· How It Started
· Darkness Always Follows Light
· Hiatus and Return
· Light Always Follows Darkness
· The Taoist Online Will Return

This will be the final article published on Medium under a banner I created in late 2022, The Taoist Online. Many don’t realize TTO didn’t start on Medium, but moved here from a Wix site. Here is what I remember.

Click here to skip the story and find out where we went.

How It Started

A new social network named Mastodon appeared, and I wanted to give it a chance since my Twitter days had long passed. So, I opened my own website and began to write, sharing the posts through the new social network. I created the moniker The Taoist Online since Taoism (Daoism) is the lens I choose to see the world through.

Instead of everyone ignoring me, visitors to the site grew quickly and caught the attention of Debra G. Harman. She was extremely friendly and supportive and was well-connected to many other excellent writers on a platform called Medium. Surprisingly, I joined Medium in 2013, just a year after it launched. I wrote an article about esports and moved on.

Eventually, I decided to give Medium another try, opened a new account, and looked around for fellow thinkers who wrote about Taoism, philosophy, or just general spirituality. However, finding publications and users was difficult, and to some degree, still is. I didn’t see much of an audience, so I did what everyone does — Googled it.

“How to grow your audience on Medium.” A Google search that changed my life.

One of the results suggested creating a publication, as the algorithm preferred accepted articles. I searched Medium for a publication about Taoism and didn’t find one. Next, I searched for philosophy and spiritualism but didn’t find anything that fit my work. With only one option left, I created a publication and selfishly took the name from my old Wix website—The Taoist Online.

Through various Discord channels and chat rooms, I discovered a few other writers looking for a home. There was a teenager from England who loved stoicism, a kindred spirit from the U.S. who loved Taoism, and a woman in Brazil who wrote about veganism. Soon, I had dozens of writers who wanted to help and share their journeys with the world. I accepted all of them.

In only our third month, The Taoist Online (TTO) reached 140,000 monthly viewers!

My editing queue exploded, and I brought on several editors, whom I tipped each month with my Medium payments. By the end of our first year, we reached 190,000 monthly viewers and accepted hundreds of writers who published hundreds of articles each month.

Everyone was happy and healthy and loved the hard work. Tens of thousands of strangers came together each month to read, share, and connect regardless of religion, faith, nationality, race, or gender. My publication, stupidly named after myself, became a massive force for change and wisdom online.

Until it wasn’t.

Darkness Always Follows Light

Medium provides four tools for running a publication.

1. The ability to create publications with a home page.
2. The ability for writers to submit articles to a publication.
3. The ability for publishers to accept or deny articles.
4. Private notes from editors to the writer and vice versa.

That’s it.

As a publication owner, did you receive 50+ article submissions today, and do you need to filter or sort them? Sorry, that feature isn’t on the list. You should make a spreadsheet. Then make sure you all share and maintain it together, forever.

Do you need a method to communicate with your editors that isn’t public comments on articles? Sorry, that isn’t on the list either. Every private comment you leave for the writer, every editor will also be able to see. You should make a Discord or Slack workspace, or email each other all the time.

Want to communicate with everyone who is a writer? Sorry, that’s not on the list. You’ll need to find them one at a time and ask them your question, or create an announcement page on your publication homepage and hope everyone reads it. I hope you have an email address for them, or else you’ll go to private notes, where the notification can get buried under all of the other Medium notifications they receive.

Despite these missing features, my team and I still managed to create one of the largest publications on philosophy and spirituality. However, running a pub like this caused personal problems between editors, writers who refused to follow rules, a never-ending email chain, and eventually, resentment.

I resented Medium for not helping the people they depended on to keep their platform profitable, and writers for causing drama. I resented the publication for taking so much time away from my children so that I could edit, write, and manage. I wanted it to stop, but felt guilty if I stepped away. I owed my writers results and needed to carry on. Eventually, however, I couldn’t take it anymore.

Taoism teaches us to let things come and then calmly let them go. Despite the money, notoriety, and success, I lost my love for writing, and that‘s how I knew it was time to go. So, in March 2024, I started an extended break to regain my passion.

Hiatus and Return

By December, I found myself in the middle of a nervous breakdown, and I was placed back on anxiety medication. I spent the next 90 days learning new routines at home with my family, remembering how to breathe, and finding joy in rereading Tao Te Ching. I even wrote an article about politics — something I always refused to do.

