For every act of evil, there is an act of beauty. You Can't Change the World, Only Your Attitude Towards It.

Ever Felt You're Being Stared At - Your Mind Is Not In Your Head

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Tao Essence Zen Rot

It can't be touched, seen, tasted, smelled or heard. Not sensed one bit. It must be nonsense, make no sense, not sensible, or you're not sensitive to it.

It was what was when you were being a new born baby, when you were making no sense of the world. You were taught separation, gradually, taught to differentiate, name and categorize things, you were acted towards as if you were a thing with a name and in time you adopted the name and accepted your separation. By your adolescence your sense of self was so concrete that you'd spend nine hours in ten dedicated to your sense of self, comparing it to others, adapting it, dressing it, wishing for it to get naked with and sense some carnal essence. The true self that was being the baby, was being the adolescent, had been ignored like the glass of a TV screen is missed when characters enthrall.

In later life you saw the world in a new way, the seemingly concrete sense of self was seen to be just a sense and perhaps even nonsense. A wisdom was born that all was one and that this sense of separation was constructed, acts of this constructed self were more often seen as play acting, puppets on the stage, puppets who'd forgotten the same puppeteer had a hand in both.

In time a seeking was undertaken to discover the lost self but the methods and even the doer of the seeking were rooted in a world, that of concept, so traps lay at every turn. A simple truth emerged though, so clear, so obvious, so simple, this, is it. Sitting or walking one day, or in some other simple act, painting, gardening, washing potatoes, you were struck. Behind the watcher was an infinite oneness that did not judge, name, sense, rejoice or complain, it enveloped the totality. The being you were when you were a new born child.

In this complete emptiness you were present and whole, yet soon, natural habits began to whirl up from a lifetime of beliefs that only the learned program of 'me in the world' was real. A change had occurred though, the programmed self had meet and been struck by a timeless self and the programmed self had a natural attitude to this, it wanted to be, have or use this new discovery to draw it from suffering.

It seemed now perhaps that these two selves were incompatible or living them was unhealthy, the new books you were drawn to spoke of the constructed self as negative and the true self to be something to be sought with all you could muster, in fact the wise on these subjects said there was nothing more important than the discovery of the true self. You thought it through, hadn't you rediscovered it by doing nothing though? Hadn't it just made itself apparent one day through no effort? Wasn't it already the case at birth? You saw this to be the case, oneness was the case, the problem then? Was the constructed self!

Now Zen sickness had set in its rot. You tried to remove you. This terrible joke had you in its grip. Stories of great blissful ones who had achieved this mighty feet of ridding themselves of the constructed self leaving them in everlasting bliss, fueled the very egoic self onwards in the task equivalent to a knife trying to cut itself out of existence. You'd been better off when you were unaware of the true self, you had the act well played, you were the best there'd ever been at playing you. You could not go back though, a window had opened and you could not live this side of it without its presence drawing you to the other side.

So far this story is, in a general case, the story of the common spiritual seeker. What follows is perhaps and hopefully what it takes to end the journey.

You can see both selves as you are the glass in the window, not a third self, but the non-self. You can look out into the projected and constructed world of the conceptual self in the world and you can look inward at the essence. No need to affirm or deny either, the magic is that you are infinite Tao and by way of infinity you can act a role where you are separate. To act the role convincingly and to provide infinity with a show of ceaseless wonder, you forget your true nature and you live out a role where you are not in control. Feel privileged that you can see both ways, enjoy what the show brings and live free of fear as you're, as you came to realize by peeling potatoes, infinite oneness. Tao.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Guilt!

Is it guilt keeping you from the ultimate freedom?

"I wish to be free!" Said the pupil "What is keeping you from this freedom?" Asked the master "......nothing is!" Said the pupil as he realized his true nature

Years after this old Zen story people are not freed by simply realizing that nothing binds them as, something is binding them! The world has become so much more complicated, religions and beliefs of the common man, such as those passed on via the media, bind people in guilt. Fundamentally, ask anyone, all they want is happiness and the avoidance of suffering, yet this simple drive that drives all humans, and many animals even, has been made taboo. In seeking what is wanted people are reminded to consider the needy and the environment. You'd be showered in stones for claiming that the needy need no help and nature can manage alone.

