WHAT IS TAO?
The Tao is unchanging, never diminishing nor increasing, yet, without pause, both static and dynamic, noumenal and phenomenal. The myriad of things in existence are copies of its indeterminability, being born, declining, and finally dissolving into other structures and energy-events. But the Tao itself is unique and free from decay or dissolution; it is absolute, not limited to the relative but at the same time not different from it either. The Tao is unaffected by any changes in the relative but is also the patterns of change in the multifarious kosmos.
It is mistaken discrimination to suppose that life-death, order-disorder, dark-light, male-female, inside-outside, yin-yang, etc., are mutually exclusive, contradictory dualities. It is folly to presume one polar opposite can exist without its other, so obviously there can be no actual duality. We live in a kind of polar monism in which there is an apparent regularity of dichotomous oscillation, a ceaseless back and forth movement that exhibits a patterning process. Everything thus is an interrelated unity and in actuality is a multiplex oneness, the Tao.
The Tao is what is. Whatever there is, that is Tao. There is nothing else, nothing other. If we could know the Tao we could know the Truth. Entering into the Tao we would know we never really left it; we were never outside, but always inside. We did not have to find an entrance; no entrance or doorway was ever needed because we were always already inside. The impartial Truth is Tao; all things are thus and there is not a single thing in space or time that is separate. All phenomena are, without exception, already that which has no boundaries, omnipresent, and immaculate. All beings do not actually abide in the Tao because all beings already are the Tao. The Tao is beyond conceptual expression since speech and words and ideas are all finite descriptions and all descriptions are, by necessity, limited and confined by the boundaries of terms. Terms are only a finger pointing at the moon.
“If you speak about the Tao, that’s not the real Tao.”
(~Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu)
©2014