Lao Tzu and “The Way”

So far it appears that Lao Tzu and other Daoists like Chuang-Tzu are the only well-known thinkers of the Axial Age who seem to have a similar approach to my own in playfully treating “reality” as personal experience of process. They were not dependent on occupying significant roles in social institutions based on agricultural or mercantile-industrial civilizations. They also appear to have been rather like wizards with a deep sense of the interconnectedness of all things and without Buddhist rejection of the world and belief in reincarnation. The sages did not mind appearing absurd to more simple-minded conformists and were happy to live on the road as travelling men if needs be. It is possible that similarly responsible guardianship role-acting informed by a systematically developed and codified process-relational cosmology could help us cope with the consequences of the approaching economic and ecological catastrophes that our present intellectual and moral leaders seem unable to see, let alone to prevent.