How has this come to be? How can anyone be born into a world and then require charity or support? The world can sustain us all, where did this problem come from? It has been manufactured. Naturally there is plenty, but, by design, it was stuck in a box and the system, brought about to be now commonly accepted as normal, is that we are to buy what we need or await charity. - Madness.

Now when the common man, spiritual in nature as we are, follows the base directives of his human code, seek to be happy and avoid suffering, he's riddled in guilt as, there are billions who can't eat! Think of them! Well hang on a second, we shout, I'm a living being on this living planet, I did not subscribe to ideas older than me (which I therefore can not be legally bound to as I was under the legal age of consent when they were made) that say nature is an asset owned by some and to be sold with the dire consequence of global poverty.

Before any law or statue be made or upheld then the freedom to seek happiness, avoid suffering, and eat freely from earth must first be upheld as inalienable.

In fact that freedom exists and all ideas that it does not have no real standing.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Guilt! ...ends

A mentioned in the post titled Guilt! there are reasons and ways, millions of them, that excuse us from freedom. Things such as guilt over our basic need for happiness, guilt that arises when we consider those worse off than ourselves. Who is the poorest person here on earth, where is the saddest caged animal, which of all the ongoing wars is most terrible, which injustice or act of oppression most terrible, who do we help first in disaster? Must we solve these before we get to being happy ourselves? Must we allow only the poorest to get what they need before the rest of us? Compassion alone is quite a trap when not intertwined with wisdom.

There is a natural draw towards happiness in us all which can't be stopped. The wisest level of happiness is contentedness and this has been said again and again in Buddhism and Taoism. Too little is bondage, too much is bondage. In the middle as we are then we should all be content and only a shift in our seeing can bring about that freedom. It is apparent to us all that suffering and financial richness are complimentary and apparent also that they pre existed this birth and will live on after death. We will likely have ideas on how to fix these issues and we will certainly have views on how they could be better. This is the case also with war, politics, animal rights, workers rights, aiding the sick, the aged and so on. There are situations that outlive us, possible fixes, certain better ways, compassion draws us to thought, aid or charity, and only wisdom combined with this can lead us to freedom.

In the land just to the borders of wise compassion live other viewpoints such as "well we're alright... I can't think about all that... They'll be ok... What can I do?... and so on. These views are selfish and we don't wish to leave compassion and wisdom for selfishness, that would not allow for contented freedom at all. We likely see that these views are part of the perceived problem. Our ultimate aim is freedom and to get there we need to consolidate our issues on this meta problem, or do we?

As it is us seeking the freedom and release then perhaps the wisdom and compassion need first to be provided to ourselves. To see that we make up for a fraction of all of this and hey, it's not us fighting, oppressing, stealing from nature to leave natures humans short of her gifts. We do though here balance and perhaps make excuses for a certain selfishness and I'm aware that can be said of any solution. Wisdom and compassion for ourselves does though have absolute validity and absolute necessity. Should we not provide ourselves with this then we can not possibly extend it to the world and we will be as much a part of the problem as any other thing we cite.

We only care for others behavior (good or bad) if we are not content in ourselves and so for that contentedness to be the case we stop the urge to change the world and we look inwards. Inwards we see a human like any other who wants happiness and the avoidance of suffering. We add to this that seeking happiness is the definition of sadness and we see wisely that the world has been this way our whole life and much longer so while compassionate to this we accept that only an inseeing compassion can benefit. Finally we see that the greatest freedom emerges from this; that; We can not change the world, only our attitude towards it. The greatest freedom comes from being free from the desire to prove ourselves free.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

wise a heartfelt talk on oneness

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao