All is One : Birthday Letter #39

[below is an excerpt of my annual open birthday letter - you can find the full version, with more personal updates and cute baby photos, here. Thanks!]

“Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.?“

— Siddhartha, Herman Hesse?

I take cold showers these days.

In the moment before I get in, my skin recoils.

“Why be afraid of cold water?” I ask. “Do you think the water is afraid that your skin is too warm?”

‘Superficial differences between men conceal a profound?unity.”

?—?Claude Levi-Strauss

I spent my birthday in Dubai.?

First time, mind blown. Young, diverse, optimistic.?

On a day trip to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, I entered a small dark gallery and was instantly electrified.?

Before me, illuminated in the darkness, lay hundreds of ancient Torahs, Bibles, and Qu’rans. Among them, treasures: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a first-edition Gutenberg Bible, a folio of the Blue Qu’ran.

Crafted mostly by hand and prayed to for centuries?—?in many cases, millennia?—?each relic radiated with spiritual energy.?

The exhibit’s curation was superb, and its message unsubtle: that while the three foundational texts of monotheism all tell different stories in different languages, and have had different influences on culture, civilization, and history, they are nonetheless united by a vastly greater transcendental bond: the human soul’s yearning for connection with its creator.

An even smaller, even darker room holds the final installment, simply titled “The Unseen.” It imagines the eternal sublime?—?God, the divine?—?as a black hole: a force so immense that light itself?—?even the light of human reason?—?is utterly subsumed. Through meditation and prayer, we gaze into the unseen within us, approaching first-hand the universal mystery that no text, however holy, can ever truly illuminate.?

I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am bent and folded, there I am a?lie.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

When I gaze within, I float above.

My own meditation takes me up, above the clouds, to where atmosphere meets space, where light meets dark, to a vacuum of the body and mind?—?a perfect emptiness in which all is one.?

Gravity is gone, and my face muscles relax; in fact, all of my muscles relax, and I realize how tense and tired I have been simply from lugging my body up and around through solid air all day.?

Above it all, I can unfold.

There is no air here, and I don’t need to breathe; the heavy bellows in my chest are relieved. My internal state and external environment are in equilibrium; the pressures of being are not extinguished, but equalized.?

I can circulate, or be still.?

There is no ambition, no surrender. There is nothing to struggle for, or against, or toward, or away from. Past, present, and future mingle casually. The boundaries of time and space dissolve.

The Way gave birth to one.

One gave birth to two.

Two gave birth to three.

Three gave birth to all things.

All things carry yin and yang

And through breathe find harmony.?

Chapter 42, Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu

Back in China now, we practice tai-chi in the park.

Our teacher’s movements are agile, elegant, strong. Our own, less so.

“Start slow” he tells us, his hand patiently gliding. “When you’ve mastered slow, you can go fast.” A sharp thrust. “The strength is in the softness.”

One translation of tai-chi is the “supreme polarity”; thus the yin-yang, the fast-slow, the soft-hard. It’s never one or the other, nor a blended average of the two; each facet of each duality is distinct, yet harmonic.

Parallels abound, of course: in business, marriage, parenting, life.

Where do we focus our focus?

Product or sales? Process or outcome? Family or firm? Local or global? Long-term or task-at-hand?

Should I be pushing myself harder to get this tai-chi move right? To grow my company? To be a better father and husband? To exercise my body or my spirit or my mind?

Or is “the way” simply to think less, love more, go with the flow?

To surrender.

“I was taught a month ago

To bide my time and take it slow

But then I learned just yesterday

To rush and never waste the day

Now I’m convinced the whole day long

That all I learn is always wrong

And things are true that I forget

But no one taught that to me yet”

— Character Zero, Phish

Essence is learning her first dichotomies!

Big/little, happy/sad, clean/dirty, bunny/no-bunny.?

We’re proud, of course, watching her describe her world.?

But it’s a bittersweet pride. She’s learning to classify the world as adults do, lumping things into positives and negatives, mines and yours, goods and bads.?

Before we know it she’ll be swept up in all the same bullshit as the rest of us: left/right, US/China, Trump/no-Trump, pro-this/anti-that… I’m tired for her just thinking about it.?

So what’s a Daoist daddy to do?

I have no choice but to teach her the language of dichotomy, because yin and yang are distinct.?

Differences do exists: a Torah is not a Bible is not a Qu’ran. There may be strength in softness, but the concepts are not one and the same.?

But she must also learn that all things were borne of three, were borne of two, were borne of one, was borne of the Way?—?the Unseen, universal, divine.

She must learn to both recognize and dissolve the false boundaries?—?between self and others, between macro and micro, between past and present/future?—?that divide and alienate what exists naturally in harmony.?

I have my own trick for putting dichotomy in its place.

I imagine every concept, feeling, or belief as a mahjong tile. My minds’ eye admires it, intricate and flawless and smooth.?

Then I flip it over.?

There is always a flip-side; an antithesis to every thesis. I examine this other side of the tile—it holds none of the same information, but lo! it is just as flawless and smooth.?

Anything can be flipped around, without compromising its logic or integrity. In fact, only when you clearly see something’s opposite can you truly understand the thing itself?—?thus the popular exercises of “steel-manning” an opponent’s position, or of doing “shadow work” to illuminate one’s own psyche.?

Remember, the water is no colder than your skin is warm.

(There is a deeper and truer level still, in which we see the flip-side of the tile not as an antithesis, but as a non-being; not as an opposite, but as an emptiness. The flip-side of Jon is not some antagonistic doppelg?nger or Bizarro Jon; it is simply my own non-existence. The flip-side of hot is not cold; it is temperature-less-ness. Whatever icon appears on the face of a mahjong tile, its flip-side is inevitably blank.)?

Anyway, you can dichotomize at any level you like?—?the point is it’s a tile.?

Now, any one particular dichotomy is unlikely to be profound in and of itself?—?tight/loose, passive/aggressive, Jon/not-Jon… sure, so what??

You don’t play mahjong with just one tile.?

Rather, each dichotomy is a building block of bigger, more complex structures?—?the day-to-day tensions and dynamics of being.?

Our businesses. Our relationships. Our lives?—?it’s dichotomy tiles all the way down.

They stack on one another, endlessly, into towering helixes, buzzing with tense energy. Higher and higher the dichotomies stack, twisting into long thrumming threads of polarity. Zoom out further and watch as the threads interweave into cables, taut with drama; zoom out again, and the cables connect into complex webs, intricate quilting, a cosmic embroidery.?

Perhaps the perceived duality of our universe?—?maya?—?is all just a hand-knit tea cosy for a pot in God’s kitchen. Each dichotomy?—?which we agonize over so bitterly?—?but a fraction of a stitch in a doily divine.?

Yes, the tensions can terrify; yes, we recoil from the cold.

But breathe in, and marvel at the magnificence of the greater creation, however mundane… breathe out, and cherish each bi-chrome building block, each flawless two-sided tile.

Your skin absorbs the very water it feared.?

Whatever god you worship, it is this tense unity that makes the holy hum.

Okay thanks for indulging me on the meditations; for the full personal and professional update (with lots more cute baby pictures), please visit and subscribe to my Substack.

Thanks!