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Studying the Wind, A Taoist Contemplation on Impermanence
In this first post I invite readers to dip their feet in the waters of the Tao. Future posts will explore further to swim in the Tao's deeper waters for it is as vast as the ocean.
In perennial Absence you see mystery,
and in perennial Presence you see appearance.
Though the two are one and the same,
once they arise, they differ in name.
One and the same they’re called dark-enigma,
dark-enigma deep within dark-enigma,
gateway of all mystery.*
Welcome to Deep Practice, an online sanctuary for those seeking temporary seclusion from a turbulent world, offering reflections on daily practice, wisdom across different traditions, and other content to nourish an embodied earth-cherishing consciousness.
Already almost midway through the third decade of the 21st century we find ourselves living in an increasingly chaotic world, the earth under siege from a massive extraction economy, AI technology, and increasing militarization and polarization between global powers, amidst signs we are heading deeper into socio-ecological collapse and cultural meltdown. This is not intended to instil fear, encourage despair or make anyone depressed. It has long been clear that fear is already part of the strategy, exacerbated since Covid, and this requires our vigilant attention. When we give attention to something it changes what we attend to, which in turn changes us. This reciprocal process at the heart of attention is one of the most valuable aspects of mind and heart training that can take us beyond the dichotomies of the relative field.
Rather than relying on shallow positive thinking, which depends upon the blind spots that allow it to sound convincing, wise discernment looks clearly at prevailing causes and conditions and cultivates an attitude of vigilance. Without giving attention to our inner states in relation to outer world events we are likely to sink into over optimistic or pessimistic views. Wholesome action arises from vigilant attention to the flux of events detached from the drivers of negative or positive feeling tones that have been seeded by past experience, or are conditioned by future expectation. To be grounded in the present, focused, but always aware of what lies on the periphery, nudging for our attention, is to navigate with clarity and to allow space for the infinite resources we all possess within to flower of their own accord, which they will, given half a chance. It helps to renew connection with nature on a regular basis, even if only to walk in the wind, sun, or rain and to feel the body responding to the elements, wild, gentle, warm or cold. You will gather from this post that water too is an element I find particularly inspiring, and nourishing, as it conjures states of flow which are essential for creative abundance.
Since most of us can have only limited, if any, influence on the play of geopolitical forces, and the consequences of centuries of extractivist economies and fossil capitalism, we need to take refuge from time to time, from whatever mundane activities we are obliged to engage with for our daily needs, to immerse ourselves in restorative contemplative practices.
Why am I here? What am I doing with my life? With mindfulness you begin to hear the response welling up from the silence within. You begin to hear the deepest calling of your heart inside you. A profound shift occurs in your relations with others and the world around you.
So spoke a wise teacher, and peace maker, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who suggested we need to create the right conditions for this inner work on a regular basis:
"Our true home is called the island of self, the peaceful place inside of us. Oftentimes we don't notice it's there; we don't even know where we are, because our outer or inner environment is filled with noise. We need some quietness to find that island of self."
Leaving aside for now what exactly constitutes ‘self’ or even ‘an island of self’ – there will be plenty of opportunity to explore this later – he offers us an invitation to seek refuge in seclusion, or sometimes in community, being alone together as it were, to acknowledge what is arising and to be fully present to what is there without preference. And the first and possibly most important step is to feel embodied, to let go of all the traps the mind creates that prevent us from being in the fully embodied mode that nature intended for us to feel connected to the life force, receptive to the elements around us, and the pleasurable feelings as well as any less pleasurable or negative feelings this arouses when we relax into it, and to notice their arising and their passing without prejudice.
In so doing we simply allow the mind-body, for they are one continuous process, not two separate entities, the opportunity to accept whatever arises and passes and to allow space for the springs of our true nature to bring peace and equanimity amidst the constant turbulence of our troubled world, both the turbulence within and the turbulence without, for it is important to notice the reciprocity between the inner and the outer, which ultimately stem from a unified field of consciousness. So, the practice entails a clearing of the ground, as it were, by noticing for example how many thoughts I consistently have that are judgmental, angry, spiteful, envious, self-contradictory, foolish or just plain trivial. How much of this is useless chaff that regular practice can sift through and relinquish to the wind leaving the mind with space enough to attend fully to the present, to the world around me or the person before me.
