What Is Tao?

by Alan W. Watts

They are always trying to fit the order of the world into the order of sense, the order of thought and words.

one asks questions about one’s spiritual or psychological state or consults the oracle concerning momentous decisions in life.

The kind of question to ask the Book of Changes that would be appropriate under most circumstances is something like this: “What is the best thing for me in my present state?”

It works like this:

the Chinese feel that the positive and the negative, the light and the dark, the male and the female, the auspicious and the inauspicious always go together in human life, because one cannot be distinguished without the other.

we never really know whether the outcome of a decision will be a failure or a success in the long run, because only the unknown — only what comes next — will show whether it was good or bad. And the unknown stretches infinitely before us.

The Chinese came to rely so much on the Book of Changes and its system of symbols for classifying all natural phenomena that in the course of time it became a very rigid structure and eventually excluded the perception of novelty.

realize that we are doing the same thing with scientific method.

When we think of causality, we think chiefly of the way events are determined by the past, and by extension the way the behavior of people is determined by their past.

Until quite recent times the point of view of Western science was based almost exclusively on the idea of causality; it had become a study of the way things are influenced by past things.

The point of view that underlies the Book of Changes is that instead of trying to understand events as relationships to past causes, it understands events by relation to their present pattern.

a suitable analogy for the Western way of looking at things by saying that we are attempting to understand events in accordance with the order of words.

The meaning of each part of the design is relative to the rest of the design just as you see it at this moment.

the fundamental philosophy of the Book of Changes and of the Chinese idea of the relationship between events is to understand every event in its present context.

we in the West have tended to understand events in accordance with linear or sequential orders like the order of words.

The fundamental Chinese idea of the order of nature is not compatible with formulation in the order of words, because it is organic, and is not linear pattern.

it is absolutely impossible to understand and appreciate our natural universe unless you know when to stop investigating.

An old aphorism from India says, “What is beyond, is that which is also here.”

the place where we are now, we have already arrived.

What we are seeking is, if we are not totally blind, already here.

the trail goes to every single place that it crosses, and leads also to where you are standing and watching it.

Every stream, every road, if followed persistently and meticulously to its end, leads nowhere at all.

leave something to our imagination.

Any place where we are may be considered the center of the universe. Anywhere that we stand can be considered the destination of our journey.

we have to come to terms with nature by wooing her rather than fighting her, and instead of holding nature at a distance through our objectivity as if she were an enemy, realize rather that she is to be known by her embrace.

Do we want to be some kind of omnipotent god, in control of it all, or do we want to enjoy it instead?

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”