Paradox, Science, and Taoism

The Tao gives birth to one

one gives birth to two

two gives birth to three

three gives birth to ten thousand things

-- Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, verse 42

This first part of the 42nd verse of the Tao Te Ching is absolutely remarkable to me. It is such a precise picture of the universe and yet completely abstract at the same thing.

If you look at it in terms of classic teachings, the Tao can be understood to be the nothingness beyond anything we know with our mind, beyond anything we understand. The one can be understood to be the source energy, the single energy underlying, cradling everything; from everything derives from. The two paints the vision of the polarities that exist in this world – masculine and feminine, light and dark, north and south, sun and moon. Yin and yang in all its amazing forms. It’s also all the paradox that is all around, with each paradox falling apart and settling back into the one the two births from. The three is stepping stone to ten thousand, or the metaphorical infinite. That is everything that exists, in all its forms.

As in any birth, or any definition of birth we understand as humans, there is a lineage and connection back to the parents, grandparents, and so on. In one sense, the Tao is how we can understand that everything remains one and connected, even as there are distinct forms. There is one of those great paradoxes – the distinct forms of each of us or the distinct idea of each rock, plant, and so on, and still it’s connected to everything else.

The word connect, or interconnect, is one of the resolvers of the paradox. To be connected, or interconnected, implies both that there are at least two objects or people that are distinct and yet by being connected they become one! Try to wrap your head around that one – or better not to and just let it be.

If you are more of a scientific bent, you might understand the universe as born from a Big Bang. The Big Bang Theory implies a nothingness before anything (the Tao). Then there is a single entity, a single energy that explodes; the single energy is similar to the one. And as in human conception, cells splits, and that one energy has split apart into two, now we’re at the two above. As the Big Bang progress, then three, then ten thousand, or infinite.

The scientific bent also has wonderful paradoxes, like the dual-nature of light. Depending on what experiment that’s set up, light can either be detected as a wave or as a particle. Wow, that’s wild. Or consider Eintein’s famous equation E=mc2 which says that energy (E) and matter (m) are different forms of the same thing! Then there’s electromagnetic waves which are everywhere being released and absorbed by atoms all the time. Those waves the connection between everything. All atoms, and subatomic particles within, are constantly connecting and interacting.

Reality, as we know it in this universe, can be described in so many ways, from the sublime description of the Tao Te Ching from thousands of years ago which contains so much in so few words, to the deep and philosophical scientific inquiry to understand something of what we experience and put equations to that.

Just some of my random musings about science and philosophy and how they may not be as difference as we like to believe.