TAO - #YIN - #YANG

on taps and drains, and luposlipaphobia

The text of this post has been translated from Dutch to English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined soon.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
Tao The Ching 1 - vertaling Gia Fu Feng

If Tao is unnameable, then any interpretation is actually meaningless and doomed to failure in advance. Tao is everything and at the same time nothing. It is all-encompassing and also present in the smallest of the smallest.

Tao

The Chinese character Tao shows a foot on the left, meaning to walk:

辶

And on the right side 'head':

首

Which in turn consists of 'self':

自

And within it we find 'eye' again:

目

All parts of the character taken together: a running head. Feet that go where the head sends them. In full mind and with full attention - being on the road with open eyes. Going and observing at the same time: following the symbolic path of life. 

A more common use in China of the character Tao is to denote a path or road. Such one with bricks or asphalt. Because of possible crowds, potholes in the pavement and other unforeseen issues, it is always smart to keep a clear head when moving along such a road.

Tao can also mean principle or truth, and then we come closer to Tao as the natural course of things. How life runs, how things go, how nature unfolds. How in spring a flower bud unfolds. How a global trade conflict develops. How the inner nature of a person or a society unfolds.

The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces.
Tao Teh Ching 42 - translated by Gia Fu Feng

The Tao begot one. Tao is not nameable because it cannot be captured in one form. And yet - sooner or later - once - long ago - far in the future - perhaps now, at this very moment - Tao will manifest. Tao conceives and gives birth to the One. The nothingness becomes something. In all cultures of the world, this miracle of creation is told or described. An idea takes shape, a word is spoken, a song is sung.

Fox was the only living man. There was no earth.
The water was everywhere. ‘What shall I do,’ Fox asked himself. He began to sing in order to find out.

‘I would like to meet somebody,’ Fox said.
Then he met Coyote.
‘I thought I was going to meet someone,’ Fox said.
‘Where are you going?’ Coyote asked.
‘I’ve been wandering all over trying to find someone. I was worried there for a while.’

‘Well it's better for two people to go together....that's what they always say.’
‘OK. But what will we do?’
‘I don't know.’
‘I got it!" Let's try to make the world.’
‘And how are we going to do that?’ Coyote asked.

‘Sing!’ said Fox.
Jaime de Angulo

An unborn child and the mother are still one. There is no notion of me and the other. For the child, there is no notion of hunger and food. There is no notion of inside and outside, yet of hot and cold. In the paradisiacal state, the existence of a world outside that paradise is non-existent. Just as there is no notion of being in paradise.

As soon as a thing - a mountain or a clothes peg - or a phenomenon - temperature or spring - or a concept - loneliness or an adventure - sees the light of day, the game of dynamism and incessant change begins. Nothing remains as it is. One gives birth to two - yin and yang - and these two play an endless game of chasing each other, teasing and challenging, crowding each other out and giving space again. 

Where yin and yang the very first hashtags in human history? Labels or stickers then, perhaps? The #yin-yang pair has made a giant leap from obscure antiquity into everyday language and media. And by now it does suffer seriously from cultural appropriation, or culture hijacking. Yin and yang have degenerated into the new starboard to port, substitutions of wanted and unwanted, a new disguise of the good guy and the bad guy. But instead of serving as reaffirmations of what is already so firmly established in our thinking - duality - they can be the ideal tools for putting things into perspective and for understanding the totality of processes. In any case, they are the key to the Book of Change. 

The character for yang:

陽

On the left, 'hill' or 'place':

阝

On the right side 'clear' or 'expand':

昜

At the top of it 'morning', 'the sun above the horizon':

旦

Put together: 'the sun side of the hill'. And then the character for yin:

陰

On the left again 'hill' or 'place':

阝

On the right-hand side 'now:

今

And under it 'clouds':

云

Taken together, the meaning of the character yin is: 'now there are clouds', 'the shadow side of the hill'.

The light and its shadow are inseparable. One gives existence to the other. In modern literature, we find only one example where this phenomenon is belied: the lone cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow.

