AN UNAPOLOGETICALLY PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL EPISTLE FROM THE ANARCHIC EAST

Dear reader, grace and peace to you and thank you for reading this far into this project. This project itself began by quoting several sayings from the Chinese, Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching here. It was not remotely my intention in doing that either to promote Taoism or to make my readers Taoists. Put most simply, I am indifferent about whether that appeals to my readers or not. But I did make use of it because, when I read it, it opened up a new experience of life for me, a life that was not about rules and right and wrong and canonised directions or decisions but that was about flexibility to circumstances, flowing with life like water, simplicity, humility and a natural, dispassionate compassion for all things. I was taught not to strive and struggle and resist the things around me but to become soft and flow with them. All things pass, I came to understand, and the nature of nature is change. 

According to the earliest Taoist texts, when human nature is aligned with the rest of nature, order and harmony are the result. Taoism is, in this sense, a therapeutic understanding of existence. From this perspective, the purpose of the kind of self-cultivation the Tao Te Ching and Taoism itself recommends, something which also accords with the thoughts of many others I covered so far this project which have broadly promoted an anarchic ‘self-creation’, is to return to a mode of existence that is natural, but that has been obscured by social conditioning. This is essentially what the Cynics of the Greek world complained about too, that being less natural was bad and that being more natural was good. One Taoist remedy, repeating certain actions such as physical exercises or meditation, in such an understanding, is a way of training the body so that it is free to react in a spontaneous, natural way. It is similar to the experience of practicing one's shots in basketball and then making a key basket in the big game — the preparation through repetition makes it possible to act, at a certain moment, without thinking, in pure spontaneity. This accords well with the training aspect to this common to Taoism and to Cynicism, which acquaints one with nature, reality, in order to mimic it, just as it comes to be, and with the habitual practice of those such as Nietzsche, Cage and Goldman in There is nothing to stick to who, all in their own ways, exhorted human beings to more natural lives - and to practices and not simply beliefs.

Yet it is clearly the case that, throughout history, human beings can deviate, and have deviated, from the natural chaos of things, their natural law and order, and have gone after artificial and conventional things of their own imagining. When they do so, often they have brought destruction upon themselves and those around them. Confucian scholars, who were rivals to the Taoist scholars who wrote the Tao Te Ching, were criticized there for imposing rules and social expectations upon people. According to the Tao Te Ching, social mores, the artificiality and conventionality of human culture and threats of punishment, cause more harm than good, as they are methods of forcing appropriate behaviour rather than allowing it to occur spontaneously and naturally which is the Taoist wisdom on such things. That we naturally become the change we seek from such teaching is, in fact, the point of it. This way is to change yourself naturally - rather than to be pushed this way and that and beaten into shape artificially - which is the target in view. Authenticity here matters. It is especially the point where knowledge and knowingness is foreign and innocence is nature in its manner of operation. This is to flow with the river rather than to swim against its current because you are possessed by the idea that you know better. 

So, in this case, the only way to encourage appropriate behaviour is by modelling it. If, for example, a ruler is a person of impeccable character, those he leads will naturally follow. But how is the ruler to become the ideal role model, thus insuring harmony for his empire? As an 8th century Taoist master said to a Tang emperor, "Who governs his body, governs the country." The way forward, then, is to practice self-cultivation and to engage in self-examination. To live according to a nature which gives us nothing to stick to will not come all by itself. It will involve us forgetting a great many things. In fact, one thing common to all the thinkers and thought I have highlighted in this project is that human cultures, in their knowingness, have, in some way or to some extent, usurped a more natural mode of life we should rediscover by imposing things upon us we should forget. But this is not a matter of going back, as if it were better in the old days: it was always available to us and it still is today. It is not a matter of time or place but it is a matter of attitude, orientation and habitual practice. It is a matter of us having all we need if only we can let go of the things erroneously added.

In Taoism the central idea regarding nature and the natural is relationship. We cannot approach nature as a thing to be mastered but only as a partner in a relationship. The goal is to become a natural part of the anarchic environment. The way to discover that environment is to turn to nature in its manner of operation. For this reason early Taoist philosophers left the cities to learn from nature and primitive people living in remote mountain villages. They hoped to eventually bring human civilization into the natural chaotic state much as the Cynics did around the same time but in Greece and the Hellenistic and Roman empires instead of in China. In Taoism nature is taken to be infinitely wise, infinitely complex, and infinitely irrational. It is divine chaos or anarchy, not divine order. Yet, as chaos, it is order. One must take a personal yielding stance and abandon all intellectual preconceptions and culturally-inculcated habits. The goal is wu wei, acting without action, or non-action, doing nothing contrary to nature but existing as it exists. Nature does not need to be perfected or improved or subjected to human ideas of order. It is we who need to change; it is we who need to come into accord with it. It is we who need to attain to its naturalistic rhythms and not us who need to impose our measuring, instrumentalising mentality upon it.