This clarity of mind is sometimes known as sampajañña, which correctly translated actually refers to the constant thorough understanding of impermanence. A mind that has fully and deeply grasped the fact of impermanence, of continuous change, which we normally are inclined to resist in many different ways, is capable of awakening to its own nature, a quality of spaciousness that has relinquished clinging to partial views and that fosters the art of listening, which might be more important and helpful than talking, which the mind’s endless chatter recapitulates to reinforce the sense of identity, which is what much of this mental noise is about if you look deeply into it. Regular practice then can help us to attain a higher degree of clarity and to act in appropriate ways to find a better balance between work and life, and to be more receptive in our relationship with others and the world of nature.
And so, I will bring this first post to a close by unpacking the enigmatic opening lines of the Tao Te Ching quoted at the beginning in David Hinton’s translation. Lao Tzu’s famously ambiguous and evocative poem plunges us deep into the enigma that anything exists rather than nothing and opens a gateway into the mystery of being alive. But not if we speculate purely abstractly. To elucidate his meaning his words must literally be digested bodily, returning us to the organic matrix from which they emerged. In the felt sense and motion of full embodiment heaven returns to earth, and earth becomes heaven, and in healing the wound of separation that results from regarding ourselves as other than nature in a dualistic cosmos, we can again celebrate our oneness with the Cosmos.
Hence the image at the top of this page sums up in some ways a Taoist orientation towards retrieving something akin to an integral cosmos. Three thousand years ago China underwent a massive upheaval with the progressive collapse of the Shang Dynasty, whose Emperors ruled a theocratic state whose legitimacy was sanctified by a celestial deity, Shang Ti, the source of all order and creation, from which they traced their lineage. Originally benevolent rulers over 700 years they became ever crueller and more tyrannical, until overthrown by the Chou dynasty whose claim to rule by the Mandate of an impersonal Heaven disintegrated under the weight of its bureaucracy, progressive civil strife and war. In the ensuing social chaos, the “Hundred Schools of Thought” urgently sought for a solution, amongst them Lao Tzu.
Leaving aside whether Lao Tzu’s famous work was by an individual or by an amalgam of thinkers, the times bear some resemblance to our own as the monotheistic basis of Judeao-Christianity and its linear progressivist narrative that justified Empire, colonialism and secular ‘development’ no longer enjoys the credibility it once had. Often driven by the best intentions Western civilization, at least from the 11th-12th centuries, somehow misconstrued the truth claim arising from the incarnation and used it in the service of temporal power and Empire. Eventually the notion of a Kingdom not of this world that would eventually be established with the Apocalypse and a Second Coming was substituted by a crude instrumental process of acquisition, exploitation and extraction to build a heaven on earth along a linear time narrative. Institutions were created that substituted for the network of relations that redefined an open human community beyond ethnic boundaries that constituted the heart of the Christian revolution. The corruption of the best became the worst. With the economy growing exponentially, creating ever more needs, as well as false expectations, and so requiring ever more things to satisfy a growing burden of mimetic desires, a process moved progressively towards the destruction of much of the earth. Greed and power played a defining role, masked by good intentions, that provoked William Blake to comment that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And so, if we are to begin the work of healing the separation that gave rise to dominance, Lao Tzu’s Tao may help us if we understand it in an embodied sense. The sense of lack that the wound of separation gives rise to can be healed, and we don’t need half as much stuff to enjoy life and to experience how every miraculous moment heaven is braided into earth when we intuit our consciousness as interwoven with that of the Cosmos. The warp threads that wove the Taoist cultural transformation in China were water and earth. David Hinton, a Chinese scholar and translator, points out that the Chinese pictograph for “cultural warp-threads” combined these two elements, with an image of rippling water blended with the clay on a potter’s wheel, clay that can only be formed and shaped by the addition of water.
