Everything and Nothing

Paradox is one of the things about Taoism, and, more broadly, mystical experience that makes people crazy.  Ask a Taoist master a question and, chances are, you will get anything but a logical, linear answer. 

During our weekly session with our teacher Monday, Stacey asked about Taoist afterlife beliefs.  Specifically, she mentioned the theory that our 'souls' (whatever those are) are dipped from an 'ocean' of admixed being and that, when we die, those souls, with all their experience, return to that ocean only to have pieces and parts dipped up and incarnated again.  Our teacher said that this was true but that it was also not true. 

We spent the better part of an hour dissecting that one idea, even getting into a discussion of channeling at one point, only to come to the conclusion, at the end of the session, that this belief is only one of various potentials to do with the afterlife.  The short answer is that there are any number of things that might  happen to us when we die but that we really do not know so we need to spend our time worrying about living now instead of what happens when we pass over. 

People who study the Way, in whatever form this takes for them, want answers.  That is part of the reason that they take up the study; they can no longer settle for the pat answers handed them by society or, perhaps, some organized religion.  This is a good attribute, this burning curiosity about what is, but it is also a stumbling block since, to paraphrase, the Way that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging Way.  One of the frustrating characteristics of a true mystical experience is that it is almost impossible to talk about. 

Those experiences are transcendent but there is nothing to transcend.  They are holy, in the sense of making wholeness, but can happen on a city bus or an urban slum.  They take us out of ourselves while making us more totally and completely who we are.  They are everything . . . and they are nothing.