In Entropism, we see all of these religions as simply different tools. Rather than saying, do eat meat or do not eat meat, or do eat fruit or do not eat fruit, we think about what are the implications of this action? What does it do for us spiritually and materially?

On the material plane (The Left), everything is divided. There’s you and there’s me. There’s companies and there’s competition and there’s violence and there’s me eating something else.

On the spiritual plane (The Right), everything is unified. God is everywhere. God is within you and God is within me. And we’re all part of one ecosystem working together building towards peace.

So whether to eat meat or not really depends on what you’re trying to do in your life right now. What is the path that God has set before you? Or what is the path that you are setting for yourself?

If you want to head in a more spiritual direction, if you want to meditate and have mystical visions, then don’t eat meat. Meat is going to ground you in your body and in the world. And it’s going to bring you further away from that peaceful God ideal.

If you want to head in a more material direction, if you’re starting a business or you have a really tough job that you need to work at, then you need meat. You need the energy and protein that meat provides. You need that raw animal, cutthroat power of the other animal. You can’t be thinking of your competition as your friends. You need to do your duty to your company.

Taking this a step further, rather than simply looking at meat versus not meat, we can look at how close the food you’re eating is to you on the tree of life. How similar is this food to what you are For example, we’re very closely related to pigs. You’ll see that most religions prohibit the eating of pigs. However, something like honey isn’t even eating a plant. It’s very far from what we are However, it doesn’t really provide much nutrition, and if you only ate honey, you wouldn’t really be able to survive in the material world. From this, we can put together a scale—from the heaviest, most grounding things that you can eat that keep you in the idea of division and duality, all the way to the most light and spiritual things that you can eat, which could help you commune with God.

With the help of an LLM I put together this simple scale to help us think about it.

The Scale (Heaviest to Lightest):

1. Mammals (Red meat, heavy fat) — Closest to human biology. Requires immense digestive fire (agni) to break down. Acts as the ultimate biological anchor, pulling consciousness out of the head and down into the dense, physical body.

2. Birds (Poultry) — Warm-blooded and physical, providing strong grounding energy, but slightly less heavy and dense than mammalian meat.

3. Fish & Reptiles (Seafood) — Cold-blooded animals. Still distinctly grounding and protein-heavy, but requires less metabolic force to process than warm-blooded creatures.

4. Invertebrates (Crustaceans, insects) — The most evolutionarily distant animal life. Dense and physically anchoring, but their energetic signature is highly foreign to human biology.

5. Fungi (Mushrooms, yeast) — The biological bridge. Closer to animals than plants. Grown in the dark and feeds on decay. It provides “earthy” compost intelligence that connects the surface mind to the deep roots.

6. Root Vegetables (Potatoes, beets, carrots) — Plant life, but deeply tamasic (heavy). Because they grow completely underground in the dark, they provide stabilizing, earth-bound energy.

7. Stems & Leaves (Leafy greens, celery) — Above-ground plant life. Solar-powered, light, and fast-digesting. Begins to thin the physical veil and promotes mental clarity.

8. Fruits, Seeds & Nuts (Apples, grains, beans) — The reproductive climax of a plant. Ephemeral, sweet, and highly solar. Leaves a very light, fast-moving energetic footprint.

9. Nectars & Resins (Honey, maple syrup) — Pre-digested by insects or drawn from tree sap. Almost entirely removed from dense cellular biology. Pure ethereal, floral, and solar energy.

10. Minerals & Water (Salt, pure water) — Inorganic matter. The fundamental, neutral building blocks of reality. Completely weightless and unanchored to the biological life cycle.

The Golden Rule:

• To Drop the Anchor: If you feel anxious, dissociated, or need to tackle heavy, material-world problems, eat closer to Level 1.

• To Thin the Veil: If you feel sluggish, overly dense, or want to access higher, expanded meditative states, eat closer to Level 10.

If you want to understand more about the fundamentals of Entropism, including the ideas of the left and the right, I highly recommend Todd Hilton’s new book, “Surfing the Cut”.