I returned to Medium in early February 2025, hoping to find a calmer, more enjoyable platform. While I was happy to write again, I was not happy with the state of affairs. Most of the editing team had left or stopped working, except for one (Golden). Article submissions were far from their previous highs, and payments were down for everyone, everywhere. TTO views per month sank 90% to 20,000.

I connected with old writing friends and found many had moved to Substack, so I also posted a few articles there. To my surprise, my stories resonated, too! I also met a fantastic group of talented individuals. So, while one platform felt alive and fun and created features that writers and readers could use, the other continued its decline.

They hadn’t implemented a single change to how editing queues were managed or how publications were maintained. Medium hadn’t created any new forms of revenue other than charging more for the same subscriptions in the hope that a few extra pennies could be shared around to those readers you read. They decided ‘meta’ articles (posts about Medium) weren’t worth paying for at all, in hopes that would boost payments to others.

Next, they removed payments from the referral program, which had long since retired but whose monthly payments had continued. Nearly everyone I knew lost views, reads, and payments—their audience evaporated. We all exported our email subscribers and took them to new platforms in an attempt to hold onto the communities we so desperately built.

The final straw, however, occurred secretly around April 15, 2025. Medium updated a support article regarding how the “Follower” and “Subscriber” features worked. Previously, followers and subscribers were separate. A follower worked like Twitter, adjusting your algorithmic feed to show you similar content. Subscribers would receive emails for every article you published.

The ability to export your subscribers’ emails and take the list with you is a standard and key feature in the publishing industry. If you want to give a TED Talk, get ready to be asked how many people are on your subscriber list. If you want a book deal or a public speaking engagement, how many are on your list? Whether it’s from Substack, Vocal, Ghost, or any other major writing platform, the list can always be taken with you.

While video social sites like TikTok or YouTube would never think about giving out subscriber email addresses, taking your email list with you is standard practice everywhere that encourages long-form content… but not on Medium. Not anymore.

Light Always Follows Darkness

I began writing on Medium to share what I learned. I created a publication to allow others to learn, share, and grow, but how can we do that when writers can’t control who sees their work?

How can we do that when readers don’t even see the writers they love in their feed? There’s not even a tab to see ONLY people you follow! You either let everyone you follow email blast you, hope they magically appear in your homepage feed, or you find your own method of connecting, just like I’ve always done — find my own way.

I love writing, sharing, learning, and growing; I don’t love Medium. Instead, I love the idea of Medium — a place to gather and care for ourselves and each other.

I realized this week that TTO can no longer fulfil its original purpose. The people who worked tirelessly for it are mostly gone, and the audience who needs to read its wisdom and knowledge can’t because Medium makes it increasingly difficult to do so as wave after wave of AI-generated garbage floods its submission queues.

I can’t ask any more writers to join a publication when the platform it sits on does so many things to make life difficult for young talent. As Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine stated recently, I have two options.

1. Take TTO private with my website.
2. Move to a more open and accepting writing platform.

I choose option two.

Medium is the Apple of writing platforms — clean, simple, and incredibly easy to open an account and immediately start writing. However, Medium has also begun to take on the bad aspects of Apple. No new features that users desperately need; platform lock-in; removing features people loved (colorizing your homepage, for example); deciding what is allowed to make money; not understanding the dangers and power AI has had on their industry.

The Taoist Online Will Return as The Daoist Online

Starting June 1, 2025, I will recreate The Taoist Online as a newsletter on Substack.com. Moving away from the online magazine format means I can slow down submissions and spend time with each article. This lessens the stress I place upon my family and allows each article to breathe. It also means that anyone subscribing to The Daoist Online on Substack will always stay with us no matter where we go because Substack allows us to export email lists. Should Substack change this, I’ll gladly move on and take our readers with us.

Never again will I give a writing platform the ability to gatekeep everything so many have worked for; everything that I have worked for.

I don’t believe Medium has the best interests of readers and writers anymore.

Substack isn’t a perfect platform by any means, and it has its own quirks, problems, and feature issues, but at least I see them trying. Podcasts, video hosting, notes, and many other features are created for anyone who needs them.

The possibilities are so great that even if it fails, I will have tried one final time to make TDO what it once was, what I always intended it to be.

A free community publication for sharing and learning about philosophy, wisdom, and spirituality.

I hope that you join us there, too. We all need someone to pick up, to guide us, and a place to share our struggles. Let’s do it together at The Daoist Online.

