GoAnimate.com: More About Dao by taoareyou

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GoAnimate.com: What is Dao? by taoareyou

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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.

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.

I am one of those that consider Science a faith.  Science is filled with “best guesses” that explain the unknown.  They say that 96% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy.  Nobody has ever actually been able to detect an actual dark matter particle, but they believe them to exist because of the way their gravity affects light.  Another theory says that everything is made up of vibrating “strings” but these are too small for us to observe right now.  These parts of science are called “theories” and basically are explanations that, if accepted, are done so with some level of faith.

I like Science, it brings us fun stuff like computers and the Internet.  Other faiths in the past also brought us good things.  Sure, they brought bad things too, but I don’t need to point out the multitude of bad things science has brought along with the positive.  But for me I recognize that eventually a new understanding of the world that will advance us even further will come to be.  Every other faith in the past has been replaced over time.  A classic zealot of Science would say that this too would be science, because only through the scientific method can we know the universe.  As a child I was told that only through Christ could I know God.  Same thing, different words.

So if every answer out there has become outdated by doubt or simply doesn’t set with you in a satisfactory manner, you have lost all faith.  It can be a very uncomfortable position because you now have no answers concerning the unknown.  As a philosophical Taoist, my solution is to have my faith be that things will be what they will be.  No matter what religions or sciences tell us, things will always be what they are.  The only thing that changes is our understanding of them.

When an answer fails, the world hasn’t changed.  It’s the constant.  This is what I accept.  Then I can accept that all other perceptions, beliefs, answers, religions, sciences can be wrong and need to change or be set aside as I explore new understanding.

Faith is a journey.  A journey we each walk our entire lifetime.  It’s very personal.  It’s about you or me and our own understanding of the world, of the universe, of all things physical and spiritual.  Make your faith about finding answers rather than following them, and you will never be lost.