1. Wrong Action/Incongruence - in the moment when you are experiencing jaw pain and tension, the action you are taking is wrong. For those who are fans of the chakra framework, this is a blocked throat chakra, which I found useful in my exploration of this topic. The action you are taking is incorrect and not what you, or your true self, or your body, or your internal motivation Desires to do. Now, how it is wrong is quite vague and unspecific here, but I’ll give and idea of how to think about it.
   Why - the reason why you are doing something is wrong.
   How - how you are doing something, the way you are doing it is wrong. Perhaps you are moving too fast or you are moving too slow.
   When - when you are doing it is wrong. Perhaps there is something else you’d rather be doing right now, and this is something that you would prefer to do later. Where - perhaps you are doing it in the wrong place or standing in the wrong way. Perhaps you’re eating food standing when you’d prefer to sit down and eat your food.
   What - what you are doing is wrong. This is not something that you want to do. Who - who you’re doing this with is wrong, or who you feel like you are when you’re doing this is wrong. Perhaps you wish to do it with somebody else, or perhaps you wish to embody a different persona while doing it.

2. Overuse of Sympathetic Nervous System - for me, I’ve noticed that often if I really feel into the pain in my jaw, it leads to me yawning, which leads to me resting and sleeping or at least relaxing. The jaw tension can be an indication that you’re in sympathetic nervous system when your body wants to be in parasympathetic. Now remember here, sympathetic doesn’t necessarily mean fight or flight. That’s a common misconception. What it means is that your nervous system and body are activated. So when you feel that jaw tension, it means you’ve been in sympathetic for too long and you haven’t given your body a chance to go into parasympathetic and rest and recover energy.

3. Threat - the reason that you’re doing the wrong thing and you’re overusing your sympathetic nervous system is because you feel there’s some kind of external threat that if you don’t stay in sympathetic nervous system will harm you in some way. Think fight or flight. In this piece, I think of it as external motivation is something outside of you that is keeping you in the activated state rather than an internal motivation keeping you in the activated sympathetic state, and if that external thing could disappear or if you could feel safe even with it hanging over your head, then you would likely naturally move into parasympathetic and let the jaw tension disappear at least for now.

Once you identify that you’re feeling jaw pain and clenching your jaw, the first thing you want to do is just stop. Because you feel threatened, you’ll probably think, there’s no way I can stop! I must do this NOW! But unless you’re actually being chased by a tiger (in which case, feel free to keep running), you should be able to stop and just take one slow, deep breath. Then, try doing literally anything differently from my list of wrong actions. Try taking it slower, or standing up, or just doing something else. I found that very quickly once I let go of doing the thing in the way I was doing it, it becomes obvious to me why what I was doing was the wrong action and what the right action, what I actually Desire in that moment looks like. Once I sit with it more and just journal about what exactly was happening, I often also find it’s pretty easy to figure out what it was that felt threatening in that moment.

Now I don’t claim this will make all your jaw pain go away. Most of your jaw pain is likely due to accumulated years of this kind of clenching. What this is about is solving the root cause of the clenching and any long-term chronic pain that may have appeared. If you can continue to be mindful about this throughout your life, it should remove the cause of the pain and tension and so prevent any new issues from arising for existing issues from getting worse. The body is pretty good at healing itself if it’s not constantly getting injured, and I have found that my chronic pain has gotten a lot better as well.

If you want some more advice on how to better understand your internal motivation, what it is that you do Desire, and what the Right Action is, I highly recommend this article from Natasha Anwar that informed a lot of how I’ve been thinking about this.

This isn’t a metaphor, it’s real physics. And it maps with precision onto how trauma resolves itself through your life.

The Artifact Installed

My parents survived the Lebanese Civil War. They knew genuine scarcity, real threat, the collapse of social order. This knowing - this survival encoding - they attempted to transmit to me as protection. But transmission across contexts becomes distortion.

Things that don’t evolve together don’t fit together. The artifacts that preserved them in Beirut - hypervigilance, rigid obedience protocols, threat assessment calibrated to civil war - evolved to dissipate lethal gradients in their environment. Transplanted to Canadian abundance, those same artifacts created new gradients rather than dissipating existing ones.