Part of the Taoist aim in this is to sidestep the observed dualities of life. To this end Taoism historically rejected all dichotomies, even the most fundamental one of being versus non-being. The goal of Taoism is to attain that which precedes duality. The only way to discover this original source is to observe nature. During peak experiences in nature, the deep meets the deep. Yet the Tao, which we may think of as nature, is a divine chaos, not a random accident. It is fertile, undifferentiated, and teeming with unrealised creation. It is the mother of everything in nature as nature births itself; it is a great darkness that operates spontaneously to give birth and life to all things. Taoists, as naturalists, seek not to be saved or to win, but rather to return to the original source of ‘the Ten Thousand Things’ which is the term the Tao Te Ching uses for the superfluity of things in nature. They see creation not as a single event, but an ongoing process that has no beginning and no end. Its divine play is taking place right here and right now. The wise person becomes like an animal or a child, participating joyfully in the profoundly irrational and anarchic (dis)order. He or she learns to trust or accept the chaos. Is that not what being ‘natural’ would amount to?

Consequently, Taoists have always avoided anthropocentrism for they recognise that we are just one of many things and not a special thing, a chosen thing nor a necessary thing. Unlike other spiritualities, they have never lost their animal gods. Ancient Chinese shamans put on animal masks in order to communicate with these animal gods. Their spirit-animals were links between the worlds of people, ancestors, and gods. There was a tradition of animal frolics during which one became a particular animal, such as a crane or a bear. These rituals are still meaningful. Taoists speak of a direct knowing that resonates in the belly when one has direct contact with nature. It is not with the head but with the belly that one can participate in the sacred madness of the ancestral gods. It is only with the belly that one can appreciate the eternal flux and the underlying unity of the Ten Thousand Things. This is not to say, however, that we knowing moderns, fixated with ‘the intrinsic nature of reality’, have to take this literally and too seriously as if what can be empirically demonstrated is all that matters. How do we ‘empirically demonstrate’ a feeling or an idea or a context? Instead, we should appreciate it for its poetic, postmetaphysical resonances and for the relationship it signifies with things beyond us that are not about reified concepts of knowledge or understanding or truth. Here context is much more important and flowing with things that are all around us, rather than classifying them in a table or chart, is appropriate behaviour. If human beings are not chosen or special or necessary and if, instead, they are just beings in an environment, then that becomes the important thing.

The idea to write this particular essay came to me because I held a poll on my account on the social media service, Twitter, some time ago. In that poll I asked respondents what it was they believed in. I gave them the choices of ‘the Good’, ‘God’, however they chose to define it, ‘nature’ and ‘evil’. 73% of the responses chose ‘nature’ and yet, as I never enquired as to what those voting anonymously meant by ‘nature’, I have no idea what they think they were voting for. I suspect that not too many of them were very sure either but that the other options seemed even less appealing, as they conceive of them, than nature did. In this project I am trying to fill out some ideas about what ‘nature’ might refer to and what some of the consequences then are, including what living ‘according to nature’ might then entail. Having read the essays in this project and thought about it some more, I wonder, then, if quite as many might then still choose nature as a consequence? Then again, it may be that some who chose ‘nature’ might have thought that it entailed god, the good and evil as well although, in my view, at least two of those are ruled out specifically once we take the view that nature does not speak, has no opinions and has no canonical function at all.

Yet the third, god, is not, a priori, ruled out and I note that Taoism, my own personal impetus to begin this project, does not formally disdain the notion of gods although neither does it specifically focus on them as the point of what it is about or what it does. This, I think, is wise for we cannot rule out the notion of god even if, as I have written about in my essay Endless Impossible which I will post in the near future, the idea of gods as persons seems vaguely absurd. Yet there are other ways to understand divinity, if understanding it is what we are supposed to do with it, and I’m not sure at all that it is. One way, in fact, has been to think of it as something very like nature and Taoism, in this regard, is quite mysterious in regard to what ‘the Tao’ may refer to. That it is not a person or being seems clear but, as with the Jewish God of the Hebrew Bible, it seems we can say more about what it is not than about what it is. For we hopefully more natural, more flowing with nature, more antiepistemological folk, I would hope that we can lose any possible anxiety about that. There are things we do not need to know and things that wisdom dictates are not necessary to our existence in a harmony of all things. This, I suggest, is one such. As Richard Rorty has informed us earlier in this project, there are some vocabularies which go out of date and become useless to us for they are speaking a language which now appears inadequate in the light of our current beliefs and with what we regard as our direction of travel. 

So in what has come before in the blogs previous to this one I have taken a naturalistic spiritual tradition, Taoism, added in some antimetaphysical and hermeneutic philosophy of self-creation from Nietzsche, sprinkled in some of the artistic and aesthetic practices of the Zen Buddhist, John Cage, mixed in a dash of the anarchic politics of Emma Goldman flavoured with a little Cynicism from ancient Greece, and here baked it together with Richard Rorty’s antiepistemological pragmatism, the Cynic-flavoured Judaism of Jesus of Nazareth, some humanistic musings on our experiences of nature, and extrapolated it all back in a naturalistic, Taoist direction. In doing so I have not, I think, obligated you to become a Taoist, a Nietzschean, a Cagian musician, an anarchist, a pragmatist of especially Rortian bent, a follower of Jesus, an incurable romantic for natural vistas or engaging with the elements or, in fact, anything else. The whole point of this project, initially entitled “There is nothing to stick to”, a phrase which remains the motto at the heart of what has been going on, is exactly that there is nothing to stick to. Yes, I really mean it. I really do mean in the face of lots of potential readers who have been taught to believe and who, consequently, feel in their bellies, that there is, in fact, much to stick to that, actually, there isn’t. What we have been schooled in is a form a life but only a form of life. It is a culture but it is not nature. It is The Matrix but it is not the world outside it. Here Rorty’s hopeful, future-oriented pragmatism shines a searchlight on our future and asks us where we want to go which might, to some, seem quite a strange and, perhaps, even unasked question in a world in which, so often, things are set out before us as the conventions to follow, the guidelines inside of which we must stay put, if we do not want to be seen as weird, or strange, or idiosyncratic or even dangerous. 

