Immortality again

I've been attempting to research the Chinese side of the Tao again and its not too fruitful. My attention was perked up by a visit of an Anglican priest to a Taoist retreat on an impossibly high and steep mountain but the insight was minimal. Further searching has lead me time and time again to the Taoist side of Taoism that I find all flowery and insubstantial. I am as you will have gathered into philosophical Taoism and even as such I often use that to springboard into my own take. Even given the title of this blog Tao for me is just a philosophy that at best points the same way as me but not something I label myself as. No label is me.

Now time and time again the Taoist ideas on immortality pop up as you research this area and I have voiced my own opinions on this subject before but am inclined to do it again. The view is nearly always that one may cultivate their human form so that it either lasts longer than average or even escapes the grips of death altogether - and for some reason people find this desirable.

I rarely get too tied up in ideas that speak of "this energy, this avatar, this method, this becoming" or so on, I nearly always speak instead of an inner completeness, a non-divided oneness where "I" is the totality and "I" is not a separate entity - by this view I see immortality as something quite different to the standard view.

In the complete oneness model which pure Taoism, Zen, Ch'an, Vedanta and others speak of there is no separate self and so you are already infinite, you exist previous to such mind made notions as time and neither the minor blip of human existence or the huge scales talked of in the physics of space are more than fantasy created to explain something already misunderstood. Like a chess piece attempting to explain the universe by the constraints of the game he believes to be real.

You're infinite, deathless and immortal because you are the infinite dancing and so you are the reason for time, not some entity constrained by it.