In case the sunny side of the hill is too sunny, too hot and too dry - and thus undesirable - then it is difficult to disconnect it from other side - that moist and fertile one - to be finally removed. And suppose it did succeed, the whole enterprise unfortunately results in yet another sunny side. However, in untold many other situations, human beings do tend to detach an unwelcome facet of what happens to them from its opposite. Pleasure without renunciation, peace without effort, courage without trial, sweet without salt, relationship without introspection. On this, read especially Dopamine City by Anna Lembke.

Suppose war breaks out, and no one comes

Suppose you have a great idea, but there is no response. Suppose the sun is shining, but there is no earth, no atmosphere, no water. Sunshine but nothing to heat. It takes two to make a dream come true.

One begot two. Two begot three. The sun is shining. Water on the earth heats up. The water evaporates, rises and expands. As it rises and the surroundings become colder, the vapour turns into droplets and therefore visible. A cloud. As the vapour condenses, it gives off heat. That extra heat pushes the cloud up even more. And as a result even more contraction and cooling. Eventually: an angry black rain cloud, full of water and ice. Rain and thunderstorms. And then everything starts all over again. 

A hot summer day. Air conditioning. Catching a cold. Getting a fever. Sweating and chilling. In bed under a warm blanket. Yin and yang follow each other constantly. When one comes to the fore, the other is equally present. The culture hijacker says: this is too yin, or that is very yang. But look closely at the fascinating image of the cloud. What do you see: sun or water, warming or cooling, yang or yin? Squeeze a lemon and the juice squirts out. At the same time action inwards and action outwards.

In DIY stores, you can find taps for kitchens and bathrooms in endless variations. The lack of diversity in drains starkly contrasts with this. After all, a dark round hole in the bottom of the sink or countertop is no match for the shiny chrome water-giving tap. Rather, the drain and sink is a necessary evil. Yet the tap derives its existence from it, because what good is a kitchen or bathroom without a drain?

The movement in cycling and the movement in walking is forward. Its goal - the place you hope to get to - lies in the future. Call this progressiveness yang. In contrast, the force needed to move forward is backward-facing. The force of wanting to move forward needs the resistance between the tyres or soles of shoes and the road to actually get off the place. Call this yin. Floating in space where the yin of resistance is missing, the yang of action is helpless and without value. Running on wool socks on an extremely slippery floor - or walking on leather soles on an icy street - is a slippery undertaking. It takes two to tango.

The utility of a bicycle wheel is in its backward motion. The now of walking is in the leg and foot pushing backwards. Excellent examples of investing in the opposite.

One begot two. One gives birth to two, and these are equivalent, but far from equal. One is the size of a match, the other a large pile of wood. One is a spark plug spark, the other a full tank of petrol. Fill a big pan of water for soup; how much salt do you use? To convince, how many words are really needed and how much silence? 

Look at a red object in your surroundings. White light shines on it and is reflected back for your eye to catch. You see the red segment of the white light; the other frequencies were absorbed by the object. So that is in fact green - at least not red.

Outside the window of the room where I am writing - the same window as in 20 Observe - six Hereford cows are grazing. They are still young, but already display the massive build of their wild auroch ancestor. Inside my room, an irritating mosquito buzzes. I think of bullfighting and Rawhide. I recall mosquito clouds in summer Sweden. I reflect on proportions, of yang and yin. Despite its nullity, the mosquito is among the deadliest animals on earth. And on its own, it keeps me from sleeping at night. Magnified in the photo, I still change my mind about its nullity. And the aurochs, the representation of yin, doesn't actually look so colossal in the picture. Things can change. #Yin and #yang are not labels - they tell about how things relate to each other.

We are here on the bank of a mighty river 
The other bank is yonder, and this one here is here 
The bank where we are not we call the other side 
This then becomes this side once we have landed there 
And this is then called the other side, so remember that well 
because this is important for when you have to cross
drs P