Category: Daoism
-
On the Wisdom of Knife Wielding
Fools take a knife and stab people in the back. The wise take a knife, cut the cord, & free themselves from the fools. The master takes a knife and butters her toast; she creates no attachments to fools, or the wise.
-
Awakening with Doris Lessing
Why have you done this to me? Jane Mooney wrote to Doris Lessing after reading Shikasta, a science fiction novel with spiritual overtones and themes. Mooney would later say, Shikasta had the most astonishing effect on me. I just thought, “That’s it now. Everything is different. I don’t know how I can leave the house…
-
Let go or be dragged
I expected tonight to be a difficult sleep. Unfortunately, I was not disappointed in that expectation. Yesterday I made a mistake at work. A bad one. Nothing that couldn’t be repaired, but the repair took time and put an entire film production on hold while that repair was made. A fairly bad mistake in the…
-
Weapons are the tools of violence
Meditations on Two Photographs The obscenity of war has many faces: Some face down and dead in awful places. Some, thumbs up and beaming like a boy In some dark death machine posed like a toy.
-
Mind the Unconscious
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. ~ Carl Jung This insight alone, ultimately, is what Laozi wrote 81 chapters about in his Dao de Jing. Except that Laozi wouldn’t quite mean ‘know the unconscious’ the way we think about it … he does not…
-
Naming is the origin of all particular things.
When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other. Therefore the…
-
Just say yes…
Deep in my depression I say “no” … a lot. More than any other single thought or action, no keeps me in the gap, the dark empty space between spirit and body. I can say no without even thinking about it, without uttering the word, camouflaging it by saying yes to a crutch or coping…