Many people start to do research on Taoism online, and they end up with a bunch of Tao Te Ching, some blogs with people writing about things that sounds just like another version of another blog, rephrase and reworking of other people's interpretation of some theories. The problem is, no matter how far you go in this research, you often end up in a conclusion of - philosophy Taoist or the western people don't believe in any God or deities in Taoism, but somehow all the Chinese Taoism you see are "praying" to something and they are doing rituals and such that is very "goddish" looking, so what is the deal? Are the westerners being just fed with something like "Chinese buffet"? Some chap-sui (Chinese food that Chinese never eat in their real culture) marketed to the west? Well, here you will find out about the real thing and what it's all about.
Yup, the video above will tell you everything, but we will continue typing here, because it's a blog, and we want some visitors to read too! Let's talk about - which one is the real thing!
To be honest, Taoism is Taoism, and it has never been seen as "philosophy" or "religious". Just like martial art is martial art, even there are some "philosophy martial artist" out there who only like to talk more than fight, at the end of the day, it's a system that teaches you about fighting and applying theories of fighting to life. Taoism is Taoism, and if you are in Taoism, you should be at least knowing what TAO the word means. I have written a nice article here - https://www.tinyatdragon.com/blogs/spiritual/what-is-taoism
Sum it up in short, the TAO is not "the way" and not "the way of nature". If you put a "subject" to it, you are already wrong, because TAO is a principle, or a concept, or some kind of pattern, and if you can understand the pattern, now you will understand what can be categorized as "TAO" in something, and understand the workings of it. TAO means "one drop of essence that give birth to a focus or destiny of a universe or system", just like your intention of your mind can also be the TAO of yourself. A father can be a TAO of the family. The boss can be the TAO of the company. Without the TAO, it's like a human without the head, it won't move, and will not be the same anymore.
So does Taoism believes in God or Gods or Deities? On the surface, if you do not understand it, you might think it is all about "those" movie style gods and deities, even the word for God is everywhere. In fact, it's not. It's just because most people misunderstood the meaning of these words, and the misunderstanding grew bigger as time goes on, leading to more illusions, and more misunderstandings. Yes, there are spiritual stuff and there are other worlds and dimensions, or even "beings" out there, but we do not do any praying, worshiping, offering, and such to any entities and stuff like that in our religion, or lineage. Maybe some other lineage does, but we don't.
The word for God, SUN 神 is referred to as the power of things, like how the power of human is be able to think, move, and do things, create things. We intake essence, essence generates energy, and energy generates power. Essence is like food, air, water, etc. Energy is everything that came out after digesting the food, it can be anything from physical matters to spiritual energies of the food. Then because of these things, your energy pumps up and you can do things, and there goes the power of your body. It's so simple, and so direct, yet people don't get it. This is the Jing, Hei, Sun theory 精氣神, yet most people want to believe or thinks that this is like 3 "solid" substance, like finding blood, bone, exygen, etc. If you try to catch it like a noun, you got it all wrong. It is not a certain subject or noun, it's a categorizing word, and it's explaining things that happen in patterns, like how laws are doing it with their law books, no subject is set, but anything that falls in this condition can be equal to this word. The more you learn in Taoism, the better you know how to categorize it into different types of essence, energy and power, and it gets very "mad science" in the real deal knowledge side of things.
