea that "the truth will out". The lowly street person who was complaining about the pain of his cancer who was quoted by Hitchens has been raised by the book (and my blog), whereas the mighty Mother Teresa has been lowered by showing her lack of compassion when she told him that the pain was the "kisses of Christ". Other than that, I can't see the reference as being much more than a non-sequitur with regard to Christ.


Mother Theresa, i cannot comment on her personal state of mind; but if you look at the writings of great Christian mystics, you will find that contemplation of this mystery brings them into a state that contains great detachment and self-lessness without erring on the side of emptiness.

Well, that's the whole point isn't it? When I read the letters she wrote to her spiritual advisor, all I saw was a person suffering in torment but who was too enmeshed in her cultural matrix and too cowardly to admit that what she was doing had granted her neither detachment nor serenity. Religion is supposed to liberate a person, not enslave them. That is the tragedy here. With regard to Christian mystics, I think that you would have to refer to specific individuals as there is a huge difference between, for example, Nicholas of Cusa and St. Ignatius.


I'm sorry, but your criticisms sound like those i have heard directed against buddhists...from christians who call them 'nihilists'. Or who in the past thought of the Daoists as guys who just ran away to forget the world.

Actually, I don't think that my criticisms are anything like the ones you mention. I was suggesting that Mother Teresa's life was a tragedy because her concept of "faith" stunted her spiritual growth. The critiques you are suggesting tend to suggest that Buddhists and Daoists are not engaged in the world.


You may be right that MT was struggling to deal with her suffering, and used her work with the poor to make sense of it. But then this - if we can risk saying so - is a problem for her, not for the religion you criticise. She may be like some peasant buddhist who recites 'omitofo' thinking it will make their life easier...but i don't think that is grounds for criticising buddhism itself.

Do you?

You forget that Mother Teresa was not a peasant. She was the head of an order of nuns, the recipient of the Nobel Peace prize, and will probably soon be declared a saint. She is being used as the pre-eminent icon for the promotion of a specific form of ultra-conservative Roman Catholicism. Moreover, my greatest criticism is not for her---she was an ignorant Albanian peasant girl---but for her spiritual advisors and the hierarchy of the church. They used her to promote the church instead of guiding her to a deeper understanding. It probably is the case that they were just as deluded as she was, which means that we need to dig deeper in order to find culpability. Ultimately, everyone who refuses to make the effort to seek the truth wherever it may lay---and that includes all the people who simply "buy into" the myth---should take some responsibility for her sad and tragic life. We are all interdependent elements of the universe.


It would be interesting to find some buddhists and daoists in similar situations and see how they express their understanding of suffering.

This isn't the place to discuss Buddhist and Daoist ideas of suffering. But it certainly is the case that many words have been written on the subject. Indeed, Buddhism is pretty much in total a meditation on the issue. And some Buddhists and Daoists have been engaged in social work that has placed them face to face with suffering. Moreover, I would suggest that those elements of Christianity that reject the scapegoat theology are the ones most committed to the alleviation of suffering. After all, if you believe that suffering has some sort of grand metaphysical value, why would you try to end it?


Finally, I think you hint at ideas about the roots of poverty, and the significance of abortion which are completely a product of the present age. I don't think it is necessarily a Daoist attitude, and it is certainly not a Christian attitude to think that we can eradicate poverty and suffering by getting to its root causes. Or rather, for christians the root cause of poverty - like all evil - is fallen human nature. I suspect for Daoists it is likewise the flaws in our originally pure nature.


Zhekai



Well one thing that needs to be understood is that abortion is a modern issue through and through. It wasn't all that long ago that church doctrine was that the soul of a child did not enter it until birth. (Which is a position than that even the most extreme pro-choice advocate would reject.) Abortion simply wasn't much of an issue before it became a safe, therapeutic procedure and large families became a liability instead of an asset. Infanticide was the option of choice for people who could not afford an extra mouth to feed.

