Tag: Lao Tse
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Prayer Wheels
I want to tell you a story about one of the way-points along the path of my gradual awakening. But I recall, that story has already been told. What follows is a prose poem written while visiting Labrangsi monastery, in the town of Xiahe, China. It’s a Yellow Hat sect, but the monastery is…
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Shadow and Light
She writes … she writes like a battering ram, through the impenetrable. If only I…. but I don’t write that way. Or. Not. Yet. I’m not ready to write. Yet. Or so I say. But I write, here and there. Inappropriately. I appropriate other’s spaces.
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The Way ~ when Nature plays its lovely hand
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. ~ George Washington Carver When Lao Tse speaks of The Dao, he is referring literally to “The Way”. There’s no simple way to tell you what “The Way” is. Lao…
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Ancients and Contemporaries ~ timeless wisdom about violence
The use of force is a last resort. One aspect of violence is that it is unpredictable. Although your initial intention may be to use limited force, once you have engaged in violence the consequences are unpredictable. Violence always brings about unexpected results and almost always provokes retaliation.
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War Prayers ~ Mark Twain and Lao Tse on the artlessness of war
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in Books, God, Insight, Non-Fiction, Perfection, Philosophy, Political, Social, Spirituality, SynonymsYesterday the people of The United States of America marked Memorial Day. It’s a day of baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, of families and communities gathering to celebrate the arrival of summer. It’s a day of flags and bunting and red, white & blue and national pride, and a day to memorialise the millions…
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The second book of The Way ~ Stephen Mitchell illuminates the Tao again.
Mmmmm… a day of cloudy wet so a retreat into a tub of hot water with salsa & tortilla chips and a good book about one of my favourite subjects, Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao (Dao, Tao, same thing, same pronunciation: Dao). Hmmmm… the liner notes of this book explain that the…
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Love, strength and courage ~ The greatest things you’ll ever learn
Every now and again I post a status message on Facebook that generates a comment storm. And every now and again, that comment storm generates ideas good enough for a blog post, as it did with The Tao of Love and Light: Riffing on physics and faith. Yesterday morning I posted the following couplet as…
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The Dao de Jing ~ The transformational quality of seeing the beauty in all things.
I can’t remember when I first encountered The Dao de Jing (also Tao te Ching, pronounced the same), which surprises me since it quickly grew to become my favourite written text. It’s brief (just 81 chapters of verse, a page or so each) yet richly nuanced. I’ve read all or parts of it dozens of…
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Winnie the Pooh and the Vinegar Tasters
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The Vinegar tasters is among my favourite allegories and provides an excellent introduction to the three philosophies that dominated China through thousands of years: Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. For me, the most important of these is Taoism, a gentle, soulful and luminous philosophy. I’m going to be lazy and let someone else explain it all.…