vsaluki

Again, you waste your time parsing the world into "admirable friends" and "repugnant friends". These are relativistic notions that only have meaning that comes from a value system that has missed the point of Tao and Buddhism. For example from the Tao Teh Ching: 2: "As soon as the world regards something as beautiful, ugliness simultaneously becomes apparent, As soon as the world regards something as good, evil simultaneously becomes apparent." 32: "People do not need to do anything to insure the harmony between Heaven and Earth." 38: "When natural virtue is lost, society depends on the doctrine of humanism". Everything that you say shows that you do not understand what these things mean. More of the same. "We can't love because bad people are stopping us." What nonsense. Only you are stopping you and you are the only one that you can change. If you understood the mystical teachings you would realize that you don't need to go around selling love like a snakeoil salesman sells a cure all. Telling yourself that a certain kind of love is the highest kind of love is also a waste of time. By obtaining a unitary consciousness all becomes Self. Love requires a subject and an object. In unitary consciousness love becomes a non issue, because all is Self. Compassion is, likewise, just so much snake oil. It also requires a subject (the one being compassionate) and an object (what one is being compassionate towards). When one recognizes all as Self, there is no need for compassion. The spiritual snake oil salesmen sell the behaviour of the realized individual as the behaviours needed to become a realized individual. This is a false teaching. Parading your pretenses of compassion as enlightenment is just so much BS. No, it is a nonsense statement. And if you understood Lao's response you would have understood why. I don't see any Tao in your posts. I see only Buddhism perverted into political pseudo humanism. Here we go again - "my love is better than your love". Don't you ever bore yourself? Yeah, I can see how you live what you preach.

Sounds like you only have to wait 10 years to find out for yourself. He predicts the demise of the world if we don't change in the way that he believes appropriate. I can tell you that the world is not going to change in the way that he wishes, so in 10 years you will have your answer. My guess is that he will turn out to be a fraud because almost nothing will have changed in 10 years.

I don't even know what a conservative Christian is. Obviously you have parsed the world into your enemies and your friends. One good indication that you don't understand Tao or Buddhism. And here we have a great indication that you have no interest in honesty. You wish to represent this as some kind of typical Christian attitiude. I am not a Christian; but I know many Christians and I would guess that less than one in a hundred would agree with Terry. Again, you are displaying your strong desire for a simplistic division of the world into "those bad guys" and "us good guys". From Chung Tzu: ""Tell me," said Lao Tzŭ, "in what consist charity and duty to one's neighbour?" "They consist," answered Confucius, "in a capacity for rejoicing in all things; in universal love, without the element of self. These are the characteristics of charity and duty to one's neighbour." "What stuff!" cried Lao "Does not universal love contradict itself? Is not your elimination of self a positive manifestation of self? Sir, if you would cause the empire not to lose its source of nourishment,—there is the universe, its regularity is unceasing; there are the sun and moon, their brightness is unceasing; there are the stars, their groupings never change; there are birds and beasts, they flock together without varying; there are trees and shrubs, they grow upwards without exception. Be like these; follow Tao; and you will be perfect. Why then these vain struggles after charity and duty to one's neighbour, as though beating a drum in search of a fugitive? Alas! sir, you have brought much confusion into the mind of man."" Basically, it comes down to this, you can't fix yourself, but you want to fix the world. You are caught up in the classical yin, yang struggle, thinking that everything would be perfect if only you could make the yin yang symbol all white. Again, this shows that you have missed the most basic elements of the teaching of Buddha, Lao Tse, Chung Tzu, and Jesus. You have missed the point by focusing on the irrelevant. Your spirituality is simply an extension of your politics. You accuse others of this, but you can't see how strongly it applies to you. I'm wondering, why you are on a Tao forum. Isn't there a Buddhist forum where you can compare the size of your compassion?

Who cares? Again, who cares? Once more, who cares? And many of the ideas of Buddhism where lifted from Hinduism. Again, who cares? Ditto above. All of this is totally meaningless. What counts are the insights that we can find in words that were attributed to Jesus - regardless of his existence or nonexistence. To those insights all of the studies of all of the scholars are a waste of time. There is deep wisdom in things like the sermon on the mount. Any mystic will recongnize those words, what they mean, and realize that they come from another mystic. Any scholarly investigation that overlooks that those words must come from a mystic is simply wrong.

