My Critique on Taoism

Ok, as long awaited, I've been looking for a religion/philosophy to critisize other than those of the Abrahamic Branch of things. So I felt it only right that I critisize the philosophy that I relate most to, so first I'll paste in an article that I found that resonates some of the beliefs of Taoists, then I'll critisize things that don't necessarily make sense.


You've probably caught Wayne Dyer on public television, pacing the stage, offering self-help wisdom in between the channel's fund-driving pitches. Or maybe you're one of the many millions who bought his books like \"Manifest Your Destiny,\" \"10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace,\" and \"The Power of Intention.\"

The ubiquitous teacher and author has been doling out non-religious inspiration for several decades in the form of world-wide workshops and 30 books; he and Deepak Chopra, that other profitable prophet, pretty much fill the \"Personal Growth\" section of any bookstore. Dyer was also one of the first to popularize the \"law of attraction\"—the notion that your thoughts create your life—which \"The Secret\" book and DVD cashed in on so successfully.

Dyer recently talked to Beliefnet from his home in Maui about his latest book, \"Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao\" and what he's like now that he's embraced the Tao, an ancient Chinese philosophy. He also tells us what’s missing in ”The Secret,\" and how we can get in on the truest secret of all.

What's the Tao to you?

The Tao is actually three words, the \"Tao Te Ching.\" And the Tao in ancient Chinese means \"great way,\" \"te\" means living the great way, and \"ching\" means book. So, it's the book of living the Great Way, or how to live the Great Way.

Some people have called it the wisest book ever written, sort of a blueprint for living a moral life based upon the principles of the highest levels of consciousness that we know today. It was written somewhere between 2,500 and 2,700 years ago, by a man named Lao Tzu who was a contemporary of Confucius but was very much opposed to governments and laws and rules, and fighting and killing, and really believed the way to guide your life is by staying in harmony with nature. That all the answers come from nature.
They all sound very paradoxical. Water is referred to a lot in the \"Tao Te Ching\" as an example of how softness overcomes hardness, that flexibility overcomes rigidness. The opening line of the \"Tao Te Ching\" says, \"A Tao that can be named is not the Tao.\" So the Tao is almost like a synonym for God without the religious aspect. It's trying to describe something that's indescribable. But, if you had to describe it, it would be that which animates all of life, which is doing nothing but leaves nothing undone, which is constantly in motion, which doesn't have any requirements for anybody on how to live their lives.

And it is that divine, organizing, invisible intelligence from which all things emanate and to which all things return. It's what allows the other clouds to form, and the mosquitoes to be here, your heart to beat, and your hair to grow.

How does that notion of Tao compare to God?

Well, it's always interesting about God because, it's like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.

Where it's different is that the Tao doesn't break it down into any pieces. It's a complete and total oneness that encompasses all and doesn't look for any kind of religious structure or organizational principles. It finds all of its strength in nature itself—a spider web is a perfect example of the Tao at work. It just takes what comes to it, and what doesn't come to it, it doesn't get itself obsessed with.

[The Tao] wants to reach out and to be creative, and to be in harmony with its own source. And yet, at almost every turn we're taught to not to trust in our nature, and to listen to other people, and to seek outside for guidance and help and sustenance.

And I think that's probably the most profound thing that you can learn from it—is that you, too, have a nature, and that those inner murmurings that you hear about what you want to do or why you should do it, those kind of things are from an inner nature.

And how has reading the Tao changed your life in a practical way?

The way that I wrote this book is that I worked on [each of the 81 verses of the Tao for] between four and five days, and really tried to live what was being taught in each one.

I See Myself as Palm Trees
And then, the last day I would just sit down and write, and look at a drawing of Lao Tzu in front of me… and I would just ask. I would get very quiet and very peaceful and experience what I call automatic writing. It would just flow to me. It made me almost radically humble. I really began to see myself as just as natural as the palm trees that are out in front of my place. I began to see myself in everyone. It's made me much, much less stressful. Much less judgmental, non-interfering, almost totally. I have eight children and many of them are here with me, in fact, they're here right now. The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be. So, when my grandchildren were here, I found myself just biting my tongue rather than telling them how to behave or whatever, just letting them figure things out.

I think I've become much more non-interfering, much more patient, much more tolerant, much more peaceful. I'm in almost a total state of gratitude all the time. I've become much healthier. I've been doing yoga instead of running because it teaches us to be more flexible. One of the most famous lines of the Tao is in the 76th verse: \"A man is born gentle and weak. At his death, he is hard and stiff. All things, including the grass and the trees are soft and pliable in life, dry and brittle in death. Stiffness is thus a companion of death. Flexibility is a companion of life.\"

Flexibility and softness and pliability are associated with life. A tree that is young is flexible. The wind comes along and blows, and it'll blow, and then it'll come back. A tree that's old and hard--as the wind comes along, it'll snap it in half. So I've learned that this is true not just in our bodies, but in the way that we think as well.

