I had a dream the other night and the gist of it was that I didn’t have much in common with a certain friend. One of my biggest issues is I have embraced Taoism and I love it but a lot of the core ideas which are mostly misinterpreted by Western scholars are truly alien to Western thinking. I am no expert and most of what I have learned has been at Qigong classes, but these odd ideas are actually what make me happy.

One idea for example is the mapping of the nine chambers and the idea of a positive cycle and a negative cycle and where it begins and ends. The top chamber is the fire chamber and the bottom chamber is the water chamber. In Western thinking if you mapped it onto the cycle you would start at the fire chamber as that is the brightest and full of the most energy. Whereas in the Taoist sense the top is actually the beginning of the negative cycle.

Rather than being at the top, which in a sense seems the brightest and most coveted, you are better off at the bottom (the water chamber) as that is the start of the positive cycle. Most people don’t get it but the core structure of the nine chambers which represent a myriad of natural cycles once understood will help you shrug off a lot of destructive ideas. It is more or less a natural set of ideas, not just natural as in the better way but in the sense of how nature works.

Considering that Western thinking believes it has already conquered nature which is actually the source of much pain and suffering for western society, the fact remains that nature will always have the final say as it the Tao (the way) and nature’s systems will always dominate. To sound like a bit of a wanker, the way will always be the way no matter how much technology tries to dominate. 

So it is probably more obvious now why I don’t have much in common with some friends because my thinking is more in line with natural systems. This is just the tip of the iceberg because I spent years learning about Taoist concepts and when I was learning decades ago with the same trainer I picked up concepts but the last six years I learnt the mechanics of the theory. The basics though are multi-layered and I couldn’t remember every detail but I understood some core ideas.

Even with some basic theory and my own infernal stupidity a lot of what I have learnt has changed my life for the better. Yet I haven’t mastered very much at all and can only hope I can improve. Nothing though should be taken for granted, especially at my age and the only piece of writing that I found rewarding was my three short stories as they relied heavily on Taoist ideas. Yet I need something less about fictional stories and more straightforward. Fiction is not something I really mastered either but I gave it a go.