Guitar Yoga

 The Tao and The Cadence

In the Preface to Tao and Trinity, Scott Austin writes: “The current pressing international situation…demands that Western philosophers and Chinese sages come to understand each other.” (vii)  Austin concludes: “both the Tao and the Trinity are a coincidence of opposites….In the end, there is no fundamental incompatibility between the Taoist way and the deepest expressions of Western wisdom.  Both articulate what happens at the very highest level of an explanation, where the ultimate governs itself as well as all lower levels of the hierarchy.  But, to govern itself, it must be both one with itself and separate from itself.” (100-01)  

Similarly, Carl Jung writes “of a genuine yang-yin relationship” which “does not damage monotheism in any way, since it unites the opposites just and yang and yin are united in Tao (which the Jesuits quite logically translated as “God”).” (“Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self”, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, tr. by R. F. C. Hull, Volume 9, Part 2, p. 58″)

C.S. Lewis: “In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta – that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple.  Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality.…

The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao.  It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself.  It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road.  It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.  It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar….This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, [28] I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao.’…It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”  (The Abolition of Man, 27-29)

Lewis: “the Tao…, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value.  It is the sole source of all value judgments.  If it is rejected, all value is rejected.  If any value is retained, it is retained.  The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory.  There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world.  What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies,’ all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses….The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.” (The Abolition of Man, 56)