unlike the other major religious traditions which operate on schizoid axes of comfort and discomfort, darkness and light, suffering and release, dao does neither in large part because it avoids operating - in multiple senses of the word - it avoids functioning, manufacturing and surgical intervention on others and itself - iow it doesn't meddle - meddling seems to dao a most harmful force and unnecessary orientation
it's always through not meddling that the empire's won
should you meddle then you aren't equal to the task of winning the empire (48)
win the empire by not being meddlesome
i'm not meddlesome and the people prosper by themselves (57)
pursue that which isn't meddlesome (63)
yet meddling - call it as easily other things - action will volition concern domination anxiety intervention management strategy policy - is the assumed modus operandi and procendidi - it's become - in addition to the power-driven currencies of sanity and money - not only a chief virtue but reified to an extent that we can consider it a modern sacred - it's unquestioned and if you do question your sanity's immediately questioned - meddling in its many guises is assumed to be a natural inevitable part of the order of things - participate or die
but dao - which is all about and in a basic sense only about the natural order of things - questions meddling and does so quite sanely - how does it do this?
dao asks not only why meddle with things outside yourself but even with yourself - yet self-meddling - whether through therapy healing drugs pharmaceuticals supplements meditation products allsorts surgery resolutions image modification and coaching repentance retreats correction workshops courses - is as rampant as intervening (regardless of the stated objectives, regardless of the perceived intended or actual goodness) in the external world - and now - hooray! - we have technology meddling and increasing its meddling
don't you feel meddled with not only by technology corporations media governments colleagues acquaintances education but also your closest friends family and intimates? and don't you typically react with more meddling - even if it's a kind of buddhistic meddling with yourself? meddling is habituated normalized enculturated sanctified
so what to do if not meddle - surely change (however we define it) seems desirable everywhere
but dao's tectonic assumptions and operations are radically alterous to all forms of the will to power (power over others, things, ourselves) and until i'm reoriented in these all i'll be doing is shuffling my existing techniques around - and reorientation isn't achievable through techniques of meddling (which are what we'll see for sale in manifold forms)
so how to dao if not meddle?
that might be the mettle you might discover in your own way without meddling
yet we can't tell you as dao's core isn't relayable through words - the most we can do is rearticulate some principles of dao that may be related to rediscovery that (in naturally sinking into) you may realize in the realm of nonwords and noncognition different ways
dao doesn't orient to any particular pole in the core binary of life and death, it dissolves classic tensions between eros and thanatos - it experiences them as the same - it realizes in the manifest world they're different but that the manifest world is one with the unmanifest and in the unmanifest they're not different
at most dao favours the feminine - which isn't identical to biological females - subtlety valleys darkness murkiness unknowing nonaction (metaphor indefiniteness tentativity frequently preferred to the copulative)
dao avoids entirely - and this may be the crux - placing whonyms (and consequently the individual self) at any centre - it neither apotheosizes nor demonizes whonyms but instead not only doesn't know if it's better or worse to be a whonym than a butterfly but doesn't particularly know if it is a whonym or a butterfly - this doubt not as some academic thought experiment but as a perpetual living reality