Yet one message of this project is that it is one of possibility, of opportunity and of self-creation. We are, none of us, limited by what we are told we can be. We are limited only by what we can be and that may be something as yet unimagined simply because, as people of culture but not of nature, it has never occurred to us that we could be anything except that which we were told or that which human culture guided us to accept as the natural order of things. But nature is not order; nature is anarchic disorder. If we open our eyes to that and disentangle ourselves from cultural anchors which try to resist and control nature’s less interested existence, who knows what might come to be?

So please remember: there is nothing to stick to.

On another occasion I once wrote a short book for myself full of Taoist texts and other things of my own creation. At its beginning I wrote this poem which was meant to bring together a number of Taoist views in a compact way:

Something from Nothing.

Nothing from Something,

Ever Returning,

The Unending Tao.

With a Mind like the Seashore,

Devoid of Intention,

With Actionless Action,

We Flow like the Stream.

All Knowledge is Empty,

All Striving is Useless,

All Time is Deceiving,

All Separateness False.

Walk the Way of Humility,

Abide in Simplicity,

Be the child of Compassion,

Be at one with the Tao.

Reading it, we can pick out several themes:

1. That something comes from nothing and something goes back to nothing in a circular process of return.

2. That “the Tao”, which means “the way”, is the term for the whole, things being thought of as a holism.

3. That the mind is thought of as a seashore which should not cling to thoughts but let them be washed away without any concern.

4. That the natural principle of “actionless action” is maintained and upheld.

5. That imagery of a river flowing and of being “like water”, as in the Tao Te Ching, is used as a metaphor for human living.

6.That life is not a matter of either knowing or striving in the sense that it is not about either the imagined knowledge, truth or understanding gained or the effort one puts into life.

7. That time is an irrelevant invention and that events do not happen on a timeline.

8. That the separateness and objectivity of things is illusory.

9. That humility, simplicity and compassion are recommended as ways to live.

Yet, after some thought on what has already gone before in this project, we can add a few more ideas to this simple and compact list to flesh it out a little and give a fuller expression of Taoist proclivities:

1. There is a concentration on the present and a consequent de-emphasis of both past and future which dissolves any notion of the diachronic narrativisation of either the self or events.

2. There is a focus on emptiness and particularly emptying the self of thoughts, narratives and emotions. Emptiness is regarded as openness.

3. Consequently, the self is thought to be illusory, a fiction.

4. Malleability and flexibility are promoted as beneficial life traits.

5. Peace is the goal of life, both within the individual and, due to its view of all things, within the context of a harmony of all things together.

6. Life is not thought to be about possession - either of anything in particular or in general.

7. Due to its abandonment of the self and the consequent de-emphasis of the individual ego, there is a greater affirmation of everything else instead and a rebalancing and recontextualisation of things in relation to other things. In the difference of all things, a completeness is seen.

8. There is no set of rules or morals, nor any algorithm for deciding such things.

9. There is a sensibility, a kind of being, that is beyond words.

10. The existence of all things is not thought something that is yours to control.

What stands out to me about all this is how some of the key imagery of Taoism, water, the seashore, emptiness, is not exactly imagery which promotes what many, especially in the West which is my main personal frame of reference, would regard as “moral” in such places. An attitude to life which can easily be characterised as “go with the flow” does not seem too morally robust and might easily be imagined to be completely inadequate to a world of criminality, viciousness and hate. Yet here we must remember that Taoism is not primarily a morality but is, instead, a way of living and a way of understanding all things in one. It is actually an anarchic amorality, it is naturalistic and seeks to site human beings in the context of, and in relationship to, all others things. As such, in the Tao Te Ching we read the following:

"When the great Tao is forgotten, kindness and morality arise. When wisdom and intelligence are born, the great pretense begins. When there is no peace within the family, filial piety and devotion arise. When the country is confused and in chaos, loyal ministers appear." (Tao Te Ching, 18)

Here the world of which we are aware, the world of contention, arises only because the Tao has been forgotten, buried by other things. Yet it is when we forget such things as I have mentioned above as being core aspects of Taoism that we begin to need things like morality or, even worse, law. We see a similar thought made mention of in the past in the words of Dr Martin Luther King when he says:

"While it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless."

Here it is law which cannot mandate a morality but can restrain those determined to impugn it. Taoism, on the other hand, reminds us that it is only when the Tao is forgotten that people need morality to separate right from wrong and better from worse in the first place. But even then, as Dr King said, there are still those who need law to remind them of the civilised need for morality. Taoism itself is about a proclivity, an attitude, a disposition. It is fundamentally one of letting go. It says that if we live in humility, compassion and simplicity with all things without striving for this or that, without a desire to possess, then the result will be more peace. So it implies, if not directly says, that morality is an observed need if, and only if, you do not do this. It is when you forget or cover over the anarchic disorder of the universe that then you have to start the messy business of right and wrong, something which in Taoism’s naturalistic view only comes into focus once the amoral, non-purposive harmony of all things is forgotten.

