The Tao Te Ching (道德经): Eastern Spirituality and Recovery from Addiction

My thoughts on the Tao Te Ching (道德经; "Book of the Way"), a Chinese spiritual treatise on flow, balance, and right action.

78. Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice.

The Tao Te Ching (道德经; pronounced roughly "dao de jing"), directly translated as the Book of the Way and sometimes referred to as the Chinese Bible, is a spiritual treatise written by the sage Laozi, who was perhaps an older buddy of Confucius, sometime before the fourth century BC.

The book consists of 81 chapters of several lines each*. It is a manual on living that describes how to maintain harmony with oneself, with nature, in parenting, and in governance.

*There is an English pdf version available here, for anyone who is interested.

The Book dwells on dichotomies whose components support and define each other. Its virtues are suppleness and balance, an ability to move with the universe rather than against it.

It describes a harmonious spiritual state of flow ("non-action"), in which every action is maximally impactful and minimally effortful because it is undertaken in accordance with the unfolding of the universe.

As poet and translator Stephen Mitchell wrote, in this state, "The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.... Nothing is done because the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed; the fuel has been completely transformed into flame. This “nothing” is, in fact, everything. It happens when we trust the intelligence of the universe in the same way that an athlete or a dancer trusts the superior intelligence of the body."

It is a favorite of athletes, CEOs, poets, and philosophers.

Particularly in its original Chinese, its language is potent and poetic. Mitchell characterized its passages as "gemlike," which is the perfect encapsulation of the power of its passages: They are shining, lucid, and contain innumerable facets that become noticeable to the reader as the light of life experience reflects upon the text.

The Book of the Way initiated a spiritual tradition in China and throughout Asia that later fused with Buddhism, giving rise to the values, traditions, and beliefs of the Far East.

Its impact on Eastern history is almost incalculable.

The yinyang is the fundamental symbol of Taoism. It represents the universe and all that is within it, constructed as it is of balanced binaries like light and dark, life and death, good and evil (note the transposition of small sections of white and black, indicating the ultimate interdependence and similarity of apparent opposites). The path of the Tao takes us along the line that separates the two halves, a Way of dynamic balance and total possibility.

***

That old cliche about the Master appearing when the student is ready applies to my experience with the Book of the Way.

It came to me when I was utterly unmired on a spiritual level, deep in relapse on a chemical level; the world itself had ground to a halt due to COVID, and I was stranded in China with little idea of what my future would hold.

I had been confirmed Catholic, a religion that I once took very seriously, but I had always been turned off by the judgment, hypocrisy, and extremism of that version of Christianity.

I also didn't like that Catholicism prescribed no reliable means for connecting with the spiritual plane; "pray and hope for guidance from God" was pretty much as far as the instruction went.

I was frustrated by the endless cycles of sin and repent, sin and repent. I wanted spiritual progress, even if that progress was ultimately circular or spiral in form rather than linear.

I yearned for the mystical and the miraculous. Even as a teenager, I gravitated toward yoga and the occult because I was fascinated by the idea that we can induce higher spiritual states by manipulating our physiology and consciousness.

During my first extended periods of recovery, I reconnected with transcendental Christianity (sometimes referred to as Coptic or Gnostic Christianity), as revealed in the non-canonical Gospel of St. Thomas. In this interpretation of Jesus' teachings, one's relationship with God doesn't require the arbitration of a priest, and the Kingdom of Heaven is a state that we can experience on Earth.

As I've written about in "Why This Atheist is Headed Back to Church," however, I found the bespoke Christian spirituality that I had developed in recovery insufficient. It felt like what it was - cobbled-together and highly individuated (and thus subject to all of my own biases and limitations).*

*If you're interested in reading more about my very spastic spiritual journey, check out my First Step and Second Step reflections.

During my first reading of the Book of the Way, which I had approached as more of an exercise in Chinese philosophy and poetry than anything else, I came across a passage that raised the hair on my arms:

"Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?"

I had been so preoccupied with all the things that I had to do to get clean and sober again. I had to taper off of benzos and opioids, somehow attend meetings even though I was in COVID isolation in China; I had to get a sponsor, attend to my diet and exercise and thyroid problem, develop a healthy daily routine again.

I had to deal with years' worth of chaos and trauma and come to terms with my own selfishness and self-destructiveness.

In the midst of all that "having to do," this passage floored me because it reminded me of a single, striking truth: The only thing that I really had to do was stop doing.

I thought for a few moments about the frenzied activity that my addiction required. I'd been running from clinic to clinic, pharmacy to pharmacy to obtain more pills, spending thousands of dollars a month tap-dancing around legal restrictions meant to keep people from doing exactly what I was doing.

