Category: Philosophy
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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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We’re too good to be this political ~ Be the change you want to see in the world
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My first mistake today was climbing into the bathtub and picking up the May 31st, 2010 edition of Canada’s weekly news magazine, Macleans, rather than the copy of Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao, in which I’d thought to have a nice, long spiritual soak along with the hot water, and possibly bubbles.…
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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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The Tao of Love and Light: Riffing on physics and faith
The following is a comment storm that blew out of a seemingly innocent status message I posted on Facebook. It got a few of us thinking, and I think the thinking in it, on all sides, is interesting. Note that the quote, by Stephen Edwards, is not taken from the book, The Tao of Physics,…
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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.…