An image where earth and water meet, where the ocean touches the sand, seems an appropriate entry point into that liminal space that enchants with a richness of ambiguity, if we give it our full embodied attention. In the image above the meeting place between two elements is not a straight or even wiggly shoreline, but a turbulent swirl of white foam blending ochre sands with aquamarine waters, reminding one a little of the energy forms depicted in those Chinese Taoist illustrations full of swirling clouds sometimes with the shapes of dragons, the primal and ever self-generating cosmos, emerging from the dark enigma-void of absence into presence as the ten thousand things, whose constant burgeoning forth lay at the heart of Taoist practices, where the Way meant simply to dwell as an organic part of the Cosmos through reweaving an elemental relationship with the natural world. All phenomena being forever subject to change, as we observe in deep meditation practice, only the empty mirror mind reflects the world as it is.
Like watching the endless play of the waves on the beach our thoughts come and go, arising and vanishing, so we observe that we are separate from our thoughts and our memories. The insight comes that we are not the centre of our self-absorbed thinking patterns as a subject ‘in here’ looking at the external world as an object ‘out there’. Instead, we are a wild primordial awareness that shares the generative ground of being with all things, a consciousness that watches identity like an actor rehearsing many parts as the play of many thoughts and memories. When thought falls silent, and the last mask has been discarded, we abide in empty-mind our identity revealed as mind and Cosmos interwoven as primordial awareness awakening into the deep ecology of our being where we can dwell peacefully, the wound of consciousness healed by such a deep seeing/listening realization beyond conceptual capture, because not static but dynamic, and born ever anew with each breath. If we bring such a practice into our lives every day, we can experience an aliveness and connectedness with sentient life in all its glorious manifestation.
I will end with some lines from a recent poem that encapsulates a Taoist practice. It was inspired by the lines below from the great 13th century Japanese Zen teacher Dogen Zenji, who had travelled to China to steep himself in the Taoist Cha’n teachings before returning to Japan where he founded the Soto School. The Taoist Cha’n teachings were much more earthbound than today’s refined forms of Zen that have migrated to the West. Dogen suggests that studying the wind is an essential aspect of practice, for the wind can change at any moment and if we are not attuned to it we can resist or be blown away: the art entails a heightened awareness, an embodied awareness that responds to the currents of wind, going with the flow, yielding but not in a passive submissive way, but surrendering the mind’s wilful tendency to resistance. The body works differently and knows what the mind thinks it knows but doesn’t: the action of non-action.
I think of wandering about like a cloud or a water-weed, studying the wind of the ancient sages. Dogen Zenji
I know the wind only by its voice and its touch,
and by how the birds in the palm respond,
the way the grass bends and the casuarina sings,
and the pace of the waves as they lift and fall,
leaving white foam trails on the sands,
the vanishing lace of the sea’s poems.
What can the wind tell me that I might live by?
I know too its sudden absence as a millpond calm,
a stifling heat that wilts the hibiscus
when the craving for wind comes like a thirst,
a restless yearning for Storm and Stress to break
those endless hours of sterile breathless waiting.
And yet if I persist, allowing the calm to blossom,
if I give myself permission to still the mind,
so restless for distractions, or even violent disruptions,
all ways of avoiding that one life-changing quake:
he awakening at the very core of being
that acknowledges our deep kinship with the earth,
self and world endlessly realized as a living whole
in a co-creation that heals the wound of separation.
When the eye that sees is also that which is seen,
as though the Cosmos were gazing out at itself,
both delighting and grieving in its myriad permutations,
just as delight and grief are forever ours*
for what happens to the earth surely happens to us.
And even if the Cosmos seems indifferent to me,
if I listen deeply, I know that by this recognition
all the living beings of the world can be loved.
It is only in silence this awakening occurs,
for it is not willed by me but received:
when the heart opens to the trembling violin within,
to the rose unfolding in the sun at midnight.
Perhaps it is only in such quiet ways the world may be saved.
©David Beatty 2024
1.* Tao Te Ching translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, California, 2015
2.* Tao implies throughout ultimate non-separation from an integral Cosmos.