Even once I obtained the drugs, I was constantly fighting myself not to take them all at once; to keep myself not sick, but not too high to function, either.

I hid pills from myself and locked them away, had friends and lovers hold onto them for me so that they didn't disappear in a binge.

It wasn't about what I had to do to get clean and sober again; all I had to do was stop f*cking using.

Everything else that was necessary would arise from that.

I know that it's not rocket science, as spiritual epiphanies go, but I can't tell you how gobsmacked I was.

I began reflecting on how much I had always over-valued the cerebral part of myself, the intellectual ability that I had been praised and valued for. For perhaps the first time, I began to see how much it had led me astray, the extent to which my addiction had coopted it to gain power over me.

As I continued to read, I discovered a sort of spiritual balm in the Book of the Way. Much that was left exposed and raw from early religious experience was soothed and healed by the wisdom of the Book.

Rather than emphasizing the need to do ultimate good in the face of ultimate evil (the "spiritual battle" that some Christians are always on about), the Book talked about a different kind of good. It emphasized the good of staying supple and in the middle, of self-acceptance and moving in harmony with the rest of the universe.

There were many aspects of the Book's teachings that I could connect to recovery. Accepting "life on life's terms"; being mindful and present; moderation, compassion, and humility all factored in.

There were also echoes of Hume's hard determinism and other Western philosophical traditions that I had studied and valued in the past.

There were even connections to be made with science. In fact, I came to think of the unknowable Tao as the spiritual version of the Grand Unifying Force that physicists have sought for decades to unify the mysteries of the cosmos.

Every passage in the Book of the Way sparked some memory, seeded some insight, held some important teaching for me.

I felt as though a cherished grandmother or grandfather, looking back on the seasons of a long life well-lived, had sat me down and compressed into an hour or two all the wisdom of a lifetime.

***

Sometime shortly after I read the Book of the Way, I finally picked up contemporary guru Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.

I've got to be honest. I had stayed away from this book for years despite the recommendations of other people in recovery because I assumed that it was rooted in the "California Buddhism" that I had a snobbish, immature, and deeply American disdain for.

At one point in the early pages of the book, Tolle asks the reader to perform a simple exercise, which I'll invite you to repeat with me now.

Close your eyes. Take a single deep breath, in and out. Say once to yourself: "I wonder what thought will come next."

When I did this, I experienced several seconds of thoughtless bliss, a calm state of full, conscious presence that I had not accessed for years.

The experience floored me and motivated me; it became one of only a handful of truly spiritual moments that I have experienced in my life.

It allowed me to see just how harried and chaotic my inner space had become after years and years of severe drug addiction.

My trusty addictive impulse kicked in: I want to feel that again, I realized.

Meditation became the cornerstone of my spiritual and recovery practice, something that I could return to no matter where I was or how I was otherwise doing. (In time, I realized that many of my prior interests and behaviors had really been a fumbling for what meditation could give me, including my worship of tranquilizing chemicals and my longstanding affinity for distance running, with its focus on repetitive rhythms of feet and breath).

Suffice it to say that 15 to 30 minutes a day of meditation has changed my life, and that without it, I don't think that I would've been able to get through the difficult physical and mental experiences put in my path.

I can't over-emphasize how much meditation has helped with my anxiety, my insomnia, and my withdrawal symptoms. I wouldn't be able to practice the radical acceptance of DBT without meditation to slow, center, and elevate myself.

It's like any other spiritual practice - it only produces results when implemented regularly - but the small investment of time has yielded more insight and tranquility than I ever could have hoped for.

If you're struggling in addiction or recovery or just looking to level up spiritually in the midst of a dopaminergic world engineered to distract us with temporarily gratifying stimuli that leave us empty in the end, please pick up these two books and give Eastern-style spirituality a shot.

The Book of the Way is short, simple, elegant, profound, and timeless. It can be read in a couple of hours, and it has none of the self-contradiction or moral grandstanding of the Christian Bible.

There's a reason why Chinese people have always tended toward longevity (and why their old folks are as serene as they are) - this despite incredibly demanding work and family responsibilities, environmental pollution, lack of food, and vast and troubling political changes. They have access to wisdom that has been devalued or outright forgotten in the West, and it serves them well.

The Book of the Way is the primer; it describes the spiritual state that we are trying to achieve.

The Power of Now is the path, a step-by-step practice for attaining through meditation the state of fully conscious flow that the Book of the Way describes.

Together, they have truly life-changing power.

If one person reads this, gives these two texts a shot, and derives one-tenth of the meaning and practice from them that I have, then this post has been more than worth my while.

Yours in seeking,

Brian

p.s. You don't need to pay for meditation instruction. There are apps, YouTube videos, and many other resources available free of charge. Feel free to drop recommendations and links to resources in the comments below.