As a child, they told me what would happen if I didn’t work hard and follow the path they laid out: homelessness, destitution, annihilation. I remember being threatened with sleeping on a cold balcony for whispering late into the night with my brother about politics, demonstrating to us the consequences of not taking life seriously. The nervous system forming in childhood cannot distinguish between stated threat and actual probability. It simply encodes: deviation from the prescribed path equals annihilation.

The equation inscribed itself: Obedience = Safety = Existence. Therefore: Disobedience = Danger = Annihilation.

I learned to split myself: the authentic self who wanted to explore, to discuss ideas late into the night, to follow curiosity - this was coded as dangerous liability. The productive, obedient, hypervigilant self was coded as survival asset.

The Oscillation Begins

In thermodynamic terms, my parents had installed a system far from equilibrium. They had created a massive potential energy difference between two states: the “safe” state of perfect obedience and productivity, and the “dangerous” state of authentic self-expression. Like a spring compressed to its maximum, the system had nowhere to go but into oscillation.

In high school, after being sent to a summer camp with other high-achievers, I swung hard toward the productive pole. I tried really hard, got into the best degree and school I could. Maximum compression on one side.

Then university hit and I swung to the opposite extreme. I wasn’t just letting myself be myself - I was almost giving up on the parts of me I was told to be. I played video games all day, put in the absolute minimum effort into school. I got tired of being a hopefully video game addict eventually, but for years, this was the counter-swing. Maximum extension on the other side.

These early oscillations possessed crude amplitude: total academic striving versus complete withdrawal into gaming. These gross swings were necessary first explorations of the territory. I could not know where balance resided without first experiencing the extremes and discovering their costs.

The Dampening Process

In physics, a dampened oscillation occurs when a system encounters resistance that dissipates energy with each swing. The amplitude decreases over time until the system reaches equilibrium - its natural rest state.

After the video game period, I started to learn what my actual authentic self looked like. I did more things in school that felt like me. I worked a little harder at my studies, became more well-rounded. The oscillations were becoming more moderate.

Then parental pressure came on again and I worked very hard at job applications because that was what was expected of me. I got a full-time job. My last term in school, I basically didn’t do anything because I knew it didn’t matter anymore and I had the job secured. Swing and counter-swing, but with less extreme amplitude and less extreme consequences.

I started working and put in long hours in consulting, travelling extensively and following my boss’s orders closely. The job was difficult and I knew I needed to keep it if I didn’t want to rely on my parents. I was living in a place where my parents would visit a lot, and it felt like they always had one eye over my shoulder. Fight-or-flight mode, hypervigilance active.

Then COVID hit. Some issues came up between my parents and I, and I basically stopped talking to or seeing them. Work required very little effort of me and I put in very little effort - basically just playing video games all of COVID because what else was there to do? The pendulum swung again.

Post-COVID, I got a new job, put more into my career, and got a promotion. It wasn’t so bad, but it was definitely still a little bit performative. The oscillations got smaller and more frequent here - it would be a couple months of going to the office and networking, then maybe a couple months of putting my energy into political organizing or going to music festivals.

Each time I swung to hypervigilant over-performance, I eventually exhausted myself and discovered it did not actually secure the safety it promised. Each time I swung to rebellious under-performance or escapism, I encountered consequences or dissatisfaction that revealed this too was incomplete. With each cycle, the extremes moderated because neither pole delivered what was promised.

The Compression

The pattern has continued, but now the quality of my work has shifted because I’ve been becoming more authentic. My psychedelic experiences have been adventures into authenticity - Surrender in the precise sense: releasing the need to direct evolution and actively witnessing the system reorganize itself. Because I pushed those explorations far in recent months, my desire to do “crazy stuff” has gotten much smaller.

Now I see the oscillation happen day to day, or even hour to hour. I may have one day of pure presence - what the Taoists call wu wei, effortless action. Then perhaps a day of getting worried about my job, and putting a ton of fight or flight effort into it. Then a day of wanting to quit my job and blast off into some new startup idea, fuck the consequences.

When I first came up with my potential startup idea, I spent 3 days grinding on it, pushing myself past my limit. Now, that desire to grind and be free of my job has reduced to just a day at a time, or perhaps just a few hours. Then one moment of pure presence, then a swing toward driven productivity, then back to center, then a swing toward wanting to escape my job entirely, then back to center again.

When oscillation frequency increases while amplitude decreases, the system approaches the point where discrete swings collapse into steady state. I am no longer ping-ponging between months of different orientations - I am fluctuating within single days or hours between presence and pushing, between authentic rhythm and conditioned drivenness.

What the Swing Teaches

Here’s what I’ve learned: any reaction to the oscillation itself adds energy to the system. Each time I force myself toward productivity to “correct” for a period of authentic exploration, I add energy. Each time I rebel into leisure to “correct” for a period of driven work, I add energy. The reaction perpetuates the very cycle I wish to resolve.

But here’s the key: the resistance doing the dampening is awareness itself. Each time your do some meditation or journaling instead of jumping to act, the system becomes a little more free. The energy that would have perpetuated the swing instead gets radiated as consciousness recognizing its own patterns. This is what spiritual traditions mean by “burning through your karmas” - not destroying them through force, but allowing them to dissipate through witness. The karma is the oscillation. The burning is the dampening. Each cycle witnessed without reaction reduces the amplitude until the pattern exhausts itself naturally.

Just like in a swing, trust the dissipative forces at work. Air resistance and friction at the pivot point will drain momentum without your intervention. Your task is not to stop the swing through effort, but to cease adding energy through reactivity.

When the impulse arises to prove dedication through hypervigilant work performance, I’m learning to recognize this as energy-adding movement. Observe it without obeying. When the opposite impulse arises to dramatically quit or withdraw effort as rebellion, recognize this equally as energy-adding. Observe without obeying.

The system settles itself if you stop jostling it.

The False Binary Dissolves

What I’m discovering is that the entire oscillation has been between two distorted positions, neither of which represents actual truth. My parents’ framework contained only: responsible self-suppression (career job, perfect obedience) versus irresponsible self-indulgence (gaming, partying, “wasting” time).

But this binary was always false. Production and authenticity are not opposites. Responsibility and genuine expression are not mutually exclusive.

My startup work, for instance, doesn’t fit cleanly into either category. It’s not the “safe” corporate job my parents envisioned, but it’s also not irresponsible escapism. It’s authentic calling expressed through structured effort - what emerges when you accept yourself as you are rather than fighting against yourself. The hypervigilance says it’s dangerous deviation from the safe path. The reactive rebellion says it’s liberation from constraint. Both voices miss what is actually occurring.

Currently, I’m learning to give my job a competent but not hypervigilant effort - doing what actually needs to be done without the fight-or-flight response that has governed me for fifteen years. Not quitting, but right-sizing. Not because I’ve calculated this maintains employment while preserving energy for my startup, but because this is what presence looks like when it acts.

Where I Am Now

The oscillations continue to compress. Sometimes I still feel the pull toward hypervigilant productivity. Sometimes I feel the counter-pull toward escapism or dramatic rebellion. But I’m learning to sit on the swing without pumping my legs. To observe the movement without adding to it.

I don’t know exactly when the swing will come to rest. The dampening process follows its own timeline, governed by how much energy remains in the system and how much resistance exists to dissipate it. But I can feel the amplitude decreasing. The time between swings shortening. The extremes becoming less extreme.

What I do know is this: the healing is not something I’m doing. It’s something that’s happening as I stop interfering with the natural process. Gravity will take the swing down to the bottom. Any jostling only delays the inevitable.

The recognition that this is not an analogy but actual physics - that psychological oscillation and physical oscillation follow identical mathematical structure - this represents something fundamental about how systems return to equilibrium. Entropy operates at all levels of existence. The second law governs both closed mechanical systems and conditioned psychological structures attempting to discharge their inherited tensions.

The practice is simple, though not easy: notice when you’re pumping your legs. Notice when you’re jostling the swing. This noticing itself creates the dissipative pathway. Then stop. Let physics do what physics does.