Yes, poverty is a modern issue too. Up until the modern era most people did not see the world in terms of social and economic systems. Instead, there was just the "world" and people who were either "good" or "bad". Now we can see through the study of sociology that there are ways that the world operates, and very good people can end up following "the rules of the game" and thereby create a great deal of misery. Because Teresa had been so isolated from the hard-won gains of modern learning, she was oblivious to the way people like dictators and financial swindlers abuse people that they never even meet. She could meet Charles Keating Jr. and think "what a nice man" and not be aware of the people he had driven into poverty through his phoney businesses. (Teresa not only accepted money from him, but even wrote a letter to the judge who was trying him asking for forgiveness for his swindling.)

Incidentally, one of the things that I find appealing about Daoism (and some elements of Confucianism) is the way various thinkers do meditate on the roots of poverty. For example, Daoist writers do think about things like the way regulations impact on people's lives, and how the increase of desperate people who become bandits is related to the level of taxation in a society. Daoists tend to see the world in terms of impersonal processes rather than that of sinful people willfully breaking God's laws. Indeed, the Celestial Master suggests that good people should not be prideful because much of their good comes from their personal history and social context, and bad people should not be totally condemned because much of their evil comes from similar sources.

It may be that individual people have specific psychological drives that keep them from seeing the evil they do---such as psychopaths---but society as-a-whole can work to limit the damage that they do. And people who are being put forward as exemplars of spiritual attainment should have the discernment to be able to avoid being used to by these individuals. If the discernment is lacking, then what exactly is the spiritual value that people like Teresa are supposed to have?

Finally, again with all due respect, I don't think what you are saying about Daoism is comprehensible. If our original nature is pure, how can it have flaws? If it has the potential to be flawed, isn't that a flaw in itself? I can hear Zhuangzi in the background chuckling and tossing in the comment "Now, how would I know that?"

We Swim in an Ocean of Suffering----

I haven't posted for a long time primarily because I've been working on a book. Whether anything comes of it or not, I have enjoyed taking the time to research, think and write about things without any time pressures.

As part of the research, I've been reading a lot on Mother Teresa; and this, in turn, has got me thinking about some pretty deep questions.

I got interested in Teresa because she seems to embody the failings conservative Catholic spirituality. I say that because there is a lot of published material from her (especially her book of letters to her spiritual directors), so it is relatively easy to "get inside her head"----and what there is to see isn't very pretty.

A lot of people would be surprised by this (actually, as I was too.) Most of what we know about her is some sort of generalized feeling that she spent her life helping the poorest of the poor. And to give the woman her due, it does seem that her order of nuns have done a great deal to help suffering people in the world.

But if you read her writings it all seems to have been built on a set of ideas that would repell most modern folk. For example, her primary motivation seems to not have been to help the poor and relieve suffering, but rather to convert them to Roman Catholicism. And her pity for the poor is ultimately because they are going to die as non-Catholics and end up in Hell. For example, she had the phrase "I thirst" placed prominently in the chapels of all Missionaries of Charity homes. I suspect that most people who see this assume that it refers to the idea that Christ suffered when he was on the Cross (where the phrase comes from in the New Testament), and similarly the poor also suffer. Teresa's writings make it very clear, however, that she placed the motto because she saw it as meaning that Christ "thirsts" for the souls of the poor and suffering. Indeed, an ex-Missionary of Charity relates in an unpublished manuscript (quoted by Christopher Hitchens) that Teresa instructed her nuns to secretly baptize dying Hindu and Muslim patients by asking them if they would like a "ticket to heaven" and then mopping their brows with a wet cloth if they said anything positive in reply.

Another thing that certainly sounded weird to me was the way she glorified suffering in a way that sounds like out-and-out masochism. For example, in many places she writes about her nuns as being "victims of Christ's love". And in a quote from Hitchens she describes the pain of a person dying of cancer as "the kisses of Christ". Indeed, this revelry in pain and suffering seems to have been the core of Mother Teresa's spirituality. As her letters to her spiritual directors reveal, after the initial period when her order of nuns was established, she seems to have suffered from a never-ending horrorshow of depression (what Catholic spirituality calls "desolation" or "spiritual aridity".) At points she even doubted the existence of God. The way she dealt with this wasn't to let it spur her into a re-examination of how she was living her life and guiding her nuns, however. Instead, she decided that Jesus had singled her out for the especially excruciating "gift" of sharing in his pain and suffering. Her advisors didn't see this as unwholesome masochism, however, but evidence of faith in God.

