S2. Chapter 1: The Tao That Can Be Podcasted Is Not the Eternal Tao

Lloyd Dobler returns for Season 2 of The Tao of Lloyd, the philosophy podcast that behaves more like a guided meditation trapped inside a political commentary podcast trapped inside a Gen X fever dream. In Chapter 1, Lloyd opens the Tao Te Ching and immediately commits a cosmic foul by trying to podcast something that has spent 2,500 years politely declining to be explained.

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Armed with spiritual commentary, a meditation practice held together with duct tape and stubbornness, and a democracy performing its own mid-autopsy, Lloyd tries to sit still long enough to locate a single honest breath. What follows is satire, mischief, and a Taoist experiment in staying human while everything around you is buffering like a 1998 dial-up connection.

This opening episode blends insight, irreverence, and real-time existential improvisation, a guided meditation for people who meditate badly in a political commentary podcast for people who’ve lost the plot, delivering a Gen X attempt at clarity inside collapsing times.

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Lloyd Dobler opens Season 2 with Chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching, blending philosophy, meditation, and political insight to explore clarity in chaotic times.

Chapter 1 of the Tao of Lloyd is inspired by chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching, adapted and translated by Stephen Mitchell

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
the gateway to all understanding.