Vmarco: "The truth of Christian is enough to render it null and void" Guess that depends on which Christianity you are talking about. If you are talking about Christianity as interpreted and passed down to us by the church, I have to agree. If you are talking about what was taught by the mystic Jesus, I have to disagree. It's kind of pointless making generalizations about Christianity unless you specify which Christianity you are refering to. But then the Hinduism, Buddhism, and Tao that is practiced by the masses in many countries is really little better than the Christianity that was passed down by the church. On this forum we tend to look at the intellectual, philosophical and esoteric aspects of those religions. But that is not what many - if not most - of the adherents practice in their home states. Superstition, ritual, dogmatism and bigotry are common all religions as they are practiced by the masses. The question is - why should we care. The important thing for us is to go to the originators of these religions and try to extract the message and the meaning that they wished to pass on. Beyond that, value judgements are pointless.

This seems to be one of the central themes of religion in general and Tao in particular. Both Lao Tzu and Chung Tzu seem to have expressed opinions on this subject. And for the most part, I would say that we ignore those opinions. I have a lot of ideas on this subject, but rather than voicing everything at once, I'll just bring up a couple of things. Metaphorically speaking, is it as important to have a Darth Vader as it is to have a Luke Skywalker? For the sake of having a good story, this certainly seems to be the case. But is it also true in real life? All of us have some idea about what it would take to make a better world. Assuming that one could, with the wave of one's hand, produce the better world that one envisions - would it really be a better world. Let's suppose that you could suddenly have everyone be caring, generous, spiritual, etc. Let's say that you could stop war, preserve the environment, stop hunger, achieve perfect equality, etc. Would that truely be a better world, and, having achieved it, what then? From the Tao Teh Ching translation by Hua-Ching Ni: [2] ...As soon as the world regards something as good, evil simultaneously becomes apparent... [19] Abandon the separate concepts of holiness and unholiness Then all people will be benefitted a hunderedfold. Abandon the separate concepts of justice and humanism, and all people will return to a natural state of harmony. From The Book of Chuang Tzu Hsu Yu said, "So why have you troubled yourself to visit me? Master Yao has already branded on you the practice of benevolence and justice and mutilated you with the distintion between right and wrong. So how can you now expect me to help you meander alone in freedom and aimlessnes, enjoying things as they happen through the process of change." Appologies to Nietzsche for borrowing his title.

As I was reading "Mindfulness In Plain English" the other day, a nice analogy came to me. The way of Tao is much like breathing. You can breath two ways. One way is to breath automatically, without thinking about it. Your body will regulate your intake without any effort, and according to what the body needs. The other way is to think about your breathing and to regulate the pace and volumne directly. In other words, one puts every breath under command control. Not only is the second method much harder to do, but it also produces an inferior result. You are constantly trying to guess if you are breathing too much or not enough. You change your rate according to your guess rather than the need of the body. You tie up your mental resources and probably make yourself dizzy. We can approach life in much the same way. We can be constantly worried that the things that are not directly under our control will go wrong and so we can struggle to get as much control as possible so that things don't go wrong. The result is that we tie ourselves into knots because we have the illusion that we know what a better world would be like and we think we know how to make it that way. In reality, the best thing that we can do is just regard life as a naturally self sustaining entity that we cannot improve throught the exercise of our ego. Unfortunately, we can always recognize other people's ego's at work, but we cannot do this for ourselves. A good way to start is to look at all of the cases where you think that you know better what other peoples behaviour should be than they do. Of course you always tell yourself that you want that change for the betterment of both mankind and the people that you want to change, but that is where the illusion begins.

We don't have a surplus of gas and oil like Norway. We have a shortage. Norway's population is smaller than New York city. And their oil and gas sales are huge. So judging their economic model as a success is not possible. How would their model work without the surplus gas and oil. How is this attitude "western inspired"? Do you find such attitudes in the East? I don't think the average Easterner is a Lao Tzu.