The rest takes care itself.

“I often say "be yourself" and it's VERY good advice. The thing is, yourself is NOT your ego. It requires deep soul searching. When you are yourself, you can never be lame or cringe.

Elon is 100% ego. There is nothing him about it, and so he is as cringe as is possible.”

@Ramsey_Kilani

Someone asked me to explain this in more detail, and the explanation turned out long enough I figured I’d put it into a post, and add some Entropy to it for ya’ll. As it does tie everything together.

What we see here is Elon operating from ego, from extreme narcissism, everything he is doing is about trying to control the external environment. [Trying too hard to hold onto control is an attempt to force a low-entropy, Yang structure. It can be done, but not forever, and it comes at a high energetic cost. Systems that resist natural entropy flows eventually fail.] He’s always trying hard to impress others. Like 15 year old boys trying to impress 15 year old girls. Because he doesn’t believe in himself, he doesn’t even know what the authentic Elon looks like. We see Elon trying to borrow Milei's coolness, hoping it will make him cool. But without being authentic, without believing in it, without understanding what’s cool about it, it only comes across as a lame act.

[In Entropism, clinging too tightly to ego prevents you from self-organizing into your natural, optimal rate of entropy production. Authenticity is when you align your internal structure with the external world. Misalignment causes both internal discomfort and external awkwardness, as we’ll see with Elon.]

The reason Elon wields the chainsaw is not because he thinks it is cool (even though he may think it is cool). Its because Milei IS cool when he does it, and he hopes the crowd will think he is cool when he does it. Milei may be a wacko, but he believes in his cause. You can see the passion in his eyes when he wields that chainsaw. [Milei, for better or worse, has found an entropy production rate that aligns with his internal and external reality. Even if people disagree with him, he at least comes across as real—a system in self-organized equilibrium.]

Think when a 15 year old sees people wearing fedoras on TV, and thinks wearing a fedora will make him cool too. Depending on how in tune you are with emotions in general, it can be more or less difficult to see how lame this is, and to avoid doing it yourself. Unfortunately for 15 year old boys, they are not very in tune with their emotions, and the girls around them tend to be quite a bit more so. Even more unfortunately for Elon, he is not a 15 year old boy, and doesn’t get the grace we would give one for being lame.

[In Entropism, self-awareness is necessary for finding your natural entropy production rate. Without it, you end up in a constant state of energetic inefficiency—failing to find YOUR optimal rate of Entropy Production.]

First thing you see as they shake hands is Elon makes this face of like "yaaa I'm so great I have the chainsaw I'm going to do the chainsaw thing". It’s very transparent as a kind of "wow someone cool is letting me play with his toys now I get to be cool ohhh man I'm so excited". And Milei is like "ya you go kid good luck for some reason I am obligated to support you and let you use my chainsaw". Like a 15 year old begging his parents to be allowed to borrow grandpa’s fedora, being given the fedora, yet the boy is still wearing a t-shirt and sneakers. Supremely lame! And we’re only 2 seconds in.

As soon as he picks up the chainsaw, he does the Elon musk roar thing that he seems to hope others think is cool. Notice though, he doesn’t look at the crowd for this, HE doesn’t think it is cool at all, he just hopes it is. This makes it more lame in our eyes, as many of us see right through him (even if we aren’t consciously aware of it).

Then, Elon looks to Milei for validation. Notice how Milei doesn't make eye contact or look at him at all. Milei is cringing at Elon and so doesn't want to look him in the face. If he was looking at Elon in that moment, Elon might see the cringe in his face, so he simply avoids looking at him altogether. Milei is good at keeping his face together, he is a politician after all. But it becomes a lot harder when you have to look the person in the face. So he avoids it! And you can even tell that Milei's heart isn't into the thumbs up that he's doing, he doesn't seem happy that this teenager is copying his chainsaw gimmick. His smile seems forced. Like the 15 year old looking to grandpa for validation that the fedora looks cool, and grandpa avoiding eye contact and throwing out a half hearted thumbs up, but only because the kid’s parents are around and they would be annoyed if grandpa wasn’t nice about it.