THIRTEEN SQUARE

What is Thirteen Square? First, it is ancient wisdom from Taoist and Buddhist sources. The number thirteen squared equals 169 and so there are here 169 examples of such wisdom in 13 sets of 13. But what is it for? It is to provoke thought, to consider, to meditate on, to read in stillness. It is to use in whatever way helps and not hinders you. As the gathered wisdom of centuries of thought in these Eastern traditions it is here as guide, as warning, as support and as wisdom. You may concentrate on one saying at a time, read through the whole, pick sayings at random or use it in whatever way you see fit. As you read through the 169 sayings you are sure to be stimulated to thought if you let your mind be still.

Peace be with you.

1 An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.

2 What you do right now is what matters.

3 The only Zen you find at the top of a mountain is the Zen you bring with you.

4 The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.

5 Best be still; best be empty. In stillness and emptiness we find where to abide. Talking and moving we lose this place.

6 The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

7 In the pursuit of knowledge: every day something is added. In the pursuit of enlightenment: every day something is let go.

8 Whatever you do, you do to yourself.

9 Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

10 However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act upon them?

11 It is the child that sees the primordial secret of nature and it is the child of ourselves we return to.

12 Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

13 The mind of non-mind, the thought of non-thought.

14 Ordinary mind is the way. If you seek it you cannot find it. The way is not a matter of knowing or not knowing.

15 To understand nothing takes time.

16 Hope and fear are phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear?

17 You may say, "I must do something this afternoon" but actually there is no "this afternoon". We do things one after the other. That is all.

18 Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.

19 Be mindful of intention. Intention is the seed that creates our future.

20 Do everything with a mind that let's go.

21 The mad mind does not halt. If it halts, that is enlightenment.

22 If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.

23 When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

24 If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best time of your life.

25 Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself? The action of non-action.

26 A fool sees himself as another, but a wise one sees others as himself.

27 Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not.

28 By plucking the petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.

29 We shape the clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.

30 The wise one is one who knows what they do not know.

31 We may idolize freedom but when it comes to our habits we are completely enslaved.

32 All wrongdoing arises because of mind.

33 This is the time. This is the place. This is the vastness. Right here is paradise. Always. Always.

34 The world is won by those who let it go.

35 All conditioned things are impermanent. 

36 Ask a cloud "What is your date of birth? Before you were born, where were you?"

37 Where ignorance is your master there is no possibility of real peace.

38 Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.

39 You are one with everything; that things are separate is an illusion.

40 What is malleable is always superior to that which is immovable. This is mastery through adaptation.

41 For all things difficult to acquire, the intelligent one works with perseverance.

42 The only thing we really have control over is our own experience.

43 Our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.

44 When you seek it, you cannot find it.

45 The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

46 The entire teaching of Buddhism can be summed up in this way: Nothing is worth holding on to.

47 When your inner commentary finally ends, your happiness can finally begin.

48 The one who knows how little they know is well. The one who knows how much they know is sick.

49 True peace cannot be achieved by force… it can only be attained by training the mind and learning to cultivate.

50 Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.

51 As long as you seek for something you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.

52 What you possess, you lose.

53 A person stands in their own shadow and wonders why it is dark.

54 To give up yourself without regret is the greatest charity.

55 All that we are arises with our thoughts.

56 If you wonder what Buddhism has to offer you, the answer is nothing. If you wonder what life is about, the answer is the same.

57 The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away! I'm looking for truth," and so it goes away.

58 You have a treasure within you that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.

59 Flow with whatever happens and let your mind be free.

60 Our life is shaped by our mind. We become what we think.

61 Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.

62 It takes a wise person to learn from their mistakes, but an even wiser person to learn from others.

63 High understanding comes from not understanding at all.

64 Experience this moment to its fullest.

65 The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

66 Practice non-action. Work without doing. 

67 God or no god, infinite divinity or eternal emptiness; they are the same thing.

68 True happiness is based on peace.

69 Composure is the ruler of instability.

70 Those who know don't talk. Those who talk don't know.

71 Do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish your opinions.

72 In the confrontation between the stream and the rock the stream always wins; not through strength but perseverance.

73 Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world but accepting that they pass away.

74 Everything will come. Exactly as it does.

75 Meditation is a skillful letting go and the skill of letting go.

76 Be like water.

77 The no-mind thinks no-thoughts about no-things.

78 The soft and supple will prevail.

79 How you live today is how you live your life.

80 In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities but in the expert's mind there are few.

81 When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing.

82 Can you see time? No. Then you should stop looking for it.

83 There is no connection between I myself yesterday and I myself in this moment. Who I am tomorrow is not connected to who I am today.

84 Becoming awake involves seeing our confusion more clearly.

85 When you realise there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

86 Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

87 The moment we desire to be something we are no longer free.

88 When you realise there is nothing lacking the whole world belongs to you.

89 The brush must paint by itself.

90 If right were really right it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no argument. Is that how you experience right?

91 The sacred lies in the ordinary.

The yin yang symbol signifies unity in opposites. Difference and wholeness cannot be separated for each implicates the other.

92 Understand yourself and then you will understand everything.

93 The stories you tell yourself create a "you" that is not true.

94 Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace.

95 If you are not happy here and now you never will be.

96 Die in your thoughts every morning and you will no longer fear death.

97 Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience.

