Drugs And Daoism

Drugs and Daoism

I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with the use of drugs themselves, from a purely abstract perspective. In reality, there are a number of ethical, political, and physical issues with taking any mind-altering substance, depending on where it came from, how it got here, and what it can do to your body. But assuming that it’s a fair-trade product that isn’t supporting an evil empire and doesn’t have any extremely dangerous side-effects at the dosage standard, I see nothing wrong with their use. This is why I go out and have drinks every so often with friends, or why I drink coffee on an early (or late) workday. Like anything else in our lives, moderation and living well is the key to staying in line with the Dao.

But the problems start when we move out of moderation, when these substances become necessary for us to function, when we depend on a dose to keep us going. I believe that over-medication has taken a lot of people in my country off their Path, both from the established pharmaceutical industry and from the recreational drug culture. People look for something that can make them feel better without taking the time and effort needed to understand what they are trying to feel better from.

Imagine that your room has gotten quite messy, as rooms tend to do over the course of our lives. The bed is unmade, the laundry has piled up, papers and pens and old receipts have been strewn about everywhere. Things are in quite a state of disarray. However, you decide not to take the time to sort through things, to organize them and put things back in their proper place, to maybe even come up with a more efficient system of keeping things nice and neat for longer, but instead you rent a newfangled cleaning and organizing robot to pick everything up for you. It saves you a bunch of hassle, and things seem at least a little bit nicer than before. But the robot doesn’t know you and doesn’t know how you operate on a day-to-day basis, so things aren’t organized in a way that actually is easy for you to find and get access to. After all, the robot’s only parameters are to make the room clean, not convenient. And since you haven’t actually learned anything from tidying things up yourself, I would bet that the room is going to get cluttered again pretty quickly. So you rent the robot again, and again, and again; each time inevitably going back to the messiness of before, or even making things worse as you constantly fight against the robot’s way of cleaning your room.

This is what happens when you try to medicate yourself with drugs. They push us out of alignment with the Dao, and the more we use them, the more out of sync we will be. If we really want to set our messy room back in order, we need to do it ourselves. We can get help from our family and friends, even help from the occasional robot now and then, but ultimately it is something that needs to be by our own hand.

always relevant.

Live in the moment, live in the Dao.

The separation between the two, like the separation between many other things, is but an illusion.

Daoism as Religion

I am not a religious person. I do not consider myself spiritual. To be honest, I’m not sure I consider myself to be particularly faithful (in the religious/spiritual sense, I’m not a cheater!). Is this against Daoism?

I don’t believe so. True Daoism isn’t really a religion, in any sense of the word. There are no deities, no rituals, not even really a code of conduct. It isn’t the same as Zen or Shinto or any of the other East Asian spiritual traditions that it is so commonly associated with in the modern world. Daoism is, quite simply, a guide on how to live one’s life without the stress and worry that came with the alternatives of Laozi’s age, namely Confucianism and Buddhism. Like many famous old texts, there is even debate on whether the old man wrote it himself, or if he existed at all (but that’s a story for another time, I think). So how did Daoism get to be associated with religion at all?

Well, here’s where things get complicated, and the issue of labeling what is and what isn’t Daoism can be problematic. Somewhere deep in China’s long and storied history, the religions of the land needed to be categorized, and Daoism, being an odd sort of duck, was lumped together with many of the shamanistic folk practices of the common people. From here we see the rise of institutionalized Daoism, with churches and rituals and all the trappings of what we would call a spiritual tradition.

But if you look at the core of the book, of the themes it encourages, this is against the very nature of the Path. It is unnecessary for the people of the world to organize groups or schools around the concepts of individual exploration, and perhaps even detrimental to the act of discovering the Path for oneself. The story goes that Laozi was hesitant to even write the book, as it creates a structure in and of itself. The conundrum is understandable, especially looking back at what’s happened over the last couple thousand years.

I believe that true Daosim, in order to focus on the core idea of letting all discover and walk their own way along the Path, should avoid this sort of idolatry. This includes venerating the old man and the book, to avoid being a Lao-ist, as it were. It’s great to have the teachings there, don’t get me wrong, but as I mentioned earlier, the authorship is under a healthy discussion as it should be, and we should look at the teachings as less a strict code, and more like guidelines, really. If there’s any sort of faith to Daoism, it would be the faith that the Path is leading us all somewhere better than where we currently are, or that everyone will eventually find their way to it and then things will be good. But that faith isn’t necessary to living your own life in accordance with your own personal Dao.

Just as a disclaimer, in no way am I saying that religion shouldn’t exist, or that the religious schools of Daoism are bad or harmful. Things turned out the way they did for a reason, this is part of the Path. Obviously, religion does a great deal of both help and harm to peoples’ lives, and this is the way I believe it is supposed to be. What I’m saying is that Daoism exists separate from wherever people choose to place their faith, and can complement or contrast with any personal spiritual belief you may have.

Always mind your mind.