Thank you, all. Goodbye Medium.

Why I Moved ‘The Taoist Online’ From Medium to Substack was originally published in The Taoist Online on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A tie is so important, yet it does nothing. Choking on Meaning: A Symbol That Doesn’t Save Your Life

If your car went to get fixed
and it came back with more problems,
that every solution applied caused more mayhem — 
wouldn’t it be difficult to claim
the garage isn’t run by conmen?

It becomes obvious
they don’t know what they’re doing then.
This world was way beyond the thoughts of men.

Those seeking power
end up protecting themselves like they are small,
and those disempowered
end up being the ones walking tall.

With all they have,
they take as if they have nothing at all.
I have experienced joy
playing with papers wrapped into a ball.

It seemed like the planet was healing
when we were holed up during COVID.
I felt a little bit of shame
when the signs showed our presence is morbid.

Distraction — the new form of amnesia.
A virus reminded us
we are a village,
whether in Polynesia, Canada, or Tunisia.

Sometimes I ask myself — 
what are we really doing?
Not out of joy,
I find myself laughing.

We really left it
at washing hands and sanitizing,
while we wait for laws and tech
that would stop us from spiraling,
when not even a contagion
could keep them from partying.

I just got envious today
watching the hawks fly — 
how calm their heads must be,
from their thoughts they are not fried.

The chirps of others,
the rain, the wind — 
must be music.
Take away all the noise…
what’s left must be magic.

It’s just absurd
perpetuating the absurd.
I’m seeing good people being turned bad.

Once a zombie,
the rest don’t seem that mad.
Funny how the world changes
when you are not in a herd.

How long can you stay without touching your phone when it’s in front of you? Seconds? Minutes? Can you watch 2 minutes go by?

Talking while walking was originally published in The Taoist Online on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Habit of Splitting the World

Scrolling through Medium, I instinctively sort every essay — including this one you’re deciding whether to continue reading — into interesting or boring, engaging or not. It’s almost automatic, isn't it? We seem hardwired to think in polarities. I certainly hope this essay lands on the right side!

This simple moment of scrolling illustrates something much deeper: one of the most profoundly ingrained habits of the human mind is to divide the world into opposites. Good and bad. Light and dark. Self and other. Virtuous and evil. Desire and aversion. The mind, in its hunger for clarity and security, splits the seamless fabric of existence into poles, assigning one as favorable and the other as to be avoided.

Yet this very tendency, so natural and almost invisible in daily life, masks a profound truth: at a deeper level, reality is not composed of opposites. The apparent division is a trick of perception. Beneath the surface, there is a unity that transcends all distinctions. Things simply are — neither good nor bad, neither desirable nor undesirable, neither self nor other.

This insight lies at the heart of many Eastern wisdom traditions. Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, and Buddhism all point to the non-dual nature of existence. A Zen Buddhist, when asked about enlightenment, might simply reply “just this”—pointing us to reality itself, whole and undivided. In these traditions, the division between subject and object, “me” and “world,” is not ultimately real. It’s a practical convention, not truth. In the end, there is only what is—seamless, indivisible, whole.

The Myth of Rare Nonduality

Many contemporary seekers become fascinated with nonduality—not just as a concept, but as a living reality. Traditions have grown up around inducing non-dual states of awareness, aiming to dissolve the sense of separation between self and world. Some pursue it through years of meditation; others, through psychedelics. And while glimpses do arise this way, the belief that nonduality is rare or remote is deeply misleading.

This leads to an unfortunate misunderstanding: that nonduality is some rare, exalted, mystical state — remote from ordinary life, accessible only to those who have devoted decades to spiritual practice or experienced profound altered states of consciousness. This framing keeps many from recognizing its presence in their everyday experience.

I want to suggest something different, something radical in its simplicity:

Nonduality is not as rare as we think. It is woven into the fabric of everyday experience, if we have eyes to see it.

While we often assume that nonduality requires a mystical breakthrough or a trek to a mountaintop, the truth is that many of us have already lived through nondual moments — moments that transcend the mind’s either/or logic and open us into something deeper.

One such experience, surprisingly common and deeply human, is the simple act of a good cry.

A Good Cry: The Depth of Everyday Wholeness

Over a decade ago, I was transitioning from a faculty job in downstate New York to one upstate. It was time to leave the apartment we’d called home for six years—the place where I’d grown into a law professor and built a life. As I stood in the now-empty living room for a final walkthrough with the building supervisor, I felt something stir. After he left, I stood quietly with my wife—and then the tears came. I broke into sobs.

