The Dark Side of Tao

One of the things that I most appreciate of Taoism is that it accepts contradiction. According to Laozi (or Lao Tsu, Lao Tse… you tell me), contradiction is part of our existence. Yin and Yang, darkness and light, war and peace are two sides of the same reality. Tao includes both the extremes of this couple of opposites, among which there is a continuous movement.

What’s most interesting, is that these two opposites aren’t just the two faces of the same coin. They’re not separate, they’re two different manifestations of the same reality. As the Tao symbol clearly represents, Yin and Yang aren’t simply placed side by side, but they compenetrate each other, they’re intimately bonded. More than this: they’re the same thing.

Contradiction doesn’t really exist, it’s just an illusion, because everything roots down to a unity. That you may call Tao, or God, or simply existence, nature of things, but the essence remains the same.

This is the ontological vision that comes out of the words of Laozi. And then there are all the ethical aspects suggested by the few pages of the Tao Te Ching. Man must be in harmony with theTao, and to achieve this goal has to act spontaneously, according to the nature of things. Putting aside your own ego is fundamental to approach the Tao.

Tao Te Ching is often ambiguous, but an attempt to show a path, a behavior to follow is undeniable. And this despite the warnings against rules and their perils. In his anti-dogmatism, yet Tao Te Ching ends giving a role model. And this is in a certain sense contradictory, although we’ve already seen that contradiction is part of reality.

Due to its ambiguity, Tao Te Ching has not only been interpreted, but also translated in many different ways. And many translators chose to favor some aspects of Laozi’s ethics, to adapt them to their own.

I get it, it’s tempting. But translators almost always end up throwing off Tao’s blaance in favor of light. Peace. Good. As if they actually were one thing with darkness, war, evil. But underneath it all they were a little more relevant, a little more important than their less popular counterparts. A momentary unbalance is fine, but only if it’s a step towards a new equilibrium in which good prevails.

I’m not interested in telling what Laozi really meant. First of all because I’m not able to. Secondly because I’m not interested in doing so. What’s interesting in Taoism’s elastic structure, in my opinion, is that there is no dogma and there are no profets.

So I can tell my opinion, this could be in conflict with what Laozi meant, but it isn’t less important. In short, I’m sure that good old Laozi wouldn’t be mad at me, if I tried to add my own opinion to this complicate matter, to interpretate.

What I think, as probably you already guessed, is that the Dark Side of Tao has been deeply neglected. If opposites truly are just one thing, then we can’t create an implicit hierarchy inside the dualism of things. Good and evil are both worth the same, darkness and light are both worth the same, and so on. Moreover, none of the two opposites is worth something, because in this case the notion of value doesn’t make any sense.

Tao, on a smaller scale, can be also found inside men. And men are full of contradictions, that eventualy find a (less or more) stable balance in a coherent behavior. We may — and I think it’s right to do so — choose what to be. But we can’t truly accept a part of ourselves, if we consider it to be “less true” than the others.

There are things, in our way of thinking and being, that frighten us. That appear to be dark. And we often try our best not only to avoid them, but to ignore them, pretend that they don’t even exist. Because they are bad, and being so they aren’t truly part of ourselves, they are “outside” of ourselves.

At least we love to think so.

Accepting our own contradiction, I think, consists in considering every side of our personality, even the darkests, as true. I don’t mean that we have to embrace these dark aspects. We just have to let them find a reasonable mediation with the other aspects of our Self.

Maybe, sometimes it’s even desirable, they will never show in our actions. But they’re still part of our unity. In fact, they are as important as every other aspect of our personality. Being conscious of this could make it easier to find a personal dialectical balance.