Wu wei

The closest thing I've ever found to God is the Tao. Taoism isn't a religion, although it will be seen as one by many people. If it is a religion it is a holistic religion of Nature, without deities. It is a way of viewing existence itself as the divine force, a repudiation of the dualism of Western thought. When you spend a day fishing, listening to water lap against the shore and sea-birds hanging on an air current, this is the Tao. When you lay atop the peak staring at the blue and white sky, this is the Tao. When lysergic suggestion frees your brain to perceive the fractally geometric essence underpinning all complexity, this too is the Tao. Time does not seem to flow from past to future as physics would have it. When you really know a thing, it feels permanent and now. Past, present, and future come together in a single spell which is all there is. You can think of time as flowing in a circle or you can just abandon the idea altogether and let the cycles of the seasons and the struggle of life be what they are without description.

If Buddhism is a prescription for personal tranquility, a way out for the mind, then observence of and respect for the Tao is the prescription for the soul. It provides an abstract existential justification where Buddhism leaves a profoundly empty hole. If Buddhism's foundations lead as easily to nihilism as to humanism, the Tao provides a positive focus around which to organize one's life. There isn't meaning per se, but there are the facts of existence, motion, and change. A de facto reality that is right simply because it is there, and it works. Really the concept is no more than an elaboration of the Buddhist's universal unity and transference of the importance from the cosmic to the mundane. That is, it removes the sense of belonging from the insular world of the meditating mind and places it squarely in nature, in the relationship between stone and water, between man and beast.

I believe in the Tao. Whatever you call it, the organizing principles are there to be seen and felt. I don't believe in Taoism, insofar as it's a codified doctrine made by human beings which threatens to replace the personal immediacy of experiencing the Tao first hand with a filter of arbitrary rules to be followed. I find Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, an extremely useful tool for the upkeep of the mind; for stripping away layer by layer the old paint of the past; for staying away from objectification and staying focused on the present moment, the authentic experience of the senses. Likewise, I find Taoism useful when it comes to thinking in the long-term, something which Buddhism discourages but which most of us rather naturally do anyway. The Tao is always there, flowing when water flows, blowing when the wind blows. Scientists call it natural selection, emergence, chaos, structure. Mathematicians call it mathematics. Mystics call it God. I don't call it anything at all, I just listen, and remain silent.