Flow

I wonder what you can find me that is fixed. Perhaps a heavy lead ball. Perhaps a crystal. Let's take a crystal right in the heart of the universe. Is it fixed and unchanging? It isn't. It's held in your mind. It's moving relative to something. It reflects that which moves. Its constituent parts, though well formed, are in flux.

How about a lump of steel in the middle of a large slab of concrete. You stand right beside it and hold it in your glare. Fixed? No, not at all. Seen from the moon, you and the lump are whizzing around, not fixed at all. So how about the clouds? No! Of course not! We know they move and change. A mountain? No. Forever changing on its surface. A river? Nooooo. A foundation stone supporting the great pyramid? No.

Nothing is fixed, nothing is unchanging.

You are change witnessing change. You are growth witnessing growth. You are flowing witnessing flowing.

While we know nothing but change, fascinate our minds with nothing but change, we are strangely caught in games of attempting to fix the world both in form and idea.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

At peace

There you are at peace.

Then a thought.

Peace disturbed.

So another thought.

"Perhaps if I do this, I'll find peace."

Then actions.

More thoughts.

Actions and thoughts and plans aimed at peace in the future.

Yet peace is where you began.

When the thought had not entered.

Let thoughts go. No actions required. No plans.

Peace is always here.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

your enlightenment

Your enlightenment dies with you.

Your enlightenment dies with (the concept:) you.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

I'm the Universe, aged 1

Around 2 years after my mother gave birth, I was born. I had been referred to as an individual with a name for all of the time previous to this but only around that age had my brain learned that I existed. Yes, I learned that I existed. Self consciousness came about some considerable time after the body had already managed incredible feats such as development, respiration, circulation and sense formation. Not only did I have fully working vision and more but I had eaten meals and been the star of many photographs before I even had a self. So now here I was, a separate individual. Not because an individual had been born but because some time after a birth, a brain learned that it was an individual.

So a universe bubbles away for infinity and within that these forms come about who, with a little time, learn that they are some one.

But for the learning in our earliest years, we're the universe. 

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Song of Tao

It's only ever, no matter what it seems, one song.

The-Uni-verse.

Accepting all is greatness but even your resistance is perfect harmony.

My previous, my life and my death are not mine as yours are not yours. Being as we are, not separate beings but being, we are the uni verse.

The understanding mind will manage things great and small. Being will be it's greatest pleasure.

The universe has evolved electrical impulses, an alive brain and pulses. Conscious as this is, it's not "you". You didn't do a thing.

Isn't being this star of aliveness special enough? Without the belief "I can do"?

We are the totality.

Your body is not the body you were born with. Your self identity is now not the same. Changing as they are, in a universe where all we witness is change, how do you hold on to the fixed principal of "I" and deem it so real?

Self identity is born around 18 months after birth, no wonder it is tough shaking it. Yet it is so easily done, each time you sleep.

Meditate yourself to death each night you sleep and then death is easy. When death is easy, life is great peace.

Space, time, force, energy or matter could not exist in isolation from one another. Together they form 5 sides of a cube. The 6th side is being. You know this to be true as your consideration of them took being and being would be empty but for them.

Space contains matter and, inspect closely, matter contains much space. They are not separate things. Being acts through time to witness all of this, there is no separation or distinction, they are one thing, not one has reality alone.

Dimensionally you are the zeroth dimension. By your being you are all dimensions. In all you are oneness. The one universe is you. How else could you be without everything? How could everything be without you?

Self identity born of evolved nuero-interactions is not your true identity or your true self. It came about, fades each night and will surely cease. Your self identity is guaranteed an end. Your self identity is born of complex interactions and it has no center, no "point" where it exists. What is permanent and ever present is you. The one song.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Enlightened Times Have Always Been

In times of old we stood and looked at the world and the sky above us and we thought the world went on forever, endless, we thought this was it. In those times there were enlightened folk even if their knowledge was limited.

In later times we found the world was round and we thought that our galaxy went on forever, we thought this was it and we stood amazed at our place in it. In these times there were enlightened folk even with limited knowledge.

In more recent times we found that we lived on the edge of a vast galaxy with a billion stars and we found that our galaxy was one of billions floating in a space, still infinite and limitless as we used to believe with the earth and our galaxy, but now at a level beyond the minds abilities. And with this limited knowledge still there were enlightened folk.

Now we push to prove or accept that the seemingly infinite universe is actually one of many, floating in other dimensions, with whole new laws of physics. Knowing for sure now our knowledge is limited and may even never reach a full understanding there are still enlightened folk.