Originally, I wasn't terribly sympathetic to all of this---and I still think that it is extremely wrong-headed---but as I spent more time thinking about it, the more I came to think that I understand what was going on. As I see it, we have to remember that this earthly existence is an ocean of human suffering. The Dao De Jing acknowledges this with its statement that 'Heaven and Earth treat humans like straw dogs'. The Buddhists understand this by saying that 'Life is Dukkha'. This comes especially home to me when I go to my local Unitarian church and listen to people in the congregation announce their various "joys and concerns". Even in a very small congregation on one Sunday it isn't that uncommon to have more than one person stand up and announce a really nasty concern in their life---a terminal illness, death of a child, business collapse, etc. As a nun ministering to the desperate poor of Calcutta, Teresa spent a great deal of her life dog-paddling around in this sea of misery. As such, I suspect that she simply had to develop some sort of coping mechanism for dealing with it.

The response of most people to all of this suffering is to turn their heads away and try to ignore it through various forms of denial. But people who live introverted, spiritually-directed lives (like Catholic nuns who aspire to sainthood) do not allow themselves this luxury. They try to stare full-on into the face of this misery and understand it. Mother Teresa was a very simple, uneducated woman from a very conservative Catholic background. As such, she simply couldn't start to see the poor in a social context, which means that she was consigned to the ultimately fruitless job of what Henry David Thoreau would have called "hacking at the leaves of evil while leaving the roots intact". Moreover, since Christianity teaches believers to focus outside of the believer onto a deity, she had no meditative practice to follow that would have allowed her to develop detachment and equanimity in her daily work with the poor. Instead, she had to "put everything onto Jesus". My understanding is that followers of Eastern spirituality can develop the wisdom to see suffering as an illusion, but all Christianity gave to Teresa was the option of using an act of willpower to simply accept it all on faith. Faith was enough to keep her going in a punishing work schedule and put forward a cheerful facade to her nuns and the rest of the world---but it does not seem to have been enough to let her be happy.

And if Christopher Hitchen's book about her can be believed, this faith was not enough to give her any wisdom about the world around her. She was regularly used by evil people who gave her money so they could use her to give them credibility, she seems to have not used the vast sums of money donated to her mission in anything like an efficient manner to help the poor she was supposed to be serving, she opposed any sort of artificial birth control, and, when she won the Nobel Peace Prize announced to the world that the greatest threat to world peace was abortion. In other words, the fruits of her life of service and prayer amounted to not much more than non-offensive charity work and whatever platitudes the Pope had decided were important.

How very sad and empty.

Daoism and Science

I cruise around the internet a fair amount and once in a while I "eaves-drop" on conversations on Daoism discussion boards. Usually I'm more than a little disappointed by what I read (which is why I decided to start writing this blog.) Part of this stems from the antagonism to science I routinely observe.

I understand why many ordinary people are concerned about "science". But it needs to be pointed out that what people are reacting against is not science, per se, but rather something altogether different: the rapid adoption of powerful technologies without any appreciation of their impact on the world.

Scientists often get upset about this antipathy and proclaim that it is totally misplaced, but I think they have to accept some blame because the culture of scientific research consistently evades any sort of moral responsibility for the consequences of the application of their research. (Incidentally, I think at least part of the solution would be to make being a scientist a regulated profession---like a doctor or lawyer--- so there can be sanctions applied to misconduct.) To a large extent, I think that this is because most scientists see what they do with a certain romanticism that is increasingly out-of-step with reality. For them, the iconic image is that of a lonely researcher seeking the roots of reality. In contrast, ordinary citizens more often envision a huge corporation developing new some new technology and willfully "fudging" its research to hide from government regulators any harmful side-effects. Scientists think "penicillin", while concerned citizens think "thalidomide".