What's the most common spiritual affliction that you see?

Carl Jung said that the number one purpose of organized religion is to prevent everyone from having a direct experience of God. With spirituality the implication very often is that some people have it and some people don't. And those that have it dispense it to others. And I think it's more than an affliction. It's a huge, huge, huge error to make--each and every being on this planet is a piece of God. We all came from the same source.

It sounds like you're talking about separation.

Separation from our source, yeah. In the first nine months of your life, when you were inside your mother's womb, you were doing nothing, you know? You were just being done. And you surrendered to that completely. And you didn't worry about it, and you didn't pray that your nose would show up on time, and that your fingernails would come and they would be in the right place, and all that. You just surrendered to it. And then, when you're born, we are surrounded by people who suddenly say, well, that was good work, God, but now I'll take over from here.

When We Develop the Ego
And then, we develop this ego, which is an acronym for Edging God Out. As we edge God out, we take over ourselves, and we start believing that we're not these divine creations. We start believing that we are what we have and what we do and what we accumulate, and what our reputations are, and we start really believing strongly in all of that stuff. And in the process, we lose our connection to what we really are.

How can changing your thoughts change your life?

You Can Change How the World Looks at You
They say when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Einstein once said that the most important decision you'll ever have to make in your life is whether you live in a friendly universe or a hostile universe. And if you're a person who believes that you live in a hostile universe, you're going to be looking for that. You're going to be experiencing that. You'll be seeing it everywhere. You'll become a person who's always looking for occasions to be upset or to be offended or to be hurt, or depressed, or sad, or right, or whatever.

If you live in a world that you believe supports you, and is friendly and is there for you, and is bringing you all that you need at any given moment, and all the experiences that you have are perfect, if you just really believe that, then, the things that you don't like you'll just be able to ignore, and the world looks very, very different.

Since so much of your work has been about the law of attraction, I wanted to ask what you think about \"The Secret.\"

Why I Turned Down Filming
'The Secret'
I'm thrilled that the book sales have been so great on this thing. It's really brought people to a new awareness of the power of the mind to create what you want. The reason I wasn't in that movie--I was asked to be--is that I think too much of the emphasis is on manifesting stuff. Manifesting more things. Nothing wrong with stuff and things and so on. But to me the great secret is that when you're giving, when you put your attention on what you really want and then shift to [asking] \"How can I offer this to others rather than seeking it for myself?\" That's the ultimate secret—the more you give, the more you receive.

I wrote a book about the secret long before \"The Secret.\" It's called \"Manifest Your Destiny,\" and it's really much, much more about putting your focus on serving. Like, if you say to the universe, \"How may I serve,\" the universe responds back with, \"How may I serve you?\" If you say to the universe, \"Give this to me,\" you're coming from a position of shortage or lack. If you say to the universe, \"Gimme, gimme, gimme,\" the universe says back to you what you ask for, which is, \"Gimme, gimme, gimme.\" And you're constantly feeling as if you're never given enough, you know?

So, is there an ideal way to ask for what we want?

Focus on Serving the Universe
I think the best way to ask for what you want is to say, \"How many I serve?\" I have a rule with myself. Which is that I start out every day by doing something for somebody else that they're usually not expecting, whether it's one of my family members or, oftentimes, it's people from around the world--somebody wants me to call them in the hospital, or I send a book or a gift. And the opening words out of my mouth are, \"Thank you\" when I awaken. I have found that the more I'm able to offer and give as much as I possibly can, that I can't even control how much flows into my life. It just comes in bigger and bigger.



Dhagon's thoughts:
First off, let me get my frustration about how he talks about the Tao and God in the same interview, like they are the same. Though there are some similarities to the concepts of both, ultimately by base beliefs, they are not the same.

Ok, now into the bulk. How can you do nothing and leave nothing undone? It really doesn't make sense, if you get everything done, you've obviously done something. Even if its influence someone else to do it all, you've done something however minimal it was. Either this was lost in translation or there is a serious error to someones definition of doing nothing. When I do nothing, nothing gets done.

