Tao Te Ching - Tao Of Nature

[pluto]

Edited February 3, 2020 by pluto

[Leo Gura]

Quote

"Stop seeking to realize the mystery of life"

This is bad advice.

Do the opposite.

The rest is pretty good.

[mandyjw]

Allowing desire/ desiring non-desire is quite a mindblowing paradox. 

[Kristy W]

I imagine he means stop seeking outside of yourself, which is the only true way.

[pluto]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

This is bad advice.

Do the opposite.

The rest is pretty good.

That's where you have some deeper digging to do to get a better grasp of the nature of Tao.

The more you know, the less you understand.

Seeking stems from the mind/ego, 'being' is the key word here to see past this.

By completely being at peace within the present moment, there is no need to seek, all flows in divine order, you become a direct extension of divinity, so to speak.

Saying this is 'bad advise' is exactly what these teachings try to teach the illusory nature of our words, concepts and ways.

Give 'The Tao Te Ching' and 'Tao of Nature' a read, they will give you a better understanding of what i am saying.

Don't try to live life or you will fail, let life live you.

This is embodying Infinite Intelligence.

Edited February 4, 2020 by pluto

[pluto]

6 hours ago, mandyjw said:

Allowing desire/ desiring non-desire is quite a mindblowing paradox. 

That's why i believe Taoism is one of the most effective teachings to dissolve the mind and its illusory natures. It radiates the mind with such deep truths(no good, no bad, no right, no wrong ect..) that it eventually is cornered to hit self-destruct.

Edited February 4, 2020 by pluto

[pluto]

Here is a full link i found which goes more in depth on the subject <3

https://www.sloww.co/tao-te-ching/

[Matt8800]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

This is bad advice.

Do the opposite.

The rest is pretty good.

@Leo Gura I didnt see that in the list but if someone has attributed that to Taoism, they dont understand Taoism. 

Edited February 4, 2020 by Matt8800

[Leo Gura]

@pluto There are substantive questions to ask and understand of reality/Tao.

You can play cute Zen games, but in practice this confuses people and discourages contemplation.

Contemplation is crucial. Just sitting around is not good enough.

The nature of Tao requires contemplation and profound questioning.

After 10,000 hours of contemplation, yes, then you can just sit.

[mandyjw]

22 minutes ago, pluto said:

That's why i believe Taoism is one of the most effective teachings to dissolve the mind and its illusory natures. It radiates the mind with such deep truths(no good, no bad, no right, no wrong ect..) that it eventually is cornered to hit self-destruct.

In my experience I agree. Also in my experience it's impossible to point to who or what to credit for a breakthrough when you are everything. 

[Inliytened1]

1 hour ago, pluto said:

 

By completely being at peace within the present moment, there is no need to seek, all flows in divine order, you become a direct extension of divinity, so to speak.

 

.

Its paradoxical as it must be, as language cannot capture Truth and turns in on itself.   

Completely being at peace within the present moment is both seeking and not seeking.  Did a teacher tell them this?  If so they have purpose behind it.   If they didn't and it just happened spontaneously - it negates the above teachings as they weren't said or never existed for them.

[Gili Trawangan]

I've just read a quote by Nisargadatta Maharaj that seems fitting to the discussion:

"Don't try to understand! It's enough if you do not misunderstand."

[Inliytened1]

13 minutes ago, Gili Trawangan said:

I've just read a quote by Nisargadatta Maharaj that seems fitting to the discussion:

"Don't try to understand! It's enough if you do not misunderstand."

Exactly.  Saying anything is going too far if you really wanna split hairs.  But yet we still teach it...we still have this forum...and thus to say to someone there is no need to do practices but just hey - your enlightened - that doesn't hold water.  Because Being is prior to knowledge.  And to collapse the relative into the Absolute you gotta do the work.  It's great and preferable if you stumble on it with no expectations but it is still practices.  (Meditation, pyschedelics, yoga, etc)

[pluto]

Like the fallen leaf from the tree that lands on the river.

[Inliytened1]

14 minutes ago, pluto said:

Like the fallen leaf from the tree that lands on the river.

❤?

[Deezeetho]

17 hours ago, pluto said:

I read it. Needless to say, I don't fully grasp it but, I will reread it. 

[pluto]

1 hour ago, Deezeetho said:

I read it. Needless to say, I don't fully grasp it but, I will reread it. 

[erik8lrl]

Both beingness and contemplation are needed for awakening and it all depends on the person. Both ways can get you to truth and neither one is easy. I had to do both. But currently, the collective consciousness is much more focused on intellect and desires, I think Leo is fitting his teaching to that to avoid confusion and increase accessibility. Most spiral dynamic orange and blue people don't care about beingness, and they cover most of the world.

[WelcometoReality]

@pluto It has some great pointers to truth and the authentic self and also the separate self.

My favorite is:

"The Master views the parts with compassion,
because he understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged and common as stone."

I think Stephen Mitchell did a very good translation.

[VeganAwake]

"What is sought remains hidden from the seeker by already being everything.

 

It is so obvious and simple that the grasping of it obscures it. Never found, never knowable, being is the consummate absence that is beyond measure.

 

Looking for being is believing it is lost. Has anything been lost, or is it simply that the looking keeps it away? Does the beloved always dance constantly just beyond our serious focus?

 

The very intention to seek for a mythical treasure within life inevitably obscures the reality that life is already the treasure.

 

By seeking the myth it dreams it can attain, the seeker effectively avoids that which it most fears … its absence.

 

Liberation is like a fuse that suddenly blows, and all the little lights go out and there is only light.

 

This is not a message about you or me or anyone getting anything. This is about the realisation that there’s nothing to get … that what has been sought has never been lost.

 

This isn’t about seeking or not seeking; it’s beyond the concepts of Advaita and non-dualism and beyond the idea of reaching states of awareness or mindfulness. There’s no goal. There’s nothing on offer. This is totally beyond knowing.

 

This is really a description – a sharing together of a description of something that is beyond attainment, something that can’t be lost and also can’t be grasped or gained.

 

All the time there’s separation there’s a sense of loss, there’s a sense of a feeling that there’s something that isn’t whole. And so the seeker attempts to fill that void, fill it with something – whatever. And some look to something called “enlightenment” because it is felt that enlightenment might be the thing that will fill this sense of loss; it could be the answer to some secret that we don’t quite get.

 

And it sounds, when we read about enlightenment, as though somebody else has found the secret. But nobody’s found the secret.

 

There’s no such thing as an enlightened person. It’s a complete misconception. But the difficulty is that being seekers, the energy of seeking pushes us into being attracted to the idea that somebody else has found something that we can find, because we grow up believing that effort brings results. So, if effort brings results, and we’ve heard of something called enlightenment or liberation, we can make the effort and then we can become liberated or enlightened … like this guy up the road we’ve heard about, or that woman that’s giving satsangs. They have got something