At that moment, I realized I wasn’t just leaving behind walls, carpet, and appliances. The space had become ensouled. I was saying goodbye not just to a location but to a part of my life — a chapter that had quietly fused itself to my being.

The cry itself was painful. There was grief and heartache, the sting of impermanence, the ache of letting go. But something else emerged too — a kind of grace. As the sobs came, so did relief. Gratitude rose like mist. I could feel, even in the rawness of the moment, that something was being honored. The tears made space for appreciation to rise alongside the pain.
This is what makes a good cry so powerful: it doesn’t fit into any neat emotional category. It is not just sad or just happy. It is both — and something more. A good cry transcends classification. It defies the mind’s habitual sorting into opposites. It holds pain and release, sorrow and sweetness, all at once.

Good cries are liminal spaces—thresholds where opposites converge and give rise to something new. They remind us that nonduality isn’t mystical or remote. It’s embedded in the raw fabric of ordinary life. In these unguarded moments, we glimpse a kind of wholeness the intellect alone can’t reach—a unity that holds everything together, just as it is.
Nonduality, then, is not far away. It is right here, woven into the complexity of our real lives, waiting to be found in the very places we are often tempted to avoid.

The Longissima Via: The Winding Path to Wholeness

Real wholeness is not the same as constant happiness. True wholeness arises when we can embrace both sides of existence — the light and the dark, the joy and the sorrow — without bypassing, without rejecting.

Carl Jung spent much of his life exploring this truth. He spoke of the longissima via — the long and winding path toward wholeness. In his words:

"The right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not straight but snake-like, a path that unites the opposites …. a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors."

To grow into wholeness is to walk this serpentine path, to face what we fear, to embrace what we have rejected. It is to recognize that the opposites — joy and sorrow, love and loss, self and other — are not obstacles to be overcome but essential parts of the journey. Without them, no true depth, no true humanity, is possible.

Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest collaborators, puts it this way:

"If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough — sustain it, be true to it — we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality."

Holding the tension, not collapsing into one pole or the other, is the alchemical work of the soul. Out of that sustained tension, a deeper, richer life is born.

What does holding this tension look like in everyday life? It's the parent who feels both frustrated and deeply loving toward their child in the same moment. It's the writer of a Medium essay who embraces both the satisfaction of creation and the anxiety of inadequacy. It's sitting with a loved one in grief without trying to fix it or rush through it.

Pema Chödrön echoes this wisdom from a Buddhist perspective. She writes:

"As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. … We deserve something better than that. We deserve … an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity."

We suffer when we demand tidy resolutions, when we insist that life must be either this or that, good or bad, happy or sad. True freedom comes not from resolving the opposites but from relaxing into their paradoxical coexistence.

The Problem with "Wholesomeness" in Meme Culture

In today’s online culture, it's common to see uplifting photos or videos tagged with labels like #wholesome. The implication is clear: what is wholesome must be good, pure, heartwarming. At first glance, this seems harmless enough — even beautiful. But when we look more closely, something important gets lost.

By highlighting only the “positive” aspects of life, this version of wholesomeness quietly edits out half of reality. Anything messy, painful, or difficult is implicitly labeled unwholesome — something to be filtered away. In striving to curate only the bright side, we end up splitting the world once again into good and bad, desirable and undesirable — the very habit that prevents true wholeness from taking root.

The word “whole” means undivided, complete. Wholeness invites us to welcome life as it is: light and dark, sweetness and sorrow, woven together. It’s not a polished stream of positivity—it’s the ability to stay present through the full range of experience, allowing all of it to matter.

If we seek only the curated positivity of meme culture, we risk missing the deeper invitation that life offers us: to grow by embracing the totality of existence, not just the parts we find easy to love.

Learning to Hold It All

The ancient Taoist symbol of the Yin-Yang captures this beautifully. In the heart of the white fish (yang) is a black dot (yin); in the heart of the black fish (yin) is a white dot (yang). Light contains darkness; darkness contains light. They swirl together, inseparable, forming a perfect whole.

This is the nature of our own lives. Joy and sorrow, success and failure, love and loss — they are not enemies but partners in the dance of existence.

When we open ourselves to this, when we stop fleeing from half of life and allow ourselves to experience it all — the beauty and the terror, the pleasure and the pain — then we begin to glimpse the true meaning of nonduality.