In actual fact, there are precious few independent researchers in the world today. The overwhelming majority work for large institutions following agendas that are far from altruistic. Researchers mostly work for corporations, the military or universities. And of those that work at universities, most either work for grants by the military or corporations, or departments that increasingly tailor their research to make themselves more attractive to outside money from these two sources. (I know a retired biology professor who complains bitterly about how concern about patent infringement has destroyed the sense of collegiality that used to exist at the university where he taught.)

If scientists are honest with themselves they admit that science is now big business. And while ordinary citizens see a great deal of value in the free market, they also understand that it is basically amoral and reckless. The invisible hand is simply not interested in moral questions or the well-being of the community.

Some of the people who are concerned about the dangers that market-controlled technology end up on Daoist discussion boards. There are probably a lot of reasons why, but several immediately come to my mind.

People see concerns about education in some Daoist texts and then jump to the conclusion that this is similar to modern fears about technology. For example, if you check out the Dao De Jing you will find passages that say a ruler should keep his subjects' stomachs full and their minds empty. But contrary to what modern readers may think, the scholarly consensus is that this is a suggestion that ignorant peasants are easier to control than educated ones, rather than a statement about the inherent value of knowledge. (Large parts of the Dao De Jing are somewhat cynical suggestions about how a governor can retain control of a state. But that is at topic for another post.)

There is also a significant strain in Daoism that suggests that greed for knowledge can be just as great a barrier to wisdom as greed for wealth and power. Zhuangzi, for example, begins chapter three of his book with the following:

Our lives are limited,
But knowledge is limitless.
To pursue the limitless
With the limited Is dangerous.
(Victor Mair trans.)

The casual reader has to understand, however, that this rejection of greed for knowledge was always balanced by a profound interest in a certain type of learning. This gets back to a paradox that lies at the root of Daoism---the striving to become someone who doesn't strive. The author of the Dao De Jing starts the book by warning that the Dao that can be spoken of is not the real Dao. And yet, he goes on make a great many statements about the Dao anyway. More to the point, no matter how many times in the Daoist tradition people have written about the value of "going with the flow", a great many more words have been used to describe very intense practices aimed at changing oneself. "Going with the flow" only seems to happen after one has put a lot of effort into swimming upstream! A problem I have with a lot of casual modern readers who identify themselves as "Daoists" is that they simply refuse to see any reason for putting in all of this effort.

Modern readers don't understand the cultural assumptions that the ancient Daoists were working with or reacting against. The first of these is the concept of "kung-fu", which is probably one of the deepest held of Chinese cultural artifacts. Most Westerners will only associate this concept with Bruce Lee and acrobatic martial arts. But the term really refers to any type of applied work that results in a deep and almost miraculous ability to do something well. So "kung-fu" in martial arts results in someone like Bruce Lee or the Shaolin Monks. But it also applies to any other human activity, and Zuangzi discusses it with regard to butchers, carpenters, boatmen, archers and so on. Another example of kung-fu comes from Journey to the West. In that book all the miraculous creatures, demons, Gods, immortals, etc, started out as ordinary beings and gained their powers through applied work. Even animals and plants can become immortals if they simply apply themselves to kung-fu.

Zhuangzi is not arguing against kung-fu, but rather against a sort of pedantic Confucianism that has been prevalent in China for time immemorial. Modern readers don't understand this because they don't live in a world where all the major institutions are controlled by a literati class that gained most of their power by passing examinations based on a very stylized and abstract form of Chinese scholasticism. (Anyone interested in this subject might consider reading The Scholars, by Ching-Tzu.) Moreover, because we live in such an egalitarian society (at least in contrast to ancient China) we don't understand that Zhuangzi was making a very strong statement simply by taking as examples people in such lowly occupations as butchers, carpenters and boatmen. In effect, Zhuangzi is not opposed to learning, but rather a specific form of pseudo-learning that is based on rote repetition of the Confucian classics. Indeed, since it can be argued that what is so valuable about the teaching of the butchers, etc, is that it is grounded in practical reality, Daoists should be seen as supporters of scientific study instead of being opposed to it.

