More About Dao
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What Is Dao?
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Order and Chaos?
A well known Daoist view is that generally when we define something, it comes with an opposite: light and dark, up and down, good and evil, happy and sad. Chapter 2 of the Daodejing states, “When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly.” (Mitchell). So to be able to recognize order we must have chaos.
However I believe that chaos does not exist except as marker for our limits of understanding. We see chaos as disarray, following no predictable course. There is no order in chaos, right?
But really, can anything truly be chaotic? Are there things that are not subject to the laws of physics? When a star goes supernova, every single particle involved in that massive, seemingly chaotic explosion moves and reacts within a system rules and, knowing all the variables affecting any of the particles, we could say, “Yes, this is how we expect that to move”. But when we do not fully know all the variables and conditions, we cannot predict something with unerring accuracy.
What we think is chaos is simply things acting the way they will act, without us having a full understanding of everything involved.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of a chaotic system (ok, well the second thing after the image of Jeff Goldblum in that dinosaur movie) is the weather. Despite all our fancy equipment and science, we cannot predict when and where a tornado will hit far enough in advance to always be prepared for them. But is the weather chaotic? No, it follows all the same laws of physics as everything else. The problem is that the Earth’s weather is a massive, dynamic system. There are more conditions than we have the capability to measure and track. Satellites and radar can tell us what’s happening, and we can tell the speed and general direction. We can even tell how heavy the rain within a storm. But all of this gives us only basic forecasting.
Yet the storm is most assuredly moving within the rules and parameters of physics. Rules we didn’t create and are still discovering. Order exists everywhere at all times. It’s not even order. Order only exists because we don’t fully understand it and have thus labelled those parts we don’t understand as chaos.
To me, this is Tao. The way things are. The way things flow. It’s the order we understand, and the order we don’t.
Faith
Via Twitter, @TheOnlyRealSage asked me if I have any words on lost faith or hope. To start with, we need to understand what these words mean. Faith is often used interchangeably with belief or trust. In such cases, to lose your faith in someone would mean a loss of trust or belief in their words or actions. Another use of “lost faith” is in a wider spiritual sense and means to become disillusioned with a particular view. In this light, Faith is the acceptance of an explanation for something that has no other reasoning that satisfies you. When you begin to doubt this explanation, you lose acceptance and eventually you’re left with no satisfactory answers.
The problem with faith in a specific system or religion is these are generally static, meaning they have little room for change. Yet answers must change as our understanding of the world changes. Anything unable to reasonably grow with our awareness will often bring us into direct conflict between our faith and our understanding. While it may be possible to make enough justifications in our minds to reconcile these differences, it’s often that we have to let go of old answers that simply no longer work for us.
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