A Revelation to Taoism

I grew up in a small town in north eastern Indiana, a small town called La Porte. From here my family traveled to Indianapolis, where we stayed for a short while. My parents divorced while I was living in Indiana, and moved in separate directions. My mother remarried when I was four years old and moved the family first to Tampa, Florida and then to Carmel, Indiana. From here my step father found a job as a salesman, marketing conveyor belts to various companies. The job lasted for a time up until the point that my brother was born. By this time I was seven years old. The birth of my brother David was a high point in my parents' lives, but followed with a heavy blow that would change the course of my family's history. My step father, Bill, had been fired from his job as a salesman. As the baby had arrived and the job lost, our financial situation turned for the worst. Bill sought various related jobs in the industry and found one location in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His experience and personality won him a position at the company, and we found ourselves moving to the northern state. A state that would bring a cold and difficult struggle to find the American dream amongst the rubble of hardship. Our time in Minneapolis lasted five years, a long time for a moving family that would spend on average of two years in any location. Here I met and grew up with various friends and begun to learn the ways of the world. By the end of our time in Minneapolis, Bill had risen to success in his company, and found new positions in other locations around the country. As any middle-classed family seeking the fortunes offered by higher status and bigger pay, we found ourselves migrating to the Lincoln state. Chicago would be our home for the next two years and it was here that I grew an interest in technology and met like-minded friends that introduced me to the technical foundations that I hold today. This was also the point in my life that I met and begun to struggle with fear in much of my daily life. I had entered junior and senior highschool, an arena of social warfare that would broadside me with confusion until I would find myself years later. From Illinois, we began another tour of the country by moving west, to California, where my understanding and passion for technology grew faster and stronger than I could imagine. However, the insecurities and fear that I had not faced during my time in Chicago had resurfaced and poisoned me throughout my time in the western state. Though I found refuge with the social barriers offered by the internet, it would only be a temporary cure for a long term sickness. So, I had found my self staying away from large crowds and preying eyes, only hoping that one day I might find the solution that defused every kind of energy I could spare. This would continue for a while, and the problems would gradually build in dominance. To my luck, we had only lasted a couple years in California, and plans were in place to move east, far east, to Charlotte, North Carolina. The location alone could have been overwhelming for anyone, but for me it was an opportunity for a fresh start. Here I would finish high school and continue to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. My time in college allowed me to remove myself from the family and begin to think on my own and build on dreams that I had been seeking my whole life. I began courses in software development, that would lay the framework for the kind of work that I do today. But the true wealth of knowledge that I acquired began when my problems arose. I had begun to experience the same kind of afflictions and pain that I had experienced my whole life, and it became a daunting task just to shift my thinking away from the hurt. I had become complacent in that I was either different, unattractive, mean, stupid or all of the above. I had blamed others when I couldn't stop blaming myself. I would hit bottomless pits of thought and escape with uneasiness. My droughts of energy would be accompanied with a lack of sleep. My dreams would be clouded with nightmares and horror stories. Days where I could fight the pain would only end in seeing a struggle at night and in my dreams. I would fight others because I thought they made me feel what I felt. I would fight my family because they never understood and only made it worse. I would stay up all night, forget to do homework or forget to be social, and the hardships would just pile higher and higher. Whenever I wanted to be close to someone, I would always feel the same resentment or indifference that I had felt for so long. I could feel there was something wrong, but never knew where to look, until finally I found help. My help came in the form of drugs, and I smoked marijuana because I felt like it unveiled a part of me that was closed off in obscurity throughout my everyday life. Marijuana did what nothing could have ever done to me before. It scared me into paralysis. I had never felt so much fear and pain and disgust in my entire life, and though Marijuana brought it out, it was not the cause. It only showed me what was. It brought me to a level of self observation that I was completely oblivious of from before. I never chose to look inwards, because I always had an ability to keep a tolerance of the pain that was inflicted upon me in everyday life. I had been living amongst a tolerance of pain, and never realizing that I could be living in joy. My entire life had been struck with the idea of misery as a means of exploration and achievement. I had willingly accepted the idea of negativity into my being every single day of my life. And every single day of my life, more and more would accumulate, and more and more would be tolerated. Each day I would grow more strength to defeat the hardships that presented themselves. Each day growing more tolerant for bitterness and