On the edge of the storm...

sitting with some Taoist philosophy and creation myths

This past month has been an energetic whirlwind. Honestly my world has been shaken upside down in more ways than one.

Now here I sit, in the quiet of night, as the winds and rain of yet another band from Hurricane Ian cross through my neighborhood.

The pot has been stirred, as within, so without. I have been brought to that infamous zero point field, where everything is questioned, until there is nothing left to question.

As I write this, thunder rumbles until I question: is it thunder or a tornado, you know , when they say it sounds like a train coming right at you?

There is nothing like the energy of a storm to clear the field.

Walking the spiritual path, one walks through many storms, not necessarily by choice. The only way through to the other side is head-on into the fear, the lightning bolts, the thunderclaps, the gale force winds.

Releasing any and all attachments to this illusion we call life.

Welcoming the karmic lessons with wide open arms.

Inviting one’s demons in to devour one’s illusions and beliefs.

It is not for the faint of heart, and yet some of us have no choice in the matter.

Chaos and the floods

"The great dao floods over." Dao De Jing

As I sit on the edge of Category 4 Hurricane Ian bearing down in the direction of the west, my attention is drawn to the stack of books sitting in that evergrowing pile at my bedside. One, in particular, keeps grabbing my attention, “Nourishing Destiny: The Inner Tradition of Chinese Medicine”.

Becoming tired of watching the updates on the slow 10 mph crawl Hurricane Ian is making across the state and the every two-hour notification going off on my phone letting me know the tornado, flood, and tropical storm watch is still in effect, I flip open the book. And what do I discover but creation myths involving chaos, floods, and giant whirlpools.

Chinese medicine is based upon the understanding of the functional processes of nature and how these processes are mirrored within the body. It was developed by the astute observations of spiritual masters, trying to understand the basic foundations of reality and immortality, sitting with nature and observing the reflection of outer processes mirrored within the body.

“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…” a spiritual maxim attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and the Emerald Tablets of western alchemical teachings in the 12th century, and I feel originated much earlier in the East, tells of processes that permeate nature (the macrocosm) and the human being (the microcosm) in an unbroken chain.

That which appears in the outer is reflected in the inner and here I was reading about chaos, whirlpools and flooding as a historic storm was passing by.

Chinese medicine studies the functional relationships between things, not the things themselves, because it is within the empty space between things, that the eternal dao is to be found. The dao is the state that exists before the creation of duality in the world, as it precedes the creation of the ultimate duality, heaven and earth, Yang and Yin. It is the ground of all being, the harmonization of all polarities, the undifferentiated oneness that is unknowable by the human mind, because in the very act of naming or attempting to know, it changes from the “eternal” dao of formlessness, into the conceptual dao in the world of duality.

Creation myths and Cosmology

As I flipped open the text “Nourishing Destiny: The Inner Tradition of Chinese Medicine”, I came to an early creation myth. The Chinese characters tell much more than the flat two-dimensional meanings of many of our words in the English language. Chinese characters are drawings that can actually tell a story of great depth and contain inner, secret meanings. The Chinese character for the word “myth”, shenhua means literally “spirit talk”.

The earliest version of the creation myth of Pangu dates from the third century C.E.:

Heaven and earth were in the chaos condition, like a chicken’s egg, within which was born Pangu. After 18,000 years, when heaven and earth were separated, the pure Yang formed the heaven and the murky Yin formed the earth. Pangu stood between them. His body transformed nine times daily, while his head supported the heaven and his feet stabilized the earth.

The triad, “the three” is seen in many cosmologies, including the kabbalah and Norse mythology. Three times threes equal nine, the number of completion. In the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, it states, “According to the final calculations nature begins as one and ends as nine. The first is heaven, the second is earth, and the third is man. These are the three. Three times three is nine and corresponds to the nine wild regions upon the earth. Thus man is composed of three parts, and each part has three subdivisions that decide upon life or death.“

The myth of Pangu continues, illustrating the macro- and microcosmic relationship of the human body to the universe, the death of Pangu giving rise to the phenomenal universe as we know it:

After the death of Pangu, his breath became the winds and clouds, his voice the thunder, his right and left eyese the sun and the moon, his four limbs and five “bodies” (fingers) the four quarters of the earth and the five great mountains, his blood the rivers, his muscles and veins the strata of the earth, his flesh the soil, his hair and beard the the constellations, his skin and body hair the plants and trees, his teeth and bones the metals and stone, his marrow gold and precious stones, and his sweat the rain. The parasites on his body, impregnated by the wind, became human beings.”

Chaos and the floods

Controlling flooding of the great rivers in ancient Chinese was a continual problem, as it still is today. Commerce, agriculture and so much of human activity is centered along the waterways and shorelines. In Chinese mythology, the imagery of flooding represents the daos’s efforts to assert its original, spontaneous nature in human society, to take back the wildness where man had tried to civilize and control it.

Descriptions of the dao reflect the nature of storms like the hurricane sitting on my doorstep:

• The dao, as the primal state of formlessness, and potentiality of all things is described as “a vast whirlpool continually ‘moving away’ from and ‘returning’ to its source in the process of its own ‘self-becoming’”, its fundamental nature being chaotic. "

• “The dao is a river whose waters are continually rising”

• Chaos is the dao, the undifferentiated oneness that is the source of randomness in the universe.

The flood is a metaphor for the dao’s continual effort to assert its original, spontaneous nature, where human’s have tried to channel it and civilize it. The dao will wipe the slate clean for a new beginning, even as humans continue in vain to attempt to control the ensuing chaos.

There was something chaotic yet complete, Which existed before the creation of heaven and earth.   Without sound and formless,  It stands alone and does not change. It pervades all and is free from danger;  It can be regarded as the mother of the world.                     -Dao De Jing