Dao is Not The Law of Attraction or Positive Thinking

Calling something “Dao” does not mean it is indeed Dao, as is found in the first chapter of the Daodejing. I am reminded of this when someone once asked for an interpretation of something that supposedly came from Daoism, but a websearch revealed that it was actually said by Oprah Winfrey.

Misquoting Oprah was suddenly, in the words of my bluntly pragmatic (or pragmatically blunt) friend, “A white woman mistaking the words of a dead Chinese guy for a popular black woman while hoping everyone else thinks that she herself [the white woman] is profound and original.”

What was the reason the person in question thought that Oprah’s words were of the Daoist canon or philosophy? Because it radiated positivity and had the New Age feel-good tone that promoted the Law of Attraction.

This is what some people mistakenly believe what Daoism is: being positive and attracting what you want because they misappropriate the mystical misconception of what Dao is to be a metaphysical representation of their ideals.

Quick definitions for those unfamiliar:

The Law of Attraction, as taken from its own site says: “Simply put, the Law of Attraction is the ability to attract into our lives whatever we are focusing on. It is believed that regardless of age, nationality or religious belief, we are all susceptible to the laws which govern the Universe, including the Law of Attraction.”

The Cult of Positive Thinking is essentially that: a cult that imposes a mandate of positivity and disdains negativity. Positivity and Negativity aren’t actually good or bad, but functional applications–just like “bad” isn’t bad nor is “good” good as we see with Yin and Yang theory in Daoism.

If we define “positive” as Yang and “negative” as Yin, then with people focusing on all Yang and defining Yang as “all things good and positive” and Yin as its opposite, this is like saying you only want daytime and no nighttime, but you can’t have an up without its down, or a left without its right. Opposites define one another, and is why going into an empty, balanced state is a common practice in Daoist meditation (more on this later).

A quick reminder of Yin and Yang from Derek Lin’s translation of Chapter 2 of the Daodejing:

When the world knows beauty as beauty, ugliness arises
When it knows good as good, evil arises
Thus being and non-being produce each other
Difficult and easy bring about each other
Long and short reveal each other
High and low support each other
Music and voice harmonize each other
Front and back follow each other
Therefore the sages:
Manage the work of detached actions
Conduct the teaching of no words
They work with myriad things but do not control
They create but do not possess
They act but do not presume
They succeed but do not dwell on success
It is because they do not dwell on success
That it never goes away

Now, a reality check: Daoism does not espouse the Law of Attraction or encourage the Cult of Positive Thinking. If anything, those are criminally inadequate interpretations of the lines from the first chapter, which are boldfaced here in two different versions, including plain speak favorite, Ron Hogan:

If you can talk about it,
it ain’t Tao.
If it has a name,
it’s just another thing.

Tao doesn’t have a name.
Names are for ordinary things.

Stop wanting stuff. It keeps you from seeing what’s real.
When you want stuff, all you see are things.

These two statements have the same meaning.
Figure them out, and you’ve got it made.

and Jonathan Star:

A way that can be walked
is not The Way
A name that can be named
is not The Name

Tao is both Named and Nameless
As Nameless, it is the origin of all things
As Named, it is the mother of all things.

A mind free of thought,
merged within itself,
beholds the essence of Tao
A mind filled with thought,
identified with its own perceptions,
beholds the mere forms of this world

Tao and this world seem different
but in truth they are one and the same
The only difference is in what we call them

How deep and mysterious is this unity
How profound, how great!
It is the truth beyond the truth,
the hidden within the hidden
It is the path to all wonder,
the gate to the essence of everything!

So we can glean from this that if the Law of Attraction states that you’ll only attract what you’re focused on, it totally ignores how the Daodejing says that you’ll actually see and attract the entirety of reality and the world around you when you’re focused on nothing (as opposed to not focusing on anything). Besides: if you focus on the good and try to attract good, you’re inadvertently still seeing bad because you’re trying to filter it out.

This is why the Law of Attraction is often paired with the Cult of Positive Thinking: people are inherently uncomfortable with “negativity” even if they are perfectly natural and complement one another as part of the Yin and Yang theory in Daoism. One way to think of it is this: you can focus on enjoying your favorite television show, and you can use your Tivo to skip past commercials, but then you’ll still find product placements in the show you are watching.

In other words, the more you resist, the more things persist.