Another way in which modern-day supporters of the Way oppose science comes from their tendency to latch onto old metaphysical language from ancient texts and hold onto it with the grip of death. The worst offender is the concept of "qi" and the practice of "qi gong".

"Qi" is word that is found throughout texts from the very beginning of Daoism yet is never really well explained anywhere. The important point for Daoist practitioners is that it has become associated with the strange feelings one gets when one begins to practice an internal art like taijiquan or internal alchemy. The problem is that people are not content to describe these feelings as they experience them but feel obligated to move on to make wild generalizations about what these feelings are caused by and their relative importance in the practice.

The problem is that people use the idea of "qi" as what philosophers describe as an "occult quality". Occult qualities (or, "faculties") are metaphysical substances that are used to explain other phenomenon. The problem is, however, that they are totally unknown, (hence the term "occult"), which means that they do not actually serve any purpose at all in describing the phenomenon at hand. In the language of science, therefore, if you cannot actually measure what you are talking about, it serves no purpose whatsoever and merely confuses people. In the case of Qi-Gong, therefore, the fact that we cannot actually measure or point to "qi", it is best to simply describe what we feel and not make any further step to talk about "qi".

The English rationalists came up with the idea of "occult qualities" because they were trying to cut away a lot of empty verbiage that was left over in scientific discourse from a previous era. If, for example, they were looking at an herb that helped people sleep the traditional way of understanding it was to say that it contained a "dormative (i.e. "causes sleep") quality"---like all other similar herbs. What the philosophers were pointing out was that the only thing that we can say with any faith is that this particular herb helps people sleep. Other herbs also help people go to sleep, but it is an over-generalization (because we have no evidence to say so) to say that the reason why this herb helps a person sleep is the same as the reason why another herb does too.

In fact, an appeal to occult quality actually hinders our understanding because it seems to give an answer (e.g. "dormative quality"), when it does nothing of the sort. At this point people were thinking that they had an answer and then stopped looking more deeply into the subject through observation and experimentation. I would argue that in the same way many self-described Daoists have a similar attitude to notions like "qi". They think that the word means more than "a funny feeling I have when I do taijiquan", and then stop paying attention. (Usually this is the point where they hang up a shingle and start charging money for lessons----.)

What I think this all stems from is that ancient China was a pre-scientific society. And in such places people still need to be able to transmit information from generation to generation. But this can be extremely hard to do if we don't have a conceptual framework that links different ideas together. To understand this point, think about any difficult subject you have had to learn. Until you understood the underlying principles that explained everything you are doing, you felt like you had to memorize a lot of jumbled steps. Once "the penny dropped", however, everything seemed to make sense.

If no one in your society really understand how it is that things link together, the "penny" is never going to drop for anyone. So in order to help make sense of it all, people have to create pseudo-reasons to explain things. And that is where ideas like "qi" come from. Saying that a martial arts move (or the progression of the seasons, change in government, etc) comes from the flow of "qi" isn't really telling anyone what is happening. It is sort of like using a "spacer" to fill in the part of a puzzle where the piece is missing just so the whole thing won't jumble up again if the table gets bumped. As such, it served a very useful purpose way back when. But if we hold onto it now simply because we venerate the old, we are not gaining "ancient Chinese wisdom" but instead making fools of ourselves.

The thing to remember about the old Daoists is that they lived a long, long, long time ago. They were confronted by a very different world and came up with answers that were remarkably sophisticated and very practical. Our world is very, very different. There is a lot that we can use from the Daoist solution, but only if we apply it properly. By focusing on peripheral issues, instead of holding onto its fruitful core, we completely and absolutely miss the point. The people who reject science as being opposed to the Dao have done so.