Also how can this guy (I know its only one person, but I've read it over and over) say that you don't need outside influence. FIrst of all, you cannot prevent outside influence atleast somewhat, but even if you could, how would you learn to do things as a child? I'm sure you'd figure out how to walk at some point, but talking, gathering food that is non harmful, even those at the basics, you would need someone to teach you. Also this guy puts in that we build our ego's because of what we have and accumulate and are taught, which edges out our apparent \"a piece of god\" factor and we lose whatever it is that supposedly makes us \"devine\".

In the Tao also teaches flexibility and softness overcome the strong and rigid. Though is some instances like say the river cutting out the grand canyon, sure, though it took thousands of years if not more. In the current world this does not apply, the stronger you are, physically, your going to defeat someone less physically stong (barring a gun or other weapon). Usually also physically fit people live longer, whereas this guy says the rigid and unmoving resembles death. Its contradictory to todays world. Sure, there are less physically strong things that still live long lives, but more commonly it is stronger bodies that whether better in time.

How can this guy believe that believing eventually brings about reality? I've seen this in other Taoist writings, though I didn't see it directly in the Tao Te Ching (that I remember). I've been believing I'm going to become rich, since I was a little kid, but it has still not happened. I've believed that the war would be over in a decent amount of time (originally) that didn't happen. I've believed that a country as great as ours (USA) would take care of its own homeless and needy people before giving billions of dollars of aid to foreign countries, but time and again I've been proven wrong. Not just by the government, but by multiple different aid agencies. This is definately one that does not apply to reality. You can percieve things as hunkie-dorie as you want, but that doesn't make it a reality. You don't change reality, you change you perception of it.



Ok, I know this probably isn't the best criticism, and probably not the best article to criticise, but its what I could find short term and I did what I could. My criticisms do not necessarily mirror my beliefs, but I critisized things that I can see are questionable. Run with it.

Dk

Hey Dagon -

I saw Wayne Dwyer in his black chinese pajamas, bowing and saying Namaste - and then name-dropping, hawking his books, etc., and saying how he loved listening to the whales song on his front porch of Maui.

Americans have a type of Taoist beliefs - I've heard it called \"Tao-urbia\" that make many true classic Taoist shiver.

I think Dwyer makes Taosim palatable to the US masses - but it isn't Taoism - any more than any of the other \"Pop-Taoists\" out there.

I am glad they are getting that smattering and I know it's done me a lot of good. I think true Taoism would be cultural stretch for most Americans that would be too much of a gape to encompass.

The problem with Pop-Taoism is that it is like Dwyer - an illogical feel-good with enough wisdom to pass. The Tao does not advocate \"doing nothing\" in the classic sense. Ask a real classical Taoist - and be surprised at the answers.

The Tao is much more like Jedi feeling than Dwyer's idea that you can do NOTHING and the world will come to you. That is actually a bit of an abomination to classical Taoists.

I have fairly well in my life and it's been a lot of work. It's been gumption and stepping forward to find my way. No one was going to come up and hand me what I have.

Life doesn't work that way...

But the underpinnings for our personal life and goals of humility, cutting through the self-made emotions, unhealthy desires, and other aspects that the Tao speaks of - including Dwyer is very good and healthy so although I think some go \"Tao-happy\" like Dwyer and end up looking pretty hypocritical and foolish - for the most part it is an incredibly central theme the walking the Jedi Path.

The Jedi Path is actually more Classical Tao than the Pop-Tao so popular today.

Good topic Dagon!

- Asta Sophi

Thank you, although with what you said, it seems my critique of his view of Taoism, is sort of useless, I didn't know there was a \"pop-tao\". I was going for criticism of the base/majority view. Some of which I got, some I didn't. I personally follow Taoism closest to any other named view of things, but don't concider it a religion, I also know I would have a hard time living the full life of a Taoist, in the classic sense. I personally, understand what is meant in the Tao Te Ching, about we-wei and non-action. I was just criticising it from a non-understanding viewpoint. Or atleast trying to, guess maybe I should have chosen a better article.

DK

I was actually agreeing with what you said - although I have recently read the criticisms of Pop-Tao - and the last straw seemed to be Dr. Wayne Dwyer.

I think the Tao has done that masses a lot of good - but I agree that you cannot sit-back and think sweet and fluffly thought and good things will come. You need to think positively while you do your daily activities and allow the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching guide.

I thought it was a very good critique. The Tao is open-ended and I do not consider it a religion but rather a philosophy/spirituality.

In this Dr. Dwyer claiming Tao in place of God is misleading. The Tao is in no way considering itself a diety...to most minds. This is where the Pop-Tao statement has come into play.

But any introduction to the Tao Te Ching is good! It's a good philosophy/spirituality but it's not the end-all...I also don't think it claims to be but seem to want to make it so?

- No insult intended!

- Asta Sophi