Seeds of Fire, Mike Brock, Alan Watts and the Tao

Seeds of Fire at Forty

道生一，一生二，
二生三，三生萬物

In this chapter of Seeds of Fire, a series that commemorates the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (Hong Kong: Far Eastern Economic Review, 1986), we follow up on The Longest Relay, an essay by Mike Brock — a prolific thinker and cultural commentator — that we published to mark the anniversary of June Fourth in 2026. The title of that reprint was June Fourth 2026 — Seeds of Fire, the Substrate and the Longest Relay.

In the grand sweep of Brock’s work we recognise themes that we addressed in Seeds of Fire in 1986 and followed up on in New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Voices of Protest, the sequel to Seeds that was compiled in the aftermath of June Fourth 1989.

This second essay — ‘An Argument in Three Costumes’ — also first appeared in Notes from the Circus, Mike Brock’s Substack, which is devoted to philosophy and socio-political commentary. It starts with a response to the work of China Heritage and goes on to elaborate on the author’s metaphysical position. In it he mentions Alan Watts (1915-1973), one of the writers who influenced my turn to non-dualism and contemplation of the Tao in my mid-teens (see On Heritage 遺). It was then that I read his best-selling The Way of Zen.

Brock says of the self-described ‘philosophical entertainer’ that:

Watts’s life’s work was demonstrating that the schools were saying the same thing in different clothing: reading Zen into the American idiom, reading the West’s own mystics back to a West that had shelved them with the fairy tales, treating the category borders as administrative artifacts rather than ontological ones. He also read the Fall the way I read it—not as inherited crime but as the mythology of self-consciousness, the dreamer forgetting he is dreaming. The Gnostics got there first and angrier, the world as a forgery, its maker a plausible impostor. He called himself, only half in jest, a spiritual entertainer. He really wasn’t being modest. It was a real metaphysical stance about what philosophy is for when its discoveries keep arriving in costumes.

For Alan Watts on Zhuangzi, see:

And, for more on Zhuangzi in our The Tower of Reading series, see:

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In the conclusion to his ‘argument in three costumes’, an incisive discussion of nonduality, liberalism, French theory and Alan Watts, Mike Brock writes:

Barmé’s [Seeds of Fire] series pairs its commemorations from 1986 with the work of people still writing. The relay in their title is a relay of conscience—voices handing refusal across a generation that was supposed to have forgotten—run, lately, through a memorial museum in Los Angeles that someone tried to deface three days before the anniversary. Those pairings keep working: the American essay about the long transmission sits down next to the Chinese witnesses without a seam, because transmission is the same problem in both costumes. What coheres is not nationality, school, or era; it is what can be handed on without distortion, which turns out to be the only test any of these traditions were ever applying.

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The Chinese rubric of this chapter in Seeds of Fire at Forty is a famous line from Tao Te Ching, Chapter 42, one to which Mike Brock refers in the following essay.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
7 October 2026

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An Argument in Three Costumes

On what my metaphysical position actually is

Mike Brock

In June, Geremie Barmé’s China Heritage ran The Longest Relay in its Seeds of Fire series, forty years on from the original volume of Chinese voices of conscience, on the anniversary of June Fourth. The series name is the diagnosis: the Substrate and the Longest Relay. My metaphysics were not acquired where my politics were, and the careful readers have been saying so for a while. They are right.

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The metaphysics is nondualist, and it resembles Taoism more than any dualist account the Western canon has on offer. The Western tradition keeps insisting the world comes in two substances—mind here, matter there, and four hundred years of scenic explanations for how the two could possibly touch. I don’t much find that problem compelling, because I do not believe it is a problem. There is one process, presenting in aspects—and the physical and the mental are presentations, not jurisdictions. Even the technical physics work runs on this hinge: time as correlation, observers as indexed sectors rather than little homuncular kingdoms. When Laozi says the Tao gives birth to the ten thousand things (chapter 42), the claim is not that the ten thousand things are illusory. It is that they are of the one, and the one is not diminished into a gray average by being many. The popular Western distortion flattens that into uniformity—one undifferentiated consciousness, everyone dissolved into the ocean—but a unity that abolishes the differences it unites is not unity; it is erasure.

[Note: Chapter 42 of Tao Te Ching reads:

道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物。萬物負陰而抱陽，沖氣以為和。人之所惡，唯孤、寡、不穀，而王公以為稱。故物或損之而益，或益之而損。人之所教，我亦教之。強梁者不得其死，吾將以為教父。

《道德經》第四十二章]

I just authored a short piece on a television show about collective consciousness for exactly this reason: a world with no other is a world with no one to love, because love needs the other as much as it needs the lover. Nonduality is not the claim that we are secretly the same person. It is the claim that no one is a sealed jurisdiction—and that is a claim about what makes persons precious, not fungible.

