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I’ve had a similar experience with Taoism. It is a kind of tough nut to crack coming from Western cultures what with our extensive theologies, holy books, and prescriptivist religions. I highly recommend “The Way of Chuang Tzu” by Thomas Merton.

Perhaps this betrays some fundamental ignorance on my part, but I think understanding and internalizing the Taoist mindset makes meditation a little less relevant or necessary. Taoism IMO is the sublime wisdom of not attempting to be wise (usually manifesting as inane and unnuanced rules, or clever-sounding quotes) and not neuorotically attempting to conform to practices or ways of thinking forced on us by culture, tradition, ideology, etc. Meditation and mindfulness help incrementally in that pursuit but they are like climbing rungs of a ladder next to an elevator that Zhuangzi built for us.

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> Meditation and mindfulness help incrementally in that pursuit but they are like climbing rungs of a ladder next to an elevator that Zhuangzi built for us.

It’s critical to note that not all paths/forms of meditation involve climbing rungs of a ladder or really any notion of a path whatsoever.

The practice of sitting is only for the purpose of training the mind to focus, which helps some people reach the “non-dual” state more effectively.

For example, the Dzogchen approach relies more on directly pointing out aspects of experience in a way that brings the listener more directly into contact with the current moment/unfolding experience and towards the same state that “ladder” meditation approaches aim to reach.

Many of the modern western teachers have gravitated to a more direct approach as well because it’s more palatable to the audience here (and frankly, far more practical and immediately useful).

Mentioning this because the perception that there’s a steep and long journey ahead is not necessary, and has turned plenty of interested people away from the idea of trying.

With all of that said, I haven’t explored Taoism, and it sounds interesting.

That’s very fair, as a kind of meditation-skeptic I probably too aggressively dismissed and mischaracterized it.

The Tao Te Ching itself isn’t prescriptive at all with meditation and the only time it really comes up is in a reference to a breathing exercise, which you could just as well interpret as a one-off for the excerpt rather than formal or ideologically sanctioned meditation. In later early Taoist texts meditation (particularly breathing exercises) was promoted as a way of cultivating various beneficial forces internally, rather than as a linear path to salvation or anything. But then even later they start getting into the Taoism stuff I don’t care for like meditation as a way of becoming immortal lol. Personally I think it’s possible to read the classical texts and come away thinking the Tao doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with, positively or negatively, with meditation.

I think of OG Taoism as a kind of deconstructivist reaction to Chinese culture at the time - highly political, rigidly Confucian - and defining itself more by where it disagreed with the contemporary schools of thought than by what it promoted. While it’s not contradictory to say meditation is compatible with Taoism, any kind of strong rules or expectations about meditation would contradict with early Taoism just on the basis of specifying some kind of rigid understanding of meditation or prescriptive rules about such a complex thing (because that would be very Confucian).

+1 on the Merton translation recommendation.

That's exactly how I feel about it, you just put it in better words.

Thank you for the recommendation

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