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Tao Te Ching

ToV 15 – Mud Settles and email Clears

I’ve spent a lot of the last 14 chapters trying to explain how Taoism isn’t some lay down in the dirt, do nothing, don’t try sort of principle, but a passiveness with an innate, more natural drive – wei wu wei, action arising from stillness. It’s hard to find the words to articulate it, which is why when I came to this stanza in chapter 15, I was inwardly shouting YES and pointing emphatically.

Do you have the patience to wait
til your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
til the right action arises by itself?

So, there ya go! It isn’t about doing nothing, it’s about doing nothing until it’s time to do the right thing. In Taoist circles, we joke about Taoist Problem Solving i.e. do nothing and see if the problem resolves itself. This strategy often makes other people nuts when they’re thinking: there’s a problem ohmyGod do SOMETHING! More often than not, when the mud settles, turns out things aren’t such a problem after all. At the very least, you get a clearer idea of what actually still needs to be done.

I was talking to a friend the other day, she’d inadvertently stumbled upon this sort of problem solving simply by being too busy and flooded with emails. Read More »ToV 15 – Mud Settles and email Clears

ToV 14 – the Tao of Ranting?

I had a good rant the other day, about The Secret …and the Celestine Prophecy. I don’t get my knickers in a twist about much these days, but the cerebralization of the spiritual, the ego-greed- material commercialization of what is an innate human need makes me a little bonkers (and yes, the fact I get ranty about that is part of the stuff I’m still working on). So, I’m really digging a line from the next chapter in the Tao Te Ching:

You can’t know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom.

When you’re “in the Tao” you’re in the flow, and it’s easy; there’s no resistance, because you’re not resisting. That’s not to say it’s not work, that it’s always smooth sailing; there will be rough waters and work to do. Challenging your own bullshit, getting out of your own way, is sometimes a painful, tumultuous, process. But most of the suffering comes from your own resistance to the process.

Sometimes resistance comes in sneaky guise (that monkey mind is a clever clever monkey). One of the sneaky ways to offer resistance to that “wisdom” of “where you come from” is the surface approach to the spiritual process. Read More »ToV 14 – the Tao of Ranting?

ToV 13 – Hope as a Delusion

Success is as dangerous as failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.

But but… I hear you saying in protest to these lines, the ideas of success and hope so ingrained into our collective psyches. Just hear me out, it’ll make more sense shortly!

We’re starting to get into variations on themes here in these chapters and this calls back to Chapter two’s No Judging! Here we have a different spin on the same principle, and one that may be a little more painful to look at.

I was watching Love and Other Drugs the other night, about a woman with early onset Parkinson’s. Some fella falls in love with her, starts dragging her around to no end of cutting edge experimental treatments until she finally gets pissed off and walks out; tired of living life in hospitals, she wants to get back to her actual life. The fella chases her down, asks: “Don’t you want to get better?” She answers: “Yes. Desperately. It’s not gonna happen.” This woman’s got the wisdom to live the life she’s got rather than wasting it on pursuing the life society says she should have.

Hope, just because it’s optimistic doesn’t make it any less a delusion. Read More »ToV 13 – Hope as a Delusion

ToV 12 – The Magpie and the Sky

Shiny! Shiny! Squaahk!

You can almost hear our little grasping magpie brains being addressed in chapter 12. It isn’t my intention to fully quote Stephen Mitchell’s words (rather to encourage you to buy the book and read along), but this chapter is so elegant in its concise entirety I would do it a disservice by cutting out only a piece for you:Read More »ToV 12 – The Magpie and the Sky

ToV 11 – Taoists and Topologists

Click on image for interactive Wolfram Demonstration

There’s an old math joke says: a topologist can’t tell the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut (pausing while you look up topology and doughnuts, or sigh and wonder what is wrong with me). To a Taoist however, the coffee cup has a useful sort of emptiness the doughnut does not, and that’s what this stanza is getting at:

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

It’s a hard concept (and a big Taoist one) to get your head around: the use of emptiness, the value of nothing.Read More »ToV 11 – Taoists and Topologists