Your peace of mind
is disturbed by the pursuit or avoidance
of things, but these things don’t force themselves on you;
in a sense, you force yourself on them. At any rate, if your faculty
of judgment doesn’t trouble itself with them, they too
will remain inert, and evidently you’ll
be neither pursuing nor
avoiding them.
When a
wise person hears Tao,
he practices it diligently. When an
average person hears Tao, he practices it
sometimes, and just as often ignores it.
When an inferior person hears Tao,
he roars with laughter.
If he didn’t laugh,
it wouldn’t be
Tao.
Thus
the age old sayings:
The way to illumination appears dark.
The way that advances appears to retreat.
The way that is easy appears to be hard.
The highest virtue appears empty.
The purest goodness appears soiled.
The most profound creativity appears fallow.
The strongest power appears weak.
The most genuine seems unreal.
The greatest space has no corners.
The largest talent matures slowly.
The highest voice can’t be heard.
The most luminous image
can’t be seen.
Tao is hidden
and has no name.
Tao alone nourishes
and fulfills all
things.
from The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu,
ebooks & apps of the Tao the Ching, I Ching,
Hua hu Ching, Wei wu Wei Ching,
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The place
that Solomon made
to worship in, called the Far Mosque,
is not built of earth and water and stone,
but of intention and wisdom and
mystical conversation and
compassionate
action.
Every
part of it is intelligent
and responsive to every other.
The carpet bows to the broom. The door
knocker and the door swing together
like musicians. This heart sanctuary
does exist, though it cannot
be described.
Solomon
goes there every morning
and gives guidance with words,
with musical harmonies, and in actions,
which are the deepest teaching. A prince
is just a conceit, until he does
something with his
generosity.
There are
many partial religions,
and then there is the Integral Way.
Partial religions are desperate, clever, human
inventions; the Integral Way is a deep expression of the pure,
whole, universal mind. Partial religions rely on the hypnotic manipulation
of undeveloped minds; the Integral Way is founded on the free
transmission of the plain, natural, immutable truth.
It is a total reality, not an
occult practice.
The Integral Way
eschews conceptual fanaticism,
extravagant living, fancy food, violent music.
They spoil the serenity of one’s mind and obstruct one’s
spiritual development. Renouncing what is fashionable and embracing
what is plain, honest, and virtuous, the Integral Way returns you
to the subtle essence of life. Adopt its practices and you
will become like they are: honest,
simple, true, virtuous,
whole.
You see,
in partial pursuits,
one’s transformation is always
partial as well. But in integral self-cultivation,
it is possible to achieve a complete metamorphosis,
to transcend your emotional and biological
limitations and evolve to
a higher state of
being.
By staying
out of the shadows and
following this simple path, you become
extraordinary, unfathomable, a being of profound
cosmic subtlety. You outlive time and space
by realizing the subtle truth
of the universe.
ebooks & apps of the Tao the Ching, I Ching,
Hua hu Ching, Wei wu Wei Ching,
You
can now buy
Hua hu Ching as part of a
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for iPhone or iPad for less than
the cost of one hardcover
book.
To achieve
what the Zen Buddhists
call “beginner’s mind,” you dispense
with all preconceptions and enter
each situation as if seeing it
for the first time.
“In the
beginner’s mind there
are many possibilities,” wrote
Shunryu Suzuki in his book Zen Mind,
Beginner’s Mind, “but in the
expert’s there are few.”
As much
as I love beginner’s
mind, though, I advocate an
additional discipline: cultivating a
beginner’s heart. That means approaching
every encounter imbued with a freshly
invoked wave of love that is as pure
as if you’re feeling it for
the first time.