Fathoming Life

Fathoming life is to measure its depths, to understand being—existence itself—beneath the shallow surface of how it appears to us. Implicit in this is following premise: this world you see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and imagine is an illusion, a shadow on the wall. It is but a map of the transcendental, objective, noumenal universe—a shallow, two-dimensional model—shallow because who knows how many more dimensions of measurement exist beyond the limitations of the human bodymind to conceive?

The above is a key concept for unlocking the ability to perform Taoist alchemical transmutations on the world. Setting aside the metaphor, I mean to say that once we understand that the world we experience isn’t that-is-which-is, but is merely our part of it, then we can change our relationship with reality itself by changing ourselves—specifically through changing our attitudes.

The Zhuangzi tells us a fable / parable which illustrates this concept clearly:

Once, when Duke Huan was hunting in the marshes, with Guan Zhong as his driver, he saw a ghost. The duke took hold of Guan Zhong’s hand and said, “Did you see something, Father Zhong?”

“Your servant saw nothing,” answered the other.

After returning home, the duke began mumbling to himself until he tok ill, remaining home for several days. Huangzi Gao’ao, an official of Qi, said to the duke, “You are injuring yourself my lord. How would a ghost be able to harm you?. . .”

Duke Huan said, “But are there really such things as ghosts?”

He answered, “Indeed there are.…There are the Formgones of the water, the Antlerdogs of the hills, the Unipedes of the mountains, the Pacers of the meadows, and the Serpentwists of the marshes.”

The duke asked, “What does the Serpentwist look like?”

Huangzi answered, “The Serpentwist is as big as the hub of a carriage wheel and long as its shaft, robed in purple and capped in red. This creature dislikes the rumblings of chariot wheels, and when it hears them it stands up with its hands on its head. Anyone who is lucky enough to see this creature goes on to become a hegemon of all the states.”

Duke Huan burst out laughing and said, “That is what I saw!” . . . Before the end of the day, without his even realizing it, his illness was gone. (Zhuangzi 152-3)

How one fathom’s life determines how life manifests itself to him. Such was the case with Duke Huan. His initial experience with the Serpentwist didn’t change in any objective way. What did alter was his subjective frame. His attitude adjusted as he came to believe that the ghost he saw was a good omen rather than an evil one. Note again that nothing of the quality of his initial experience was transformed. Perhaps the Serpentwist is something terrifying to look upon, especially when we don’t know what it is nor what it means. But once we do know, once we can properly fathom the unknown monster and incorporate it into our Map of Meaning, then all of a sudden, we’ve gone beyond good and evil. We’ve dug deeper as to confront a more fundamental dialectic: life-affirmation versus life-denial.

Why is this conflict more fundamental? Because both good and evil exist within being itself. There is no such thing as a world worth living in—i.e., a good world—which does not also contain evil as its existential counterpart.

From chapter two of the Tao Te Ching:

if you decide that something is beautiful
then something else immediately becomes ugly
without you realizing it

. . .

you create death when you decide what constitutes life
you create difficulties when you create ease
you create long when you decide what is short
you create a low tone when you sing a high one (Lao-tzu 10)

Therefore, we must decide. Are we lovers of life? Or are we haters of existence?

Choosing the former, we, like Duke Huan, can reconstitute our value structures. We can build and rebuild for ourselves new tools by which to fathom the depths of each our individual existences. We can learn how to turn evil into good, to transmute lead into gold, to move forward not in spite of but because of the painful and terrifying inevitabilities of reality. And we can do this because we know that the opportunity for growth is inextricably connected to the potential for misery and terror.

All of the Great Course of our lives, even the strife, is precious. This we realize through the Equalizing Assessment of All Things. Good and evil become collapsed together in our minds in order to reorder in accord with what actually is. Our Maps of Meaning update, and thereby we better navigate the Way. That is the lesson we should take from Duke Huan’s discussion with Huanzi Gao’ao.

We are injuring ourselves with our own judgements, but we can recover if only we realize that what we judge as bad is also good.

Lao-tzu. “Chapter 2”. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014. p.10

Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi; The Complete Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn, Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2020