A Taoist?! You're Kidding.
No, I'm not kidding. Why in the world would I self-identify as a "Taoist" in my approach to living life? Several reasons. Some of them may offend some of my friends and readers. Apologies for this. But here goes. It's a longish tale, but we'll get to Ray becoming a Taoist, I promise.
Directly upon my graduation from Yale (focusing on Chinese Studies), I spent a (tumultuous) 1967 and 1968 (yeah, that 1968) at New York City's Union Theological Seminary, a non-denominational seminary. I had been active in my Presbyterian church's youth league in high school, and, idealist as I was, considered the ministry a possible vocation. But while at Union Seminary I discovered that many of the beliefs fundamental to Christianity just didn't seem to make sense to me.
Take the idea of a God who created humans, alone, in His own image, and gave these humans the whole rest of the created world for their exclusive and unrestricted use. This tenet is vividly reflected in the early (un-"revised") King James version of Genesis 9: 2,3:
. "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air and upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you."
Gosh; that didn't seem at all the way a fair and loving Christian God, creator of all the world and its marvelous creatures, would set things up. Then I ran into Theodicy: the tension between the Christian omnipotent and benevolent God and the widespread existence of evil in human and natural history. The most prevalent explanation for this apparent contradiction is that God has given humans free will, a gift sufficiently precious in His view to allow humans to make evil decisions. Again: that just didn't seem something a loving, benevolent Christian God would do. I'd been a history major at Yale, concentrating on American as well as Chinese history, and been struck by how very much cruelty and monstrous evil humanity had wrought throughout its history.
Faced with what I, upon reflection, regarded as fundamental problems with Christianity, I wrote my draft board, rejecting my 4a exemption for seminary. (What a stern idealist Ray was in those days; go figure.) I was immediately put in the draft pool, with a very low number and thus the inevitability of being soon drafted and sent to the war in Vietnam. So I enlisted for three years (rather than the two of a draftee) and thus was able to choose my military occupation. If I was going to Vietnam, I was determined to go there in the medical corps.
Upon arriving (in the midst of an incredibly intense monsoonal rainstorm), I was assigned to U.S. Army Headquarters, Vietnam, in Long Binh, as a medical records specialist. Being the headquarters, there was a surprisingly adequate library at the base. There I stumbled upon several books about natural history, and became fascinated with the world of nature. After my tour of duty, having developed a somewhat misanthropic attitude toward human history, I decided to get a PhD in biology, despite having taken no courses whatsoever in the subject during my four years at Yale. (Again: go figure.) Among a dozen curt rejections from various universities, Duke University took me on a trial basis, and 4 years later I had my PhD in Zoology.
Being a "certified" biologist at this point, I began reading about Charles Darwin, the central figure in biology (a pursuit I'm still engaged in). In David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, Darwin's views on creation are given: "Special creation? Divine providence? Godly design? Darwin had found no support for those notions in biogeography, the taxonomy of barnacles, or the fates of certain innocent children. (This latter referring to the heartbreaking death of Darwin's favorite child, Annie, at age 10, a watershed moment in Darwin's life.) 'Everything in nature, he concluded coldly, is the result of fixed laws.' Had an impersonal First Cause (God) of some sort, a Supreme Being in the fuzziest sense, given rise to the universe and set it in motion according to the mechanics of those fixed laws? Maybe. For much of his adult life, including the period when he wrote The Origin of Species, that's what Darwin felt inclined to believe."
Aha! That was the moment I identified myself as a Taoist. I immediately recalled the Chinese history class at Yale, nine years earlier, where Taoism had been discussed. The Tao was (is!) a mysterious (but utterly immanent and this-worldly) force that had brought forth the world and coursed, inherent, throughout the world, not giving a fig for humans, particularly. But most importantly: impersonal. Not capable of anger or Commandments or human emotions, whether love or hate. Here in the world, in all the "ten thousand creatures" as well as rocks and rivers and clouds and sunsets. The Tao, as described in the ancient Chinese classics Tao De Jing and Chuangtze, provided exactly the ongoing, inherent creative force that set the fixed laws by which the world moved as Darwin "was inclined to believe." And which made sense to Ray as well; Ray the newly-minted Taoist.
Maybe I've read too many mystery stories. But like Sherlock Holmes in The Reigate Squires, I need to have things make sense. As he put it, "I make a point of never having any prejudices and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me."For me, this tenet has led to my adopting the Taoist point of view. It makes sense of the world, to me at least.
Nor has this been merely an intellectual satisfaction. This view of life thrills my heart as well as my head. Knowing that I (all of us, actually) am part of a grand, ancient process of creation according to fixed laws gives a zest to life. We're all in this together, humans as well as all the equally marvelous creatures and rocks and sunsets of the world, inextricably linked to each and to our lovely planet orbiting an obscure sun in an obscure universe at the edge of the Milky Way.
Let us conclude by recalling the final paragraph of our Mr. Darwin's The Origin of Species, Darwin the unknowing Taoist himself:
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." (Italics mine)
Note: for readers wishing to know more about Taoism, you might consult my 2004 Relax, You're Already Home: everyday Taoist habits for a richer life. As it turns out, my mentor John Muir was also, like Darwin, an unrealized Taoist. See my 2016 Earth Wisdom: John Muir, Accidental Taoist, if interested. Both available on Amazon. Barnett—the Taoist—out.