When Elon speaks, even his own voice sounds forced. It doesn't sound like he believes in "the chainsaw for bureaucracy". That's not something Milei would say, and we all know it. Everyone knows what the chainsaw is, especially this crowd! You don't need to explain it to them! You don’t need to scream “CHAINSAW”! Elon is explaining it because he's worried people won't get it, he has no confidence even when he's borrowing someone else’s cool. The entire point of having a chainsaw on stage with you is “show, don’t tell”. The chainsaw makes the point for you, better than your words ever could. But Elon has no confidence in any of it, tries to explain it to us, and not only defeats the entire purpose of the chainsaw, but makes it even more lame than if he didn’t have one. And from his vocal tone we can tell that Elon believes this too. Think of when the 15 year old boy takes his new fedora to school and tells the girl he likes “hey check out my new fedora isn’t it cool it’s like the 1920s”.

Then he does another weird little screech, which might be adorable on someone else, in a different context. Someone who owned their weird little screech as part of them. But Elon Musk sells himself as a big manly man with big muscles and a deep voice. Not a guy with weird little screeches. And he knows its a weird little screech. That’s why he looks away from the crowd again when he does it, only returning his gaze to them when its over. The part that could have been authentic and real, isn’t, because Elon fights it himself. And so now we think its lame too, because Elon thinks its lame.

[In order to operate at your optimal rate, you need to be self-aware. Elon demonstrates that he is not, as he denies to himself and us who he actually is.]

Then you hear him do a little chuckle when he puts the chainsaw down. It's that chuckle of relief people do, when they were doing something they were worried wouldn’t go well, and it turns out OK. "Phew!" He got a cheer from the crowd, so he feels like it was OK. Of course though, we all recognize that this is a crowd that would cheer no matter what he did. And most of us viewers are not so bought in like that crowd. So to us it reads exactly like it is, that even Elon was worried the chainsaw thing wouldn't go over well. The boy somehow didn’t totally bomb his attempt to impress the girl (she is afterall, also 15). But watching it, you can tell he didn’t think it would work. Even the boy knows deep inside that she was likely only being polite (for her didn’t believe she would be talking to him otherwise). And if the guy doing it thinks it’s lame, why would we have any reason to believe otherwise?

In fact, we even see Milei continue to walk further and further away from Elon during the entire thing, until he has to shake his hand again. You can see him awkwardly pause, put his head down to not have to look at Elon. He thinks its super fucking lame and he can’t even stand to look at Elon during the thing. Then at the end when the other guy says "Mr President thank you so much". Elon puts the chainsaw down and stops embarrassing himself trying to be as cool as Milei. You can see the relief in Milei's face, "finally this embarrassment is over". He jogs right over to Elon to do a quick handshake, so he can get away from the lamest man in modern history as fast as possible. The handshake is only a formality, and you see a bit more comradery with the host, which establishes that yes, if he wanted to, his could have spent a bit more time shaking Elon’s hand. The girl suddenly “remembers” her friends are waiting for her, and now that the interaction has concluded, scampers off as fast as she can.

And as the viewer we see all of this, even if mostly subconsciously. Milei is supposed to be Elon’s friend and ally, in fact this entire exchange is supposed to be him giving Elon a very public gift. And yet, even he thinks Elon is lame as fuck. We see exactly these same dynamics anytime Elon is near Trump. What could be more lame than both you and your closest allies thinking you are lame? What could make for a more lame person, than to be at the highest places in power, thinking yourself lame, your allies thinking yourself lame, and having it captured for all the world to see.

And a point of advice for those who feel personally attacked by this. I was that kid with the fedora. Growing out of that is part of growing up, it’s a skill that can be learned. There's hope for y’all too. Lame is simply a misalignment in your structure. It can be realigned. There’s nothing inherent to Elon musk that he must be like this. All he needs to do is get some self awareness. Take off the hat and just talk to the girl, weird squeals and all, and she’ll be more impressed by you than she ever could have been by the hat.

