3 of my 4 puppies trying to stay warm on a cold Thursday morning
Rants and Ramblings …
… there are some days where I feel I just don’t have anything to say ( well – most days nothing important anyways ).
then there are the days where someone says it for me ….
Daily Tao / 052 – Nonconformity
The world is dazzling,
I alone am dull.
Others strive for achievement,
I follow a lonely path.
Followers of Tao are nonconformists. The conventional label our behavior erratic, antisocial, irresponsible, inexplicable, outrageous, and sometimes scandalous. We hear other voices, respond to inner urgings. We have no interest in the social norm; we only care about following Tao. It does not matter if no one can understand us, for we are nurtured by something most people do not sense. Awakening to this inner urge, and distinguishing spiritual impulses from the merely instinctual, is one of the crucial goals of self-cultivation.
We all have many voices, personalities, ambitions, and tendencies within ourselves. The ability to distinguish between them, and the ability to silence all the voices save for Tao’s, is imperative if one is to reach this state of being. Once one is in touch with the true Tao, there are no doubts, and the murmuring of others cannot have any effect. One is as comforted as a child at its mother’s breast.
The more one walks in Tao, the more one is interested in self-perfection. All that matters is constant cultivation to be with Tao. This is a lonely path. There are others who follow Tao, but it is not always possible to meet them. That is why is takes someone both sensitive enough to hear the call and strong enough to walk the solitary path.
Daily Tao / 051 – Beauty
Lavender roses.
Incarnate fragrance,
Priestly hue of dawn,
Spirit unfolding.
Even on the road to hell, flowers can make you smile. They are fragile, ephemeral, uncompromising. No one can alter their nature. True, you can easily destroy them, but you will not gain anything; you cannot force them to submit to your will.
Flowers arouse in us an instinct to protect them, to appreciate them, and to shelter them. This world is too ugly, too violent. There should be something delicate to care about. To do so is to be lifted above the brute and to go toward the refined. When we offer flowers on our altar, we are offering a high gift. Money is too vulgar, food too pedestrian. Only flowers are unsullied. By offering them, we offer purity.
The tenderness of flowers arouses mercy, compassion, and understanding. If that beauty is delicate, so much the better. Life itself is fleeting. We should take the time to appreciate beauty in the midst of temporality.
John Stewart on Russian Meteor …
one of the funniest I’ve seen in a long time ….
Daily Tao / 050 – Interaction
We make life real
By the thoughts we project.
The panorama of the objective world is meaningless until we interact with it. For example, if there is a rock that we pass day after day but we do not notice, then that rock has no significance for us. If we decide to make that rock a votive object and pray to it for decades, then that rock becomes quite important. To an outsider who does not subscribe to the rock’s assigned meaning, it will continue to be just a rock. In all cases, the rock was just a rock. It was only human interaction that created its meaning.
It is a mistake to assume that the meaning we give to something is as concrete and tangible as the object itself. We should not confuse the two. For example, our house may be precious to us, but our sense of preciousness has nothing to do with the building — it comes from the values and memories we associate with it. If we lose our house, we must remember that it is the feeling we have for it, not just the building itself, that determines our loss.
If all perception of reality is subjective, some schools of thought suggest that we should therefore see everything as unreal. By contrast, followers of Tao maintain that we must still interact with the world. If we do not take initiative and work with this phenomena of projecting meaning and receiving its echoes, we fall into a state of dormancy, and the world will not exist for us at all. As long as we remember that meanings we attribute to objects are subjective, we will avoid mistakes.
Daily Tao / 049 – Death
Death is
The opposite
Of time.
We give death metaphors. We cloak it in meaning and make up stories about what will happen to us, but we don’t really know. When a person dies, we cannot see beyond the corpse. We speculate on reincarnation or talk in terms of eternity. But death is opaque to us, a mystery. In its realm, time ceases to have meaning. All laws of physics become irrelevant. Death is the opposite of time.
What dies? Is anything actually destroyed? Certainly not the body, which falls into its constituent parts of water and chemicals. That is mere transformation, not destruction. What of the mind? Does it cease to function, or does it make a transition to another existence? We don’t know for sure, and few can come up with anything conclusive.
What dies? Nothing of the person dies in the sense that the constituent parts are totally blasted from all existence. What dies is merely the identity, the identification of a collection of parts that we called a person. Each one of us is a role, like some shaman wearing layers of robes with innumerable fetishes of meaning. Only the clothes and decoration fall. What dies is only our human meaning. There is still someone naked underneath. Once we understand who that someone is, death no longer bothers us. Nor does time.
One Word Movie Review
Hong Kong – Phooey … ( ok – three words )
my mostly unfabulous life 