Essay on Tao and Anti-Tao

By W. Rabbit.

It is the tradition of people to rely on the intellect, on being able to understand rationally, to limit the unknown to the known and translate perception. It is commonplace to use our intellect to explain things to others or enable things to be explained to us which we do not understand – and naturalt to make the effort to explain things that cannot be explained. Explanation, however it plays out, is suitable/servicable for many things, for things in general – but it is not difficult to demonstrate the restraint built into language as a means to communicate, or show that it involves a prejudice of time and space used as the basis for its model of understanding. This model cannot be changed or evolved to explain certain things because of its inherent duality and the present lack of understanding of the power of a duality-driven mindset – moreover the model contains within itself by virtue of its duality a self-regulating gyroscope that causes language to perpetuate duality – and itself like an unchanging fractal that falls into itself forever.

This can be illustrated quite easily by the observation that the order of words has a direct result on the reader (who percieves) – and reacts. How you react is for all intents and purposes random – but that you react is not. We can see that Ideas, as communicated by others are perhaps never simply accepted as a pure communication that passes exactly what the writer had in mind onto paper or screen – they almost always generate conflict – as if the writer is unable to capture an objective statement of truth no matter what words they choose to use, how carefully they phrase them, or how ever many clauses and asterisks and footnotes they may include. Writing, tends to have an automatic effect of causing a reaction rather than a reflexion. Caution at this point is advised against imposing a moral conclusion over this fact – my concern is never whether this process is “good” or “bad” but simply to illustrate and prove the existence of the process. By reaction I mean an unconscious pull by the ego to respond to the stimulus received – however it chooses to interpret it, and by reflexion I mean a contemplative state of occult and self awareness that recognizes one has reactions but does not automatically obey them as prompted by the ego.

The point of A-causal to Zen is not to provide another phenomena on which to hang ones causal hat, nor provide another point in space to speculate intellectually – however causally titillating the temptation and rewarding/gratifying the poetic associations that flow in tribute – but represents a faint light in the distance of the logos that dawns from time to time in the face of contemplation. It is borne of the struggle to escape language, morality, duality, time and those dead weights we recycle in absurdio when faced with the prospect of something we are told we cannot know. It is the gnosis that jettisons causal spatial suppositions – spurns our doctrine of cartesian grid unconsciously imposed that orders phenomena to be ‘from’, ‘within’, ‘next to’, ‘outside’, ‘inside’, ‘beyond’ – simplifying the vast into the discrete using tensions that imply the existence of singular autonomous points. Unfortunately, in the desire to share, experience is written down, all too often profaning the mystery because of the means by which its message is carried.

The attempt to try to Know unhinges any knowing precisely because Words – those causal prisoners and jailers – are used to denote occulture. As soon as the word a-causal presents itself it undergoes a transformation, literal and literary. Its presence creates a shadow, an order, and is forcibly slotted into various heirarchies – pushed into and out of place by the law of words that draws some together and pushes other apart – an automatic dichotomy inherent in the supposed freedom of language to express. Viz. express freely – but within the limits of freedom.

In word or form the a-causal comes under verbal law. It becomes a ‘thing’ like all other mundane things, disposable, drained of wonder, drained of authenticity. As is the doctrine of verbal law, the word/sound/form once presenced causally is subject to the laws of form. Its name, used as a key to point toward a wordless door, a silent desert that rebukes understanding – is abused, misunderstood and sullied by clumsy attempts to extrapolate its purity with a barrage of associations and connective verbal tissues. It is thrown into the morass of language, sat next to words it has no sincere desire to be with, and forced to represent our will for it to be the occult secret itself. Causality supposes –this- and –that- to make separations where there are only prejudiced traditions of experiencing the world through the window of the human-centred ego. We cannot imagine what would be without our license to suppose, and it is ironic that our faith in knowledge prevents the evolution of it.

The word a-causal denotes an anti-concept, a sound for a vacuum of meaning outside the framework we conveniently apply. It does not denote a thing, a state, a term, word, or inference available to us through language – it is outside of language, indeed outside of languages ability to relate or even present – and that is precisely the words/sounds point – as a stop sign indicating the city limits of perception.

Like Zen before it, it is subjected to the same problems all words create – no matter what occult (hidden) wisdom they attempt to convey – once a word, immediately a form. Using a frame of reference built with instituted causal tools and prejudices people attach all manner of meaning and explaination to weigh down the sublime. To suppose nothing we must suppose something. How many ways have people tried to show Nothing. When it comes to the acausal people cannot leave well enough alone.

We build up a causal model of something we simply cannot fathom – precisely because we cannot fathom it. Precisely because we have a word like fathom and hate to waste it! We hate the idea that the universe could present something our lofty sentience could not control, we despise her secrets and her mysteries because they make us feel weak, small and powerless. They are anathema to the ego, laughter at our arrogance, vitriol to those proud inner voices to which we entrust our humanity. We hate the unknown – it is a glaring truism in everything we do, in everything we name. We masturbate ourselves over daring thoughts of some untouchable void, orgasm over the fantasy that there is something forbidden, something we cannot attain, some realm or world we cannot master – some escapist dimension on which we can dream in order to forget. But the foreplay does not last – and we **** ourselves.

We pour down tributes to our ignorance and enshrine our desperate fumbles as wisdom – congratulating ourselves that we managed to fit the word A-causal/Zen into our writing next to other words – to contain it, explain it, attain it – even if only to highlight it by virtue of what we didn’t say by surrounding it with causality as many times as we could. Then, we pat ourselves on the back and move on to imprison the next purity and sublime occult experience that dares to think itself above our causal verbal laws. Its what we’ve always done, its what we’ll always do.

Our reaction to the anti-concept of the A-causal provides deep and humiliating insight into the fragility and mentality of the collective human race and its paralyzing fear of the occult – of the hidden. Of a thing that dares remain truly hidden.

Greetings..

Sometimes.. we are simply still and quiet, and 'isness' reveals itself to us.. without words, or laws, or any formality other than the quiet understanding..

Other times, there is the need to negotiate obstacles, and words meet words.. such that the quiet understanding has space in which to be understood..

Be well..

Greetings..

Stillness, like a thick fog,
Erases the names of things
It sedates a stubborn mind,
It silences opposition to silence
And lays bare what is there
That innocence might discover
Itself again, in a moment
Taking its unnoticed time
Passing the deserted landscape
Of a mind’s former glory

Be well..

tongue tied, thru an empty hide,
ripped from crotch to crown
Brilliance within an empty skin
that simply gazes round.
In silence does dwell thru this empty shell
nothing more or less
percieved/revealed in limitless spacelessness.

*claps with one hand* "deep".

The Tao Te Ching is such a wild piece of literature. It is so simple, yet is so penetrating.

There is a word for the difficulty in retaining a concept for which there is no word.
If it is not named, we cannot easily retain a concept.
Anti-Tao? Spoilsport? Rain on your parade?
The Tao teaches one to identify only that which demonstrates a primary function. All else can be left out of ones perspective.
Materialism...Kind of a ball and chain of objects.
Spiritual superiority...a doublestandard (innocence is lost).
Intellectualization:theory is dead without practical application.