I don't see the same behaviour or attitude in someone like Ramana Maharishi as I do in U.G.

Yeap, that's how I always decide what movements to support. I say to myself, "self, what do you believe". Then I just find out what the billionaires with agendas want me to believe and that is what I support. It must be worderful to be able to have such simplistic ideas about those you have choosen as your enemies. Uncanny how well you understand us. Yeap, I'm always listening to the super rich and the divine right to rape and pillage convinces me every time. Every time I turn on my computer and use my microsoft OS I say to myself, this is how Bill Gates got to be the richest man in the world. He is raping and pillaging me and forcing me to use his OS at a price that is keeping me poor and destitute. But he has the divine right to do so. Yeh, that's exactly how I think. 10,000 to 1? Wow! Got a reference for that? Here's a few numbers for you. You seem to oppose the wealth of the evil industrialists but trust government to do the right thing. There are 239 millionaires in Congress, or 44% - as opposed to less than 1% of Americans in general that are millionaires. Of the 25 wealthiest legislators, 14 are Democrats and 11 are Republicans. Regarding the dumbed down populace, isn't it the job of our educational system to keep us from being dumbed down. And isn't the teachers union in general and the education establishment in particular heavily dominated by the left? Isn't the media dominated by the left? Isn't the entertainment industry dominated by the left. Those evil billionaires must have mysterious powers and supreme intellect if they can dumb us down in opposition to all those other factors that have our ear. Oh, while I'm on this subject, have you flipped through the channels lately and seen the morally and intellectually uplifting stuff that our progressive friends in the entertainment industry are feeding us. Maybe a good point for where to begin would be to actually try to understand the position of those that you have stereotyped so conveniently as being morally inferior to you.

I'm with you on this. When you are talking about good and evil you are bringing in moral implications that go beyond desirable and undesirable. The first thing that we should do here is to clarify the use of the word "good". When we use it in the context of "good and evil" we are using it to mean something different from when we use it in the context of "good and bad". For example, we could have good weather and we could have bad weather. But we never speak of evil weather. We can have good food and we can have bad food, but we don't have evil food. If we trip over a rock and fall down, we don't call the rock evil. We don't even call an animal evil that kills more than it needs to eat. The designation "evil", is reserved for actions and intentions of other humans - usually in the context of knowingly and intentionally doing things which hurt other. The implication is that this involves some kind of moral law being broken, and as such, an evil act is more serious than a bad act. The problem is that we cannot trace the source or authority for this moral law. Certainly the universe does things all the time that would be considered evil if they were done by a human. If a guy gets hit by lightning, it's unfortunate, but not evil. If a man had control of lightning and used it to hit another man, that would be considered as evil. So good and evil are purely human constructs that only operate in a human environment. So when mystics seek to dismiss judgements of good and evil, they are targeting a judgement that highlights the opposition of ego to ego.

I've read U.G. A little too much ego for my taste.

I agree that the ego is not evil. Nothing is. The hard part is understanding the necessity of the ego as a protective measure. Some mystics that loose it completely can be said to behave in a way that fails to protect the organism. As I understand it, Ramana Maharishi, after enlightenment, would forget to eat and drink unless reminded by someone. He stopped talking entirely; and he let his body become completely fly bitten. He got past that, but it took some time to learn how to function without an ego. Bernadette Roberts, also a realized mystic, has to live with and be taken care of by her sister. The problem with the ego is that it has a fairly tight grip on the thought process when one tries to get past the idea that self equals something enclosed in this bag of skin. Ego will even feed itself on the illusion of being on a quest to be better by shedding the ego.

Theosophy seems to have moved the reverse direction of most religions. It was started by a complete fraud in Blavatsky and it ended with a fair amount of wisdom in Krishnamurti. But to tell the truth, I don't think that Krishnamurti retained much if any of Blavatsky's ideas. And I'm not sure that he would have consider himself a Theosophist in the later part of his life.

There is no such thing as higher and lower inborn quality. There are no higher and lower realms. There is nothing to be reached. Everything is right here, right now, just as it should be. Nothing needs to be fixed.