Not as an exotic state reserved for saints and sages. Not as a distant goal attained only in deep meditation or psychedelic ecstasy. But as the very texture of ordinary life — shimmering all around us, shimmering within us.

In every good cry.

In every bittersweet memory.

In every tender ache of love and loss.

In every step along the longissima via of our lives.

Wholeness is not found by escaping the opposites. Wholeness is born by embracing them all.

Enjoyed this post? Stay connected with my writing on Jung, postrationalism, and the mystical by following my personal Medium page.

If you’re drawn to the space where stillness speaks, contradictions soften, and rationality gives way to something deeper — you’ve landed in the right place.

Let’s keep exploring the space between reason and mystery together.

Good Cries and Wholeness: Everyday Doorways into Nonduality was originally published in The Taoist Online on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Its so strange that when am feeling down I feel much better when i think about others than when am obsessing about myself. May be its because we spend a lot of time wallowing in our own distress and taking the focus away from ourselves makes us feel better. Helping others, giving others, caring for others might be the best way to truly love ourselves. Gaur Gopal a famous monk shares what its like to live selflessly.

What is the most selfish one lettered word? I. Everything revolves around I. iPhone, iPad, iPod, and the man says I paid. Everything revolves around the I. And what does I stand for? Expectations.

I should be treated like this.
I should be loved like this.
I should be dealt with like this.
I should be respected like this.
I should be given these many marks.
I should not be given this.
We are all leading a life of super high expectations.

Everything revolves around my opinions, my desires, my likes, my dislikes. I love this. I want this. I don’t want this. I, I, I, I, I. Do you think life will be a much happier when it revolves around I? From our childhood, we have grown up like this. We’ve only learned to take and everyone has to fulfill my expectations. Everything has to be up to my expectations.

One boy comes to a mother and says, “Mama, I love you.”
Five year old, mother said, “I love you too deer.”
The guy grew up to be 16, goes to the mother, “Mama, I love you.”
Mother says, “How much money do you want?”
He grows up to be 25, “Mama, I love you.”
“No worry, tell me her name we shall arrange.”
He turns to be 40. “Mama, I love you.”
“I told you not to marry her.”
He turns 60. “Mama, I love you.”
“I will not sign any papers, go away.”

It’s all about my expectations. If youngsters are not spared, girlfriends and boyfriends are not spared, married people are not spared. You think religious people coming to a temple are spared from the I? I don’t think so.
Therefore, when people come to God, people come to a temple, they’re only asking. Give me what I want. No one comes to say, I love you. I want to I want to give you.

When the president of The United States, John F Kennedy came up to stage for his first presidential speech, his voice rumbled into the public address system when he said:

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

And so we are saying: Ask not what God can do for you. Ask what you can do for God. But no one asks that because the I is so big. My expectations, my desires, my things are so powerful that even when I come to a temple and ring a bell, all I’m doing is asking.

The more we lead a life of I, our I will always be frustrated because people don’t exist in this world to just fulfill your expectations. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, the most selfish one lettered word is I, which stands for expectations and therefore avoid this word. How do you avoid this word? Be realistic in your expectations. Understand that not everyone will fulfill your expectation.

And secondly, avoid this word I by trying to serve others. You know why?

Because when you want to be served, you’re dependent on people.
They may not serve you.
When you want to serve, who can stop you?
When you want respect, people may not respect you.
But when you want to give respect, who can stop you?
When you want to be loved, you may not be loved.
But when you want to give love, who can stop you?
When you want charity, people may not give you charity.
But when you want to give charity, who can stop you?
And therefore, learn to begin your journey from I to you.

The more you want for yourself, you’ll remain frustrated. The more you want to give, you’ll remain happy.

God’s love is selfless love and when that selfless love comes in our heart you experience love of god in your heart and it manifests as compassion and concern for the people of this world. What a beautiful world it would be if we experience the love of God and we try and share that love of God. People are thirsty, yearning for that love down in their lives, depressed, negative, lonely they need hope and love is the hope. Selfless love of God that comes in our heart is the hope for the people of this world.

Otherwise its a dog eat dog world, people are all just going by selfish expectations. Ladies and gentlemen, therefore the most selfless 4 lettered word is love what should we do with it? Value it, value that 4 lettered word.

How to Love Selflessly by Gaur Gopal Das was originally published in The Taoist Online on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.