Bill, thank you for your compliments. I am flattered and humbled. I have to say, I am relieved at how civil people are here. Every site I've been to that has message forums is either overrun by trolls, or is free of them only because it is so heavily censored that no one can have a free thought. I love the atmosphere here. Thank you for being so kind.

I don't know how well I can answer your question, but I will certainly try. First of all, if you're interested in the philosophy of Taoism, I highly recommend reading The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. It uses Winnie the Pooh to explain Taoism, for Pooh Bear is actually very Taoist (though I doubt it was Milne's intention). Since most of us in the Western world are familiar with Pooh, it makes a good link for us to understand Taoism, which can be a difficult abstract concept to wrap our minds around.

But about your question... There are two Taoisms - one is a religion, and the other is a philosophy. I follow the philosophy. In fact, from what I've seen, I don't even like the religion. The philosophy doesn't really say anything about a personal God. The first line of the Tao Te Ching (which is the 'sacred text' for lack of a better word) says, "The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao." This means you can't define it in words. But human communication is limited, so we have to try. The Tao can be described as an intangible essence or force (though I am hesitant to use that word because it implies conflict and power) which is in everything.

Personally I tend to think of the Tao as that mysterious force scientists are trying to figure out, which preceded the Big Bang. You know how they can see all the way back to within seconds of the beginning of the universe? They can't see farther than that, for some reason. And they don't know what caused the Big Bang. This is where a lot of people fit God into Evolution. Science says energy can never be destroyed or created, only changed. Well it had to have been created at some point, didn't it? What form was it in, before it became the universe? Something had to have happened, to cause such an event. This 'something' could be called any number of things. I call it both God and Tao.

Tao is kind of like a God, in that it is everywhere, in everything, and has always existed, was never 'born' or 'made', and so forth. But it is not a personal God. It isn't an individual; it has no identity, desire, will of its own. It just is. It isn't good or bad or neutral. It is all of that and none of that at once. It can be experienced by humans in meditation and prayer, as that 'something' we feel but can never put our finger on.

Humans have a lot of energy. A 150 pound person has the same energy as several (I forget the exact number) atomic bombs, and lots of dynamite. So what I wondered (yes I was a strange child, heh) is, what happens to all that energy when a person dies and their body decomposes? It has to go somewhere, since it's never destroyed. That made me wonder about the existence of spirits/souls. I'm just an ignorant human, but I suspect it has something to do with Tao. All the energy in the universe, all flowing, ever changing...

The Tao Master is like the Tao, insomuch as a person can be. When she makes something, she lets go of it. She doesn't desire and possess and cling. She flows through life, and lets things flow through her. Things come to her, and they leave her, and she lets them. She is compassionate and nurturing, like a mother, but does not need or want power or dominance. Balance is a big part of her life and lifestyle. The yin and the yang, which of course is a whole other topic. She is like a river which, when it encounters a rock in its way, simply flows around it rather than fight it and try to get rid of it. She doesn't try to be anything she's not, or force others to be what they're not. She doesn't care about people's approval or judgments, nor does she make judgments about others. She accepts everyone, the good and the bad, and loves them equally. As a leader, she guides her people from behind, humbly and quietly. When they achieve something, she lets them think they did it all by themselves, rather than take the glory for herself, for she has no Ego.

So yeah, a "personal God" doesn't really come into play, as far as Taoist philosophy. I guess it isn't needed for them. I don't know if there is a personal God, honestly. I tend to act like there is, out of habit and the feeling of security I get from it, but following the ways of the Tao definitely helps my life. Plus, once you really get a feel for it, you find that it isn't cold and empty like the word "impersonal" implies. If everyone followed the way of the Tao, there would be no violence, people could deal with natural conflict better, etc. If everyone followed Christ's teachings, things would be ideal too. Of course not everyone does, but you see my point? It's just that Taoism doesn't have - and please don't take offense to this - all the trappings of organized 'religion'. Do's and don't's, commandments, judgments, categories, qualifications, rituals, dogma, doctrines, rules and restrictions, sins, requirements, sacrifices, and so on. Sometimes people have a hard time with such openness and freedom; it's not what we're used to in this culture. So it's really hard to explain, but I do hope I've been able to get the idea across...