disgust. Each day building on another until the balloon had been filled so large, that anything could erupt its massive size with the tiniest of self perspective. And marijuana opened the gates of hell. So much so, that I had physically shook and jerked in the chair where I was smoking my joint. I had never felt so much torment and fear, that I could do nothing but look deeper, and let every known substance of pain come forward in my conscious mind. Every angle of life that had ever disturbed me began to flash across my eyes. Each moment of realization, each moment of glancing horror, shook my being and rattled my mind. I could not tolerate or control this immense fury of hate, and so I would do anything to hide from it. I took a hatred towards marijuana, not because it made more of the pain that I had felt, but because it opened me to the pain that existed, and I couldn't contain it. It took me several periods of smoking, usually lasting weeks in between, until I finally realized what I was witnessing. I came to realize that I had been seeing myself for who I really was. I was seeing myself for what everyone else could see. I was seeing the ugliness that made the world want to reject me. I had finally begun to see and understand the monumental ice berg of loathing pain and decrepit emotion that had sunk a hole into my way of life ever sense I could think. Though at first, the chronic had shown me a glimpse of what was in store and invoked fear that paralyzed my being, I begun to consider it a new challenge to discover and find knowledge. So I would slowly find more and more time to hide away and smoke, while exploring more and more of my past and the universe. At first it was finding stupidity in my actions, or seeing falsities in my words, but later I would discover there was always something deeper and something left to imagine and explore. The further I went inside, however, the more my abilities on the outside would improve. I had begun as a startled, insecure young man, and grew into a machine of philosophy. Each time I would get high, there was something new that would shift my thinking. Each time I would find horror and retribution. I would find God, and find love. I would find nature, and find emotion. But always something deeper. Until one day, the greatest of all revelations would appear out of no where. The single greatest of all things was not even a singularity. The single greatest of all things was the core and governing philosophy of absolutely everything in life, and would become the most fundamental idea that I would hold true to for years to come. Before, I had struggled for so long, trying to find methods or actions to take that would give me certain success. Using lines on women, or saying a certain word to my friends. I would comb my hair a certain way, or put on a certain facial expression. All of this to act in a certain way I believed would gain me success. And all of which failed in time. The idea was not the actions or the methods that went wrong, it was my concentration on one particular idea or concept. One side that would solve all of my problems. One truth, and one solution that would cure everything. And the single greatest of all things became the revelation that tore to pieces my philosophy towards actions and methods I thought would win me a life. The single greatest of all things is not absolute. It is not one-sided. It is not this or that. It is not black or white. It is not right or wrong. It is NOT ANYTHING. It is ALL. The single greatest of all things is the BALANCE of all things. It is both sides. It is the dualism of direction. The dualism of righteousness. The dualism of light. The dualism of sexes. The dualism of EVERYTHING. Everything is a duality. Because nothing is absolute. My wiring of this philosophy pieced together and continues to piece together the scattered concepts I hold about life, and solidifies them into one single and wholesome philosophy. And that philosophy is the basis of Fundamental Taoism. Fundamental Taoism states that there can only be two sides to a duality, and no one side can be reached without having a part of the opposing side. You can not have light without darkness. You can not have right without wrong. To be right, you must know wrong, and vice-versa. Fundamental Taoism states that absolutely everything is also in a constant fluctuation of dualities, and that fluctuation is called the Flow. The flow is this exact moment in time and through time. It is your pathway in life. The most absolute and balanced moment in time is right now. Fundamental Taoism also uncovers other mysteries of life simply by the fact and only fact that everything is relative to something else. And ever since I discovered Fundamental Taoism, the world of mystery has become a dream that I have always wanted to live. I continue to discover more, and with this knowledge, one can not be held back with fear, and can not be held back with negativity or distortion of truth. One is open to emotion and balance. Open to love and understanding. Open to the world, and above all, open to their self. Ask yourself this very question. If you can find one thing in this world that is absolute, you have discovered the meaning of the universe. And because no one has ever discovered the meaning of the universe, you will unfortunately or fortunately never find an opposing argument to the idea of Fundamental Taoism. And that is why I challenge you to search yourself and to search the world around you, and connect the missing pieces you have always wondered about yourself to this simple and easy to understand concept. Fundamental Taoism is the idea that everything, including yourself is a duality. And to use the duality as your core, and not as a mere philosophy to quote, you will find yourself discovering something remarkable about yourself that you never realized. And that is truly the greatness of all things in life.