Adding BS to the teachings of a founder seems to be a common human trait. How can we be sure that we are not doing the same with Tao?

I'm having difficulty with that part. It seems to me that Toa includes as much destruction and competition as it does cooperation. In fact, even if I look at a world without man, the competition of the species as well as the competition within species seems to be prevalent. One can split the world into Tao and man made, but then one is back at the ceramic model of the Abrahamic religions. There god is one thing and man is created by god and is separate from god. God is all good and evil is introduced by man's free will. Sometimes I think that we have rejected the Abrahamic religions, but we are still importing those same values into systems like Tao. It seems to me that our problem is not about cooperation vs competition, but rather about looking at what is, seeing it correctly, and understanding that it is just as it sould be. A side effect of experiencing the world as a unitive whole is likely a behaviour that looks like compassion, but it isn't compassion any more that one would have compassion for oneself.

We have clay tablets from the Summarians that go back as far as 5000 BC. This allows us to see not only what was done in pre capitalist societies, but also why it was done. Records from that time show that communities went to war with each other for no other reason than to get the resources and wealth of the other communities. The only difference between now and then, is that they made no moral pretentions about what they were doing then. Gengis Khan stated that he loved going to war because he could take his neighbors property and sleep with their women. Also, in modern times, there is no evidence that non capitalist societies are any less likely to make war than capitalist societies. Both theocracies and communist social systems have no qualms about killing to advance themselves or their causes. There is also no evidence that sacrificing ones personal happiness for the sake of the community produces a happier community. Since the community is simply an abstraction, any happiness must still lie in the individuals within the community. The idea that you can have a happy, statisfied, and fullfilled community by having unhappy individuals that have all sacrificed themselves is simply wrong.

LB, what did you come to believe is good and evil? And what do you think of the Toaist verses that have been offered in this thread that imply that we should not have such divisions? That sounds to me like the "white must win" game. In my first post I pointed out that such balance has never actually existed. Most of the species that have been on the face of the earth have come and gone. Some were wiped out by asteroids. Some were destroyed by volcanic erruptions. Some died when another species came along and displaced them. Even if there were no mankind on the planet, there would be no balance. The earth eco system is very dynamic and it includes both great growth and great destruction. Even without man, species would come and go. My thought is that a realized mind that is in sync with the Tao accepts both things as a part of the whole. I think that their capacity allows them to label actions as good or evil, but such lables only have meaning from a trapped egocentric perspective. Think about this for a moment. Let's say that you are watching a nature program. The program is following a mother cheetah and her two cubs. You've been following them on the screen and you have gotten a little attached to them. Now the mother has been unsuccessful in making a kill for three days. The mother is hungry. The cubs are very hungry and getting weak. Life is on the edge for the cheetah family. They may starve. Then the mother gets lucky and manages to get a gazelle that falls during the persuit. You find that you are happy because those cute cubs won't starve. The cheetah family can be nurished and hopefully the cubs can become adults. Okay, now forget that whole story. Instead, you were following the life of the gazelle on your screen. You became attached to that gazelle. Then, when it is killed by a cheetah, you feel a loss - maybe even a dislike of the cheetah. The Toa perspective would likely be that there is no good or evil in those events. They are simply life moving with the Tao. It's easy to see how to translate some events to a Tao perspective in the case of the cheetahs and the gazelle. It's much harder to do it with human affairs. And it's harder still to do it when it involves ones own sense of "I" and ones own ego.

Good reference in general. And here are two lines from it that link directly into this thread. If there is even a trace of this and that, of right and wrong, the Mind-essence will be lost in confusion. "Gain and loss, right and wrong: such thoughts must finally be abolished at once."

Problem is you could have a neurological condition or a brain tumor. I don't really know. I don't want to go off the deep end here - and what you have is likely minor. But you should get checked out. Then if the doctor doesn't find anything major and just gives you some sedatives or pain killers, I recommend throwing them away and finding a more natural solution. But if there is something serious wrong, the sooner it is diagnosed the better.

See a doctor.