I'm sorry for the long post, and I know it's a bit off topic here. Actually last night I created a group about the Taoist philosophy, so if you'd like to discuss it more there, please feel free (there's a link from my profile). I don't want to distract too much from the point of this forum.

Thanks for the explanation, Jan, especially from how you see and experience it. I, too, don't want to distract too much from the subject of this thread, but alot of what you wrote about the Tao would fit quite nicely into how I think of and experience God. I was raised "Christian" so it is my native tongue and I am comfortable with that language. But I don't for a minute think that God is a Christian.

When it comes down to it, I don't really believe that God is a person or a being either. Instead, I see and experience God as a life-sustaining force or first cause or a "deeper Self." To say this publically would get me heavily moderated or banned on many Christian forums who adamantly insist that God is a person or even three persons in one.   But PCs are somewhat free to express how we see things without being made to toe a doctrinal or orthodox line. As to God being personal, yes, I experience God that way, but it is because *I* am a person and my images of God, like it or not, tend to default to seeing God as having personal attributes. But if hard pressed, I would say that God is an influence in our universe that pulls us toward life, abundant life. One theologian I like says that God is that which calls us to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that we can be.

So all of that to say it was a harrowing day for me when I admitted to myself that everything I knew and experienced of God was biased by who I am, by my own lenses and filters. I no longer envision God as a being in the sky who occasionally breaks the laws of the universe to work miracles for us or who is keeping tabs to see who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.

In conclusion, the frustrating part of all this is that I don't quite know what I am. I'm not really a theist. But I'm not an atheist either, at least as most atheist are defined. I do believe in God and believe I experience the life, love, and joy that is God. But I no longer relate to God as someone "out there" who is separate from creation and people.

And...namaste to you too. The "divine in me" acknowledges and bows to the "divine in you."

I think you’re right about the labels, Jan, they don’t really matter much. We have to know for ourselves deep in our bones what we believe and experience. And it is for sure that what I believe and experience doesn’t fit into a tidy little box, not even into the box of Progressive Christianity. Most of the time, I struggle just to find the right words to convey the ideas or experiences that mean the most to me. And even if I can accurately describe it, my experiences continue to change, requiring further definition and description.

One of these changes, going back to the subject of this thread, is Christology; what do I think of Jesus? For most of my life, I thought “Christ” was more or less Jesus’ last name. And I thought there was only one Christ – Jesus of Nazareth. But I slowly began to see that when the apostle Paul was talking about “Christ in you”, he was not talking about being possessed by the ghost of Jesus. IMO, he was talking about looking deep within ourselves to find God living there, to find the divine in residence within the human (and actually within all things). And I think, on further reflection, that this is the experience that Jesus had in his 40 days in the wilderness. He came to see that he and his Father (in theistic terms) were one. And he lived out of that union. So when Paul says that “God was in Christ”, I find this very meaningful to me without having to debate whether Jesus was literally God or not.

Likewise, in my own life, I am beginning to experience on some level the “Christ within.” I’m beginning to trust that God is inside me and that I can live in and out of that union. This in no way means that I, Bill, am God. I know that I am not God. My wife is.   But I no longer pray to a God “up there”, asking him to intervene to do something for me or my loved ones. In fact, if Jesus was right that the kingdom of heaven is within us, I even have a different take on “Our Father in heaven”, believing that heaven is not pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, but a reality within us today. 

So all my current musings on this subject tend to make me think, no disrespect intended, arguments about the Trinity and whether Jesus is God or not are rather futile and somewhat irrelevant. In my experiences, that subject of whether Jesus is God or not goes back to exclusivism and whether or not he should be worshipped. And I find it ironic that most of the Christians who claim to worship him know little of his teachings or way of life or the “way of Christ.” They have turned Jesus into an idol and, thereby, made it irrelevant to follow him. Jesus put it this way, “Why do you call me ‘Lord’ but don’t do what I say?” It is easy to worship Jesus as God. But, IMO, it is much more difficult to live according to his teachings and lifestyle, to live out of our union of “Christ within you, the hope of glory.”