The majesty of the cosmos has always filled us with awe and we have achieved incredible feats in understanding what we do. We will achieve more too. Some have the drive to achieve complete understanding and they'll keep on blowing our understanding minds in their findings. As science pushes the boundaries of the cosmos so too they delve into the mind and the fabric of space, time and matter. This is naturally fascinating as we are all interested in who and what we are.

Useful to the process and existing without the big answers is a feeling of inner comfort and as has been shown, many have gone to their grave with an understanding, while obviously incomplete when it comes to the scientific world view, complete in a most valid way. This was a contentment known as enlightenment.

In all of the improvements in our understanding some people were able to sit comfortably, amazed and impressed as we all are with our place in the cosmos and the whys and the what fors, they did not take solace in religion or by accepting the completeness of the current scientific paradigm, they found wisdom and completeness inside themselves.

Seeing the world as what it is from our own shared perspective, a place of change with good and bad, they were at peace.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Your outer voice

Out loud now: say "hello"
Internally now: think the word "hello"

When you said "hello" the sound came from your mouth and reverberated in your head (naturally, you're quite used to this so excuse me pointing out the obvious).
So then when you thought the word wasn't it natural to assume that the thought happened in your head? This is because to think a word you internally replicate the sensation of saying one.

Did the thought though happen in your head?

Isn't it quite possible that as you are so used to hearing spoken words reverberating in your head that you are then tricked into thinking that thoughts arise there too?

If we step onwards here to the weird and speculative we seem to solve the infinite regression problem of your self conscious centre. When philosophers, neuroscientists and the like delve into this tough realm they are truly at loss as to where the self resides. Are they looking in the wrong spot as they are hearing their thoughts in their head?

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

The Big Bang - Where and When

It didn't happen "When" as there was no time.

It didn't happen "Where" as there was no space.

Time and space are dimensions and there are further dimensions beyond the ones we perceive, so "it didn't happen where or when" as there were no dimensions.

So the term "happen" is meaningless.

It was not the "cause" and the afterward the "effect" as, being dimensionless, causality did not exist.

The human mind has evolved to perceive causality but without the use of the mind, causality does not exist.

Following causality back then to an inferred start point is false method and will only, at best, satisfy the mind and not provide a true answer which must in fact be absent of causality as it is absent of dimensions.

Many of us are happy with the idea of the universe being infinite. If not happy with infinite then we must be left wondering what the finite universe is within, and so we must also deduce from there infinity.

To visualise the Big Bang many minds will picture empty space and a zero point exploding. This is what nearly all animations show also but is absolutely false.

The universe as is, by our best current measurements, "expanding and accelerating in its expansion" so all lumps of stuff, galaxies and so on, are becoming more widely spaced. The galaxies are not expanding though. We visualise this by placing coins on a rubber sheet to represent galaxies as we stretch the sheet to show space expanding. Oddly though we have witnessed galaxies in space colliding and we predict our nearest neighbouring galaxy will collide with us. When galaxies collide though it is rarely catastrophic as most stuff is so far apart that very little hits anything else. We result in either one larger galaxy or the two carry on with just a change in shape.

So we see some galaxies collide but the large majority spacing apart. Not just moving apart but accelerating apart. We naturally infer with our minds that what is now big and expanding must have once been small. Yet we say the universe is "infinite" and not "finitely big and getting bigger".

We model the expansion as something growing out into an infinite space but this is not the case. As with the Big Bang which did not happen in space but gave birth to space, so the idea of 'stuff' now expanding into nothingness, is a false view.

What we are shown by cosmological observation is that space is coming into being. What we are shown from quantum theory is that empty space is not empty and it teems with virtual particles coming into and out of existence. A very curious thing which has come about from these two curious things is that: When two virtual particles come into being they then rush to annihilate but if space is accelerating in its expansion they can often be left in existence and so space coming into being then brings about "something from nothing" and it leaves behind particles, stuff and energy.

Perhaps then The Big Bang was not such a "bang" in a "place" (as we have seen, no place or time for that bang could exist previous to it) but instead the first calculated occurrence of expansion, where nothing came to be something.

Our minds work very well with dualism. As we saw earlier they love the dualism of cause and effect. We can then easily see how "nothing" naturally leads to "something". This model then is perhaps acceptable as it fits our predisposed framework, it is also though, measurably, true.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Nothing Coming to Something - Why so much Dark Matter?