98 Time is not a line but a series of now-points.

99 You need not do anything but be yourself.

100 There is only your perception of time.

101 Change how you see and see how you change.

102 The infinite is the finite of every instant.

103 The beginner sees many possibilities, the expert few. Be a beginner every day.

104 Loss is not as bad as wanting more.

105 On your way remain unknown.

106 Everything changes. There is nothing to stick to. That is the Buddha's most important teaching.

107 Relearn everything. Let every moment be a new beginning.

108 We must realise that nothing is as it seems, that what we think is not the same as what is.

109 All teachings are mere references. The true experience is living your own life.

110 In difference there is completeness. In completeness there is difference.

111 Know nothing.

112 No self is true self.

113 Be happy without reason.

114 If you realise that all things change there is nothing you will try to hold on to.

115 Life is like stepping into a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.

116 Your suffering is my suffering and your happiness is my happiness.

117 Abandon learning and you will be free from trouble and distress.

118 The torch of chaos and doubt, this is what the sage steers by.

119 To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders.

120 Being free of desires it is tranquil. And the world will be at peace of its own accord.

121 If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.

122 With eyes watching, one cannot see. With eyes closed, one can see clearly.

123 If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the top.

124 No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.

125 Be a master of the mind, not mastered by the mind.

126 Not creating delusions is enlightenment.

127 Don't be interested in high-flown statements; bite your apple and don't discuss it.

128 Let things flow forward naturally in whatever way they like.

129 The holiest beliefs and the highest thoughts offer you nothing.

130 The world doesn't happen to you; you happen to it.

131 Simplicity, patience, compassion: these are your greatest treasures.

132 Thoughts aren't really fixed realities, but simply movements of the mind that is thinking.

133 Sheer futility, sheer futility: everything is futile. Everything is as insubstantial as breath. You try to grasp it, you cannot.

134 Much wisdom, much grief; the more knowledge, the more sorrow.

135 There is no disaster greater than not being at peace.

136 Laughter is a madness and pleasure no use at all.

137 There is nothing to be gained under the sun.

138 All is futility and chasing after the wind.

139 Be peace. Live peace.

140 We have to allow ourselves to realise we are complete fools; otherwise we have nowhere to begin.

141 Humility is its own reward and appropriate to what we are.

142 People like what is not true and they don't like what is true.

143 Truth is many.

144 A compassionate mind is a diligent mind.

145 There is a season for everything and a time for all tasks.

146 Stop looking for a point.

147 A flower falls, even though we love it; a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

148 Every new moment matters most. Concentrate on now.

149 If my mind doesn't go out to disturb the noise, the noise won't disturb me.

150 We see thoughts for what they are: the passionate attachment to unreal and non-substantial things.

151 The identity fades, the energy remains.

152 Be compassionate to all living things insofar as you can.

153 To see beyond ego is riches indeed.

154 To every person is given a key to heaven. The same key may also take you to hell.

155 Live slowly. Be attentive.

156 To understand everything is to forgive everything.

157 Nurture an innate recognition of your interconnectedness to all things.

158 "Is" is a deception in a world where everything is always becoming.

159 Look without searching. See without knowing.

160 A wise person sees others as themselves.

161 The function of mind is response. The function of life is adaptation. Forests are adaptations of seeds and seeds of dust.

162 Be content to be simply yourself without competition or comparison. This is respect.

163 Just live your day. Do your tasks. And then sleep. Nothing more is required of you.

164 The path to enlightenment is underneath your feet. Stay on the path.

165 Being is still; expression, moving.

166 Whatever you're doing, you're doing it now.

167 When there is no desire all things are at peace.

168 Wherever there is absence of self there are no others, because in absence of self I am all others.

169 We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

NATURE AND NOTHING TO STICK TO: HOW ENVIRONMENTALISTS MISUNDERSTAND NATURE

I wonder what it is that you imagine “nature” to be? Having asked this question, I could now go on to offer various suggestions so as to give you a multiple choice question from which you, the reader, would pick out the answer nearest to your own. Or you could read the previous blog in which several other people did that. But I’m not going to do that right now because what I really want you to do is think for yourself and articulate it yourself. This is necessary today in a world full of people more than ready to tell you what to think rather than let you come to your own conclusions - assuming you even think that “nature” is something about which you should come to some conclusion to begin with. And it isn’t necessarily so that it is.

Increasingly today, though, people do think that “nature” or, more precisely, the imagined human destruction of nature, and so the further imagined threat to it that human beings pose, is something that people should think about and, therefore, it is very much a topic of thought. It is my thesis, however, one very much in line with the thoughts I muse upon and express in the entirety of There is nothing to stick to, thoughts which surely encompass ideas from many times and places throughout human history [and so are not nearly as ‘eccentric’ as some might wish to categorise them], that those who ally themselves to this populist movement of sentimental concern have almost entirely misunderstood the thing they claim to care about. Instead, so I argue, they have anthropomorphised it, turning it, in the process, into some domesticated version of itself, something about which, quite bizarrely, we should have “concern”. What I do not refer to here, coincidentally, is the idea of self-preservation, something which all but the most suicidal of organisms seem to possess quite naturally, which is why those things that are alive don’t just go and sit in a metaphorical corner to die. No; self-preservation I well accept and understand. It is the characterisation of, and the imagined moral responsibility towards, nature that a number of people behind environmental movements seem to possess and attempt to communicate that concerns me here in a universe I insist is nothing to stick to.

Take, for example, a document produced in 2019 by Roger Hallam, one of the people responsible for one of the most public faces of current environmental concern, Extinction Rebellion. He has published on his own website a document just shy of 80 pages titled Common Sense for the 21st Century which attempts to provide an intellectual underpinning for the movement broadly conceived and to describe the political goals and actions in view to achieve it. For avoidance of doubt, I have read the whole document from cover to cover. What it reveals, so I am going to say in what follows, is a thoroughly wrong-headed view of human beings and their place in the world and a total misunderstanding about what nature is. One might be tempted to say that this was just a one off, an anomaly, but one cannot when one sees such a document being cheerleaded for by those such as George Monbiot, another green activist who attempts to supply intellectual underpinnings for green activism, and who are equally as wrong-headed about the things they tell us [ad nauseam] that we are “responsible” for. 

But before I get into this in detail I need to make clear that my problem here is not with any diagnosis of the problem that either Roger Hallam or George Monbiot might give. They describe in lurid detail, based on current climate science, the harm that human activity is predicted to do to the biosphere of our planet and I neither deny anything they say about this nor do I wish to downplay its consequences. So whatever else I may be I am not a “climate change denier” and neither am I an ignorer of climate science. I do not deny that human industrial activity on this planet over the last 250 years has affected the planet’s climate [this is truly mere “common sense”] and I’m more than happy to agree that folks like Hallam and Monbiot are quite right about this. Where I differ from them is that I don’t care about it whereas they are telling me, and everybody else, that we should and that it is a moral duty or responsibility which suggests, in turn, that such things can and do exist.

I may now seem to you like a monster but, if I do, I casually smile a whimsical smile and think “so be it” to myself. Unlike Roger Hallam’s “common sense” that all humans have a “transcultural duty to create a world safe for our children”, I think there is no such duty. Its rhetorical, made up, empty-headed, sentimental nonsense. [And I’d think that even if I had any children which, I have to say, I don’t because, unlike those who claim to care about the environment, I’ve had the good sense to not voluntarily add to the burden put upon it!] People like Hallam and Monbiot will tell you all day and all night that “ecological collapse” is something that it is our responsibility to fix but I read this and go, “Huh? When did this memo come around?” much, in fact, as the American comedian George Carlin does here and here. And that’s a fair and reasonable question to ask because there never was any such memo. Nature, by virtue of us being born, something in which not a single one of us had any say, did not issue us with a list of responsibilities or duties the moment we popped out of someone’s vagina or got dragged through a C-section. Nature, which is passive and uncaring, without purpose or intention, doesn’t have the slightest interest in what lives or dies - including us! - and it didn’t give birth to us so that we could be “responsible”. So if people today are going to preach “responsibility” for nature then that is entirely on them. Its on their shoulders. Its not anything that nature itself cares about. Nature doesn’t speak and has no voice. That is simple anthropocentrism.

Of course, the current “climate emergency” is entirely one of human making. Hallam and Monbiot are clear about that and I’m happy to go along with them on it. Human beings, so it seems, haven’t got the common sense to even ensure their own survival and can’t cooperate to a level in which everyone is seemingly happy with their lot. Neither of these observations, though, are arguments for human beings’ responsibility for the planet or nature or the environment. Human beings, if we are observing this properly, are the problem not the solution! And how can the problem also be the solution? It is at about this point in the conversation that people like George Monbiot will talk about the basic altruism of human beings and how we can work together to help each other out and save the day. But surely it is because so often human beings don’t care to save the day that we are in this mess in the first place? As our species went along farting noxious gases into the sky for two and a half centuries and throwing our waste behind us surely it must have occurred to some of us from time to time as things got poisoned and people got sick that it was actually us who were dirtying our own nests? And did we care then? Of course not! I would argue its because nature hasn’t made us as beings who care, at least, not until the issue is present and existential and right in our faces. And unavoidably so. And then it just becomes self-interest. For human beings will always put off until tomorrow what they can get out of today. We have been made, or rather shaped by the shape of our existence, to deal in the present and take things as they come.

But "we are looking here at the slow and agonising suffering and death of billions of people" says Roger Hallam in his book. Let us agree he is right. Were any of these people expected to live forever? Were they immortal and impervious to accident, illness or disease? Were they going to live pain-free lives of happiness and prosperity in each case? Is that how life is on this planet? Is that nature? Perhaps Roger Hallam lives on a different planet to me but on the one I live on people suffer and die all the time. They get mental illnesses and degenerative diseases and live in poverty and misery and distress. I have no doubt that many of these people derive next to no benefit from their lives at all. They are just lifeforms which existed for a few years and then didn’t. No one noticed them when they were alive and no one misses them when they are gone. For some I imagine that prolonging their life is actually prolonging their misery. There must be reasons why over 800,000 people annually kill themselves according to those who measure these things. I wonder, do Roger Hallam and George Monbiot care about that? Do they care about those people who have no need of an apocalypse to get worked up about because their own experience of life is already quite terrifyingly apocalyptic enough? Climate apocalypse often seems to be the privileged concern of those for whom their middle class lives are quite comfortable enough. Hallam, Monbiot and even the starchild of environmentalism, Greta Thunberg, fit this description very well. Everything in their gardens is lovely and so they need something to worry about. That their garden might go up in flames or end up underwater fits the bill perfectly.

So what is this nature we all agree we have polluted? It is chance. It is “what can happen, will happen.” It is lack of intention, lack of purpose, lack of direction, lack of action. Taoism describes it as “actionless action” in its expression wu wei, an activity it wants human beings to follow as well. What this means is that, even though human beings might make decisions to care about things, these are not nature’s own decisions. We were not created to be custodians of anything. We are, in actual fact, not custodians of anything. Nature is not going to judge anyone for not trying to save anything or anyone because nature itself does not care what exists or what doesn’t exist. Nature just is, and just is as it is, because it could be, because what can happen, will happen. When nature creates something, quite randomly and accidentally, which we, in our human way, describe as beautiful, it didn’t intend to do that. Nature does not set out to be beautiful or create beauty. It is not oblivious to human feelings of attachment to it or happiness in its environment. It doesn’t care. It is nihilistic in this respect. It doesn’t feel and it doesn’t think. It doesn’t know anything and it has no truth. Nature means nothing, not in the abstract. It is simply that which came to be because it could in the ways that it could. Some bits seem beautiful. Other bits are cancer or flesh-eating viruses or animals that live by predating on other animals. Or us, another simple stroke of unintended randomness. There is no way to judge or value any of this. How can one judge what is simply because it could be? Nature is simply an environment, nothing more. Oh, and by the way, all this nature is strictly temporary and it exists by means of constant destruction. If a lion can kill and eat an antelope then a human can kill and eat a pig, a cow or a sheep. Or even something cuddly like a dog or a monkey. That is, by very definition, natural - as is any extinction that follows as a result.

Yes, that’s right. Nature destroys things all the time all by itself, including, incidentally, most things that have ever lived on earth. No humans to blame. Yet environmentalists love humans to blame. Its almost as if its an egotistical human fascination with itself that’s important here and not “the environment” that such people claim to care about. Roger Hallam, in his book, goes after governments and the corporate culture which has governments in its pocket. He is not wrong about this but that is a political issue, an issue to do with how people have let themselves become the slaves and pawns of other humans for a few trinkets and some shiny devices in the trap called “civilisation”. Human beings have, we are told, been given higher brain functions and greater intellects than all the other creatures nature birthed. But what have these resulted in? Greater and better ways to do more damage to more things in a faster timeframe. Civilisation. We are altruistic, states George Monbiot. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Human beings are those creatures which laud their abilities but who have little to feel laudable about as they stagger on wrecking their own home and destroying everything around them. As egotistical beings they, of course, play up their own role in all this but, in a way, they are the perfect examples of an uncaring nature which just does what it does because it can. There is no thought or care or intention in this. If it can happen then it will. This is exactly what human beings are like. Often human beings do things just because they can, a glorious and repeated exercise in “watching the world burn” just so they can look and point at the fire and say “I did that.” So human beings are very much “of nature” and we see its principles of lack of care, lack of genuine purpose or reason, working right through their actions - not least in those they anoint as “civilised”.

But it is not that this is the humanity of Hallam or Monbiot or many others, of course. Human beings, for people such as these, through centuries of human imagination, have been moulded into reasonable, rational, morally responsible beings, beings who needed to be rational and reasonable and morally responsible in order to operate in the world we had created for ourselves. This, I state it plainly, is a simple fiction which, in future blogs on There is nothing to stick to, I will flesh out in much more detail when I discuss morality or, as I believe, its lack, its fiction. Here let me say only that I see little “rational” in the operation of human beings and even less that is “moral”. “Morality” does not exist and in those places that it does it is simply fictions of human thinking piled on top of one another in an attempt to make some form of human culture work and feel justified about it.

Yet if existence, the universe, nature, is not moral, and it certainly is not even though we may observe the pragmatic trade offs that emerge for purely practical reasons along the way, then how can anything within it be? Here what things that nature creates quite randomly think about themselves is irrelevant. Can a part be a measure of the whole, a whole the vast majority of which it is not even aware of? Can a flimsy and primitive human cognition be so puffed up as to imagine that it is capable of knowledge or understanding or truth? Can it be so egotistical as to dream that it can be the ground of rationality or morality or even its dumb articulator? We would look at the ant and laugh if it dared to imagine it had the keys to nature in its imagination. Yet we are more often than not too stupid to realise that we are the ant. We are just as dumb as the squirrel, the dandelion and the microbe. Of course, we think we aren’t. But that’s part of the problem. We have mistaken our increased utility for knowledge and imagined that this knowledge gives us understanding. Because we imagined we could designate truths we took them to be the truth. This is all part of the human folly, all part of the purposeless, immoral nature from which we come and to which we will return.

So Roger Hallam and George Monbiot and Greta Thunberg want to save the earth. They are allowed to want this. But they are not the earth’s custodians. They are not responsible for it. None of us are. None of us are mandated to care. None of us can be condemned for not caring, for just going about our business until we are inevitably expunged. That is what nature is, that which is called forth into existence, which exists, for a while, as it can, and then it dies - at which point that which it is made of becomes something else. Or maybe, eventually, nothing else. Just nothing. For all of the something we so care about now once was nothing and, so our physical scientists and cosmologists tell us, it will be one day again - the tiny, inconsequential, egotistical, narcissistic human pantomime in between notwithstanding. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to continue to exist although, I must say, even this doesn’t really make any sense when any imaginable human life is utterly insignificant in the context of eternity but to imagine yourself a custodian, a saviour or a person responsible I find utterly bizarre, a basic misunderstanding of a human being’s place in nature and the universe in general. Its true that nature doesn’t stop people caring or taking responsibility, indeed, it created them as things with these possibilities and opportunities. But it didn’t do so with a purpose or as a mandate for us to be that way. Nature doesn’t care what we do or how we live or when, or from what, we die. It will carry on, remorseless, indifferent, regardless. We don’t matter. Nothing matters. To think it does, to argue for responsibility, or duty, or care, is straightforwardly sentimental rhetoric which attempts to erase the pain, death, misery and destruction from nature as if there were some dreamy, idealistic version of the same we could put in its place. All of these things, things which human beings often talk about as negatives to be erased from existence in our common hallucination of a natural utopia, are often, in fact, nature’s driving forces. This is yet another way in which human beings have misunderstood and miscast nature in the arrogance of their self-serving, narcissistic idealism.

What that idealism led to, historically speaking, is civilisation and it is civilisation, and its imagined benefits, that human beings now confuse with nature. For the truth is that it is civilisation that human beings want to save. It is that which they have created and built and imagined that they care about. They care about their own comfort and convenience rather than the nature that is chance and the non-intentional “what can happen” that will happen. Human beings domesticated the world and then replaced nature with their own domestication of it. Observe this in the writings of Hallam and Monbiot or in the speeches of Thunberg. They don’t want to go back to nature, they don’t want to dismantle civilisation, they don’t want to live “more naturally”, they have no concern for biodiversity as an abstract thing in itself. They simply want to clean up the environment, physically and metaphorically. They want to control it to their standards of cleanliness. This is their definition of hygiene.

But its not mine and, I suggest, it is not nature’s either. Roger Hallam writes that “the cost of freedom is civic duty” but this is utter fantasy in any and every respect. The context of any and all existence is not “freedom” - which would be unconditional - but constraint which is various forms of conditionality to which everything that exists is subject. That people live in a civic environment is not a given, either in its invention or its maintenance, and many kinds of people, notably for my purposes, the historical school of Cynics, have chosen to disdain such an environment and speak to its negative effects upon humanity in general. One may, in fact, argue very strongly that it is increasing the amount and depth of civilisation that has inevitably summoned the current ecological crises that people like Hallam, Monbiot and Thunberg talk about. Would an uncivilised human race have brought such destruction upon itself? I suggest not for lack of civilisation would not have supported humanity as it now exists in its highly industrialised and technological states, all things that the historical Cynics would have whole-heartedly opposed as detrimental to this and any other species. But civilisation and civilising has been the form human hubris has taken since it learned to wield fire and fashion the wheel and this is that which must not be stopped for it is regarded and promoted as a destiny. 

It will be clear from reading this essay and, indeed, this whole website that I am no apologist for civilisation. Indeed, I laud and honour many within these pages who saw it as diseased and cancerous, a means to the death and dehumanisation of the human race and a thing against which they stood opposed. If Hallam and Monbiot and Thunberg want things to blame for the current state of the earth “civilisation”, the obsession of successive generations of human beings, has a good case for being near the top of the list. But if they are people who merely want to dust off civilisation, give it a make over and make it nice and shiny for us, more acceptable to their current fictions of equality, politics, fairness and naturalness, then what really radical alternative to the progression of humanity over successive millennia, to the detriment of the nature they claim to be inspired by and the custodians of, are they offering? The answer is none. There is no utopian civilisation; there is no impactless civilisation. Their fiction of a harmony is fantasy; their belief that the humans are in, or can be in, control is deluded. Nature is chance. Nature is what can happen, will happen. Nature is remorseless destruction and endless uncaring recycling of matter and life. Nature is pain, death and decay. Life is dependent on these things as we see in countless examples in the natural world and not in their distasteful, sentimental, anthropomorphic avoidance. If you want life you must also embrace death. That is nature. One implies the other.

And so it is my view that environmentalists, conservationists and green activists generally, and the ecological panic they have engendered and encouraged, is based on a million falsehoods about nature and the natural world. You can read about them and why they are false throughout the content of this website. The first and greatest of them is that nature needs a guardian: it doesn’t! And neither does it need self-important and self-interested species waffling on about their duty and their responsibility, things which are preposterous fictions of their own self-regarding reason. Yes, species that want to hang around or want other things to hang around with them shouldn’t dirty the nest without a second thought but, then again, neither do any of these things have to exist in the first place. If something comes to be nature pays it no attention and should it disappear again - as things inevitably do - then it doesn’t remember they were ever there. Nature has no ego even though it enabled us to have one. Understanding nature means fitting in with nature as it actually operates and not, in the hubris of our own egotistical minds, imagining we can create a better version embossed as the currency of human culture and civilisation, a currency which is substituted for the nature we claimed to revere but also a worthless currency that is as temporary as we are. It must be the aim of all people who understand nature as it is described in this essay and this website to devalue this civilisation and to expose it as the artificial unnaturalness that it actually is even if that means accepting the death and destruction that was our birthright from the moment what would become us came to be as nothing other than cosmic energy. An understanding of nature means an understanding of the whole and not, instead, exalting the pride of a species to manipulate and control its singularly unimportant environment. Leave things be. It is our meddling that is the problem. That’s nature’s way. Let it do as it will. Time and chance was all we were ever offered from nature’s well, nothing more, nothing less.