Elon Musk is perceived as lame not because of what he does, but because his actions reveal a fundamental misalignment with his optimal rate of Entropy production. True confidence arises when an individual (or a system) dissipates entropy in a way that feels both natural and effective. When you accept yourself and your environment and operate based on what’s true about it. When someone forces an act, we instinctively recoil from the friction. Lameness, in an Entropic sense, is simply inefficient entropy dissipation. Coolness is entropy flowing in an optimal, effortless way. “Wu Wei”. Being cool isn’t a hat you wear, or a chainsaw you wield. Coolness is the absence of trying to be cool.

3 ancient philosophers are sitting around tasting a jar of this new product, called Vinegar. Buddha, Confucius, and Laozi (representing Taoism).

Buddha takes a taste of the vinegar, and declares it bitter. The experience of the vinegar to him was suffering, as is all of the experience of life. The world is empty of meaning, and only full of bitterness.

Confucius takes a taste, and declares it sour. Whatever alcoholic product this used to be has clearly spoiled (as vinegar is made by letting ethanol continue to ferment). As with all of life, it would be better back in its original proper state. The world now is corrupt, and meaning was found in the glorious past.

Laozi takes a taste of it, and while he tastes both those flavors, smiles. He knows that the beauty and meaning of life is found in the balance, and while not exactly an enjoyable experience, he is lucky he had the chance to experience this new flavor at all. For that is all he has. The experience of the vinegar itself is meaningful, no matter how it tastes.

And so from these experiences, each has a different prescription for how to live.

Buddha says that we must fix our inner state, to learn to detach from the suffering of the world (or vinegar). Once we achieve nirvana, we can escape this world of suffering.

Confucius says that we must fix this world, to return to the ancient and more glorious past. We must follow the proper rituals and traditions and social hierarchy to create the perfect ordered world (or vinegar).

Laozi (Taoism) says that you should enjoy this moment, for that is the only meaning he has. He accepts the world as it is today, and makes no prescriptions for how it or himself should be. He has vinegar in front of him, that tastes both bitter and sour. He accepts both aspects. He sees that soon the vinegar will be gone, and he is lucky to have tasted it. And he sees that this was once alcohol, and he is lucky that some alcohol has turned into this vinegar for him to taste. He sees both the Yin and the Yang, and knows that meaning is found in the balance that he has right now.

If you're familiar with the story, you may have already noticed how I'm interpreting it differently. It is normally presented as 3 different ideas on how to live, with Lao Zi being the superior one (when told by a Taoist). My (also biased) perspective is a little different though.

The Fresh Take - Buddha as Yin and Confucius as Yang

Buddha embodies the Yin (or high entropy). Yin represents passivity, emptiness, and darkness, features we will see at the heat death of the universe (when entropy will be the highest). He sees the world as empty, and his prescription is to empty yourself. Confucius, embodies the Yang (or low entropy). Yang represents potential, order, and light, features we see at the big bang (when entropy was the lowest). He sees the past as having been ordered and better, and so strives to return to that. Meanwhile Laozi sees beauty in the balance between the two. He sees both the Yin and the Yang and accepts them. Their contrast is what we humans live for and where true meaning lies.

So rather than 3 different ways, we have two different ways, and one way that unites them together and transcends them. In this view Taoism is not different from the other 2, but instead understands both of them and sees them both as parts of the same whole. Both only see half the picture, and so create a prescription to adapt to only the half that they see.

My thoughts on this came from analyzing how my new philosophy on life, Entropism (based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics) intersects with Taoism (it does a lot). As I go into Entropism in future posts, the insights found in this story will hopefully become more clear. The main thing I hope to illustrate here is the difference between Yin (high entropy) and Yang (low entropy) from a new perspective. And then, how these map onto the high and low entropy, respectively.

Authors Note - This is a Taoist story, told by Taoists, to show how great Taoism is. In both the traditional version, and my version, Buddha and Confucius are symbols of an idealized version of their ideas. In practice, in reality, you cannot and will not ever have a “perfect yin” or “perfect yang” idea.

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