The West is not as dualist as its front office pretends. Spinoza, whose Deus sive Natura I have treated at length here, read God and nature as one thing under two aspects—the architecture my own framework descends from directly. Whitehead took the process seriously enough to build Process and Reality out of occasions of experience rather than substances out of things: events, not nouns, all the way down. And at the far edge of mainstream physics there is, arguably, John Wheeler, whose it-from-bit participatory universe I spent an essay taking as seriously as the physics would bear—the substrate looking at itself, locally, at the scale of each embodied observer. The tradition keeps producing the same door and insisting on calling it an anomaly.

I started as a strong atheist, the kind who had read the arguments and found them all wanting. What the atheism never gave me, and could not, was an account of why the giving up had to be total—why a world with no God had to be a world with no depth. Reading the Gospels carefully, as an outsider and on the record, is part of how I came to see that the depth was never the question; only the furniture was. The metaphysics that grew in the empty room is nondualist, and the room never had to be furnished twice.

I now believe, strongly, that materialism cannot be true. What that cashes out to—God, or some other explanation—is beside my point. I do not believe it can be true. The sharpest empirical problem is binding: a billion parallel processes on one side, one undivided experience on the other, and the combination problem still has no solution. On a one-process metaphysics the unity of experience is exactly what you would predict; on materialism it is a deepening anomaly. And I have been making that case here for two years—most plainly where the case meets physics, in the argument that time is correlation structure and, more generally, in the continuing audit of quantum interpretation.

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My moral philosophy is lifted straight from the Western canon; the fit is not loose. I am a liberal of the classical tradition, and the reason is the metaphysics, not despite it. If the other is irreducible—if no collective, party, movement, or market may absorb a person’s standing—then politics has to be built around the refusal to merge. Classical liberalism is that refusal, formalized: distinct persons as a permanent feature of reality rather than as a temporary obstacle to consensus.

Hume supplies the joint the whole frame hangs from: reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions. No calculation derives what anyone should care about; every formalism begins from a caring it cannot produce. The formalists have been trying to evict that insight for three centuries, lately with a mathematics-of-alignment accent. It is a boundary: is does not cash out ought, and neither does optimizes. The eviction keeps failing because the premises still enter wearing their author’s gratitude and horror.

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On language and meaning I am in conversation with the continental tradition, more than with the analytics who trained me to be suspicious of it. The poststructuralists were doing register analysis decades before the rest of us had the vocabulary: noticing that a sentence is an instrument of power as well as of sense, that meanings are made in differences, that a term’s history rides along inside it doing quiet work. These pages have already worked that ground: True Myths—structures that bear meaning without making empirical claims, against conspiracy theories that borrow myth’s immunity while making refutable ones—is that kind of observation in American clothing. So is the habit, in the AI coverage and in On Categories, of watching when somebody’s verbs sneak a mind in ahead of the evidence, or when a category does administrative work while pretending to describe.

The scientistic critics spent a generation dismissing all of this as anti-intellectual fog—the hoaxes, the conference papers, the jokes—and some of it was anti-intellectual fog. I am not going to defend the weird subculture of French philosophy that produced the worst prose of the twentieth century as a mating display. Sorry, not sorry. But treating a tradition’s worst vices as a refutation of its best observation is a laundered argument: the sign really does carry its exclusions, power really does travel in vocabularies, and no amount of sneering at Lacan changes that the people who sneered hardest never answered the point. Meanwhile the analytic tradition arrived at meaning-as-use under respectable costuming and was congratulated for its rigor. Same territory, different flag.

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Alan Watts is the hero of this method, and I need to uplift him a little here, because Watts is remembered now mostly as ambience—meditation-app wallpaper, a lovely voice over b-roll of water. The substance was translation. Watts’s life’s work was demonstrating that the schools were saying the same thing in different clothing: reading Zen into the American idiom, reading the West’s own mystics back to a West that had shelved them with the fairy tales, treating the category borders as administrative artifacts rather than ontological ones. He also read the Fall the way I read it—not as inherited crime but as the mythology of self-consciousness, the dreamer forgetting he is dreaming. The Gnostics got there first and angrier, the world as a forgery, its maker a plausible impostor. He called himself, only half in jest, a spiritual entertainer. He really wasn’t being modest. It was a real metaphysical stance about what philosophy is for when its discoveries keep arriving in costumes.

That is the practice here, and it is why the crossings do not feel to me like crossings. The nondualist metaphysics tells you how the world is one; the classical liberalism draws the consequence that the many must not be dissolved; and the continental suspicion watches the language, because the costumes are where the laundering happens. These are not three commitments negotiated into coexistence. They are one argument, worn to three occasions.

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Barmé’s series pairs its commemorations from 1986 with the work of people still writing. The relay in their title is a relay of conscience—voices handing refusal across a generation that was supposed to have forgotten—run, lately, through a memorial museum in Los Angeles that someone tried to deface three days before the anniversary. Those pairings keep working: the American essay about the long transmission sits down next to the Chinese witnesses without a seam, because transmission is the same problem in both costumes. What coheres is not nationality, school, or era; it is what can be handed on without distortion, which turns out to be the only test any of these traditions were ever applying.

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