Something from Nothing is how we came to be and when we look at the Something we measure it as: a small percentage Matter, A larger percentage "Dark Matter" and an even larger percentage "Dark Energy".

Some wonder why the seemingly important Matter (what 'matters' after all) is so small a constituent in the known universe. We know though that Dark Matter does not react with much. In collapses, Matter heats and reacts and explodes, Dark Matter though doesn't bother.

We can see then that if there were a Big Bang that Matter would react furiously and react and be carried along. Most matter then, and why we find so little in the known universe, is way way way out in space. Beyond current measurable distance. The Dark Matter just hung around.

~

I have no calculations to prove this before you accuse me of the same. It's a theory.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

mu can't have it all

One of the supposed fundamental particles in modern physics is a Tau. The Higgs Boson though "permeates the whole universe".

It didn't happen in our universe but must surely have occurred in another one where science chose the name Tao for the Higgs Field. That would have been cute. But then in that universe Lau Tzu may have named the unknowable "tweet" and not Tao.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Higgs Boson Found

With a likelihood of, very very high, we have found the Higgs Boson.

Using the analogy of a grain of sand per interaction;
Enough sand to fill a large sports stadium was used.
Wet your finger and dip it in the sand and that's the useful data.

An excellent analogy emerged as to what the Higgs does. It is responsible for mass, but not your mass. It is responsible for mass on the tiny scale, boson mass. The excellent analogy was that of fame. Place news reporters equally spaced over a room. Were someone with the fame equivalent to the weight of a photon to pass through the room then nearly none of the reporters would notice. Were a person with fame equivalent to a heavy particle to pass through the room then the news reporters would gather around it as it passed through, the more fame the more trouble it would have passing by. Equate this fame in the sub atomic world to a field of some kind.

Now the scientists need to delve further, find more and more information, and try to find exactly what Higgs this is and also to find more parts of the puzzle to complete the ever solidifying "Standard Model" of physics.

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My own theoretical ideas on what we have is something that seems to stretch or warp space. A curve in space would then cause "weight" in the Einsteinium sense where things roll into this warped area.  

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

I need faith!

What I mean is an "I" needs faith.

1) A strong reason for religion is a promise of comfort in and after death.

2) You can not have a fear of death if you have no self awareness.

3) So it stands, bar the laying out of the scientific proof, that self awareness brings forth a fear of death and so a need for religion.

Onwards to my point...

Not a strictly Taoist view but one I have drawn from Taoism is that we, I, me, you, rock, bird, protein, snail, stone, atom, rain drop, star, billion cubic light years of space, cupcake, cow turd, politician even, are expressions of an unbroken whole. Hmm, OK, it is pretty Taoist but for the phrasing.

What I have seen from scientific commentary is that we use the model of our times to describe the picture; The mind was like a TV processing signals, then like a computer crunching programs and data and now they say it is like a network of neurons comparable to the internet. The description will surely alter again with our next technological step.

From my view of oneness though I will not take such a model, I'll instead say that the whole universe is, as one, leading to us all seeming to be, and in this way "I" is not someone right here who'll die. I was not even born. Being unborn and with then no local self, I can't die and so have no calling to religion as a saviour. I'm an expression of an ever shifting and changing universe. The forms are fleeting, temporary and not real in themselves. They are a magical shifting oneness.

Yet somehow this sounds and smells a lot like a dogma to shield me from death. I do though completely doubt my own existence as a separate autonomous entity. I doubt free will, I doubt what makes a human is limited to electrical fizz in a lump of meat. I see in the science I study and the world I see around me a vast interwoven fabric, threads going back so far in time they fade but which carry information vital to life as it is now, threads wrapping sideways through other species, chemical behaviours, properties, essential, unchangeable - Unchangeable that is because were any one apparent thing just a little different, then everything would be different. The way things are is due to everything, ever, and to come.

In this way "I" is not the body, mind, neural network, it is the universe. In this way I was unborn, have constantly shifted form, and can't die. If this is religious dogma then it is certainly a unique way of fooling myself! I don't mind at all as the "I" apparently being fooled is the one I don't believe has a true existence anyway!

When I look at the huge contradiction between science, which says we are an illusion cast up from an interaction of neurons (something I find has great merit but is, as yet, incomplete) and common religion, which says we are an eternal soul which will live on beyond the life of the body (something I ridicule and laugh at) then I find my own stance, while unproven and open to criticism, quite magical.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao

Consciousness where is I?

Great viewing for anyone exploring consciousness!

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao