Whenever I try or hope to meditate on something, I either fail to concentrate effectively on that object, or I manage to concentrate but in doing so feel uncomfortably estranged from the Tao.  It must be because I am rereading Alan Watts’s great slender last book Tao: The Watercourse Way that I feel I am beginning to understand the problem. 

I have found no better discussion of the Tao (especially given the fact that any discussion of the Tao is a misunderstanding of it—“The Tao that can be spoken is not the unchanging Tao”—the first thing Lao Tzu chose to tell us of the Way).  And no one else has come close to helping me understand how and in what ways I might be part of the Tao, and all others too, and therefore I am a part of, one with, all others—and that includes the great malefactors of our time. 

This has long been a problem for me: if I am indeed just one expression of the Tao, something the Tao is doing as Watts likes to say, and all others are in that same relation to the Tao, so that there is no difference between my self and the selves of all others in all times nor between ourselves and the physical world and universe we so objectify in order to harm it—if I am indeed necessarily and without my choosing or understanding one with all things, then obviously one cannot hope to meditate on something, because one is not a subject distinct from that something.  And just as the eye cannot look at its own looking, I cannot meditate on my own being. 

There is no problem, no emotion, no person, no pain, that is not I.  I cannot meditate on “I”, nor on the Tao as if it were not “I”.  Meditation is not on.

11 August, 2024.