In my own martial meditation practice of Xin Yi, this is part of why the seated and standing meditations put practitioners into an empty state of being. My own teacher, J.R. Rodriguez, says that “If you let nothing through, something will come through; but if you let everything through, nothing will come through.” While in the context of martial arts and combat, the body reacts faster than the eyes can see, and the eyes are easily deceived by feints and tricks where an opponent distracts you with his winding fist before kicking you in the crotch. So by looking for when he will strike with one hand, he is faking you out with his real intent to hit with the other hand or a kick, or some other cunning move.

Recalling the philosophy of Yin and Yang, the empty state lets you see neither Yin nor Yang and also still see both at the same time, a paradoxical description in words, but a perfectly natural and instinctive way of seeing and understanding once you actually feel it.

A very interesting and little-recognized fact is that emptiness is not merely a mindset, it is also a physical state that is induced from the proper meditation techniques in Daoism, especially as found in Zhan Zhuang (standing meditation) and even similar techniques like the Zen meditation practice of Zazen.

When we combine ideologies of the Law of Attraction with the Cult of Positive Thinking, we have people who are insensitive at best and abusive at worst, as described in this Psychology Today article:

The law of attraction (LOA) is the belief that the universe creates and provides for you that which your thoughts are focused on. It is believed by many to be a universal law by which “Like always attracts like.” The results of positive thoughts are always positive consequences. The same holds true for negative thoughts, always leading to bad outcomes.

But the LOA is much more than generalizations: Thinking about red Lamborghinis will bring you red Lamborghinis—always. To the believers, questioning the validity of the LOA is akin to heresy and blasphemy; it creates religious fervor. To the uninitiated, it may seem silly to discuss even the possibility that such a law could exist.

Point 14 from the same article is also worth highlighting:

14. Anecdotal evidence. Evidence that the LOA is an effective way of attaining goals is anecdotal, nonscientific and self-reported. This fact does not prove it doesn’t exist.  But closely scrutinize whether you want to invest time, money, and energy into something that is ineffective and potentially harmful.

People are much more likely to publish successes than failures. We also practice apophenia—the belief that there is meaning behind random data—when we focus on coincidences without regard to the much greater number of times that we do not experience coincidences. How many times did you think of that person and they didn’t call you? Of the two thousand people I thought of today, only two actually called. That’s not a great percentage—0.1%. But if I think of it in terms of the people that called, we get a different story. I thought of Bert and he called me – that’s 100%!

If you read LOA websites and posts, you’d guess that it is might be more than 90% effective: Everybody seems to be achieving their goals this way. Talk to experts who deal with the general public trying to use a LOA, there’s a completely different story. The failure rate is huge! In fact, LOA expert John Assaraf estimated that the success rate is about 0.1% and we believe this number to be correct.

I’m sorry for the doom and gloom, but these things need to be said. Millions of people are wasting time, money, and energy in an ineffective and detrimental system.

[W]e are no longer allowed to be dark, ironic or, indeed, pessimistic. Neo-optimism is now as brutally enforced in Britain as it is in the United States. “In America, optimism has become almost like a cult,” the social psychologist Aaron Sackett told Psychology Today. “In this country,” says another American psychologist, “pessimism comes with a deep stigma.”

As with any cult, even reluctant individuals are forced to conform. In the same Psychology Today article, B Cade Massey, a professor of organisational behaviour at Yale, says: “It has gotten to the point where people feel pressure to think and talk in an optimistic way.” Massey’s research shows that, when assessing the risks of investments or surgical procedures, people make predictions they know are overly optimistic just because they want to belong, even in life- or wealth-threatening crises, to the clan of idiot grinning optimists who seem to be in charge.

Everyone in my family was misogynist and there was a clear double standard. But thinking back, I never saw it as toxic masculinity because the only two men that mattered in my family were Donald and my grandfather. So, there was a much bigger issue, and that was this toxic positivity that my grandfather pushed on so hard.

He believed in the power of positive thinking to such a degree that it wasn’t positive at all. Because if you are required to think that everything was great all the time, that there was no room for mistakes, and that there was no suffering or pain or any emotion. It was severely damaging, but emotionally and psychologically. It’s destructive.

And that’s why Donald thinks everything is great all the time because admitting to any kind of pain or failure is a weakness punishable by death.

Too much of a good thing is bad for you, really. But a bad thing doesn’t actually mean something is bad. From the same New Statesman article linked earlier, the sentiment that pessimism isn’t a bad thing either is echoed here:

[P]essi­mism is bracing and often very funny. It is also consoling, in that it relieves us of the burdens borne by the optimist: the need to insist it’s getting better, the enervating search for good news, the rule-driven need to get the pointless job done (and, in the long run, every job is pointless).

A friend of mine from Finland also noted this as a cultural phenomenon:

This really is biggest thing that differentiates American mentality from European.

There have been many psychological studies highlighted recently how pessimism helps protect the mind and prepares for facing difficulties.

We could say it’s preliminary and pre-emptive shadow work.

Sadness is not necessarily bad. The Pixar film Inside Out explores the idea of trying to be happy all the time when one character, a teenager struggling with her emotions, reveals to us that being happy all the time is unnatural and allowing herself to feel sad is a means of getting help.

By attempting to deal with clinical depression through myopic and delusional forced happiness, it creates a series of reactions that can lead to psychological harm. This is also supported by research from the University of Waterloo and University of New Brunswick in this study by Wood, Perunovic, and Lee that found people suffering from low-self esteem reaching for the positive backfired–people felt worse about themselves after saying positive affirmations than they did before.

A humorous example of the Cult of Positive Thinking can be found in a comic book miniseries currently being published by Ahoy Comics, Happy Hour, which is summarized as follows:

“In future America, being happy isn’t just a right—it’s the law. While the Joy Police brutally enforce the cheery code, two young people go on the run, searching for a haven of melancholy where they can safely bask in the blues. A timely tale by superstar writer Peter Milligan (X-Statix, The Prisoner) and artist Michael Montenat (Dominion, Hellraiser Annual)

Another Daoist concept that we can pull out from this exploration of the Law of Attraction and Cult of Positive Thinking is the yielding and reinforcing ideas. If you push, then people push back. This is the Backfire Effect in psychology, where you can unload all the facts on someone, but humans, being stubborn, will push back even if they’re wrong because they don’t want to admit that they’re wrong.

The value of softness and yielding is commonly found in the Daodejing and is a very crucial aspect of internal martial arts. In Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English’s interpretation of chapter 76, it is said:

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.

The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

So in other words, if you argue or force your way on someone, they’ll push back. If you force positivity, you’ll gain a lot of negativity (and well-deserved, in my opinion) in return.

Comedian Bill Burr jokes that his response to the self-righteous (the Woke in his example) is “If you’re gonna be extremely annoying, self-righteous know-it-all and Woke, then I’m gonna be extra ignorant and even more annoying.”

The Japanese martial art of Aikido uses a variation of this softness and yielding approach. Aikido tends to respond by throwing back whatever an opponent gives: the harder you hit, the more you will hurt when an Aikido student redirects your punch and trips or throws you. The internal martial art of Taijiquan (Tai Chi) embodies the soft and yielding philosophy, which anyone who has ever felt the empty force of fajin can explain that it is like “being hit with something as soft as a pillow that knocks you back with the force of a mack truck.”

Analogous to this is that if you want to encourage people to be positive, don’t force it on them, and if you want to discourage negativity, don’t feed it. A Zen master on his dying bed once told his students that they could do anything they wanted, whether it was drinking all the alcohol they liked or spending time at the brothels, but they had to promise never to teach and preach Zen.

Think about that for a moment: when you preach, you turn people off, but when you live by example, you’ll be attractive to those who wish to have those same qualities themselves.

If we were to distill the essential ideas of Law of Attraction as “getting what you want” and the Cult of Positive Thinking as “being happy”, then through the lens of Daoist philosophy, simply focus on the things that bring happiness, you do not need to announce to the world that you are happy or worry about the world thinking that you are unhappy.

Dao doesn’t need you to believe it or not, and neither should you require others to know or affirm that you are happy–you should be able to determine if you’re happy without needing to have a checklist verified by others, especially marketing firms.

When you announce your happiness with self-assuredness to the world, then you will get pushback from people testing your happiness, especially if they don’t need or want to hear it.

By allowing yourself to simple be, soft, vulnerable, relaxed, and yielding, then you can recognize that happiness and sadness are complementary and cyclical, accepting that when you’re happy and when you’re not happy as ephemeral states. A balanced, empty state protects you from the mood swings of the extremes of sadness and happiness or negativity and positivity.

Dao is thus not Law of Attraction or Positive Thinking, but Dao is dynamic and alive, joyful because it is also able to be miserable, and full of vitality because it is relaxed and open to the full spectrum of emotions and experience instead of tense and closed-off to what is not desirable.

In the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This is about as Daoist as Daoist philosophy can be–without actually coming from Daoist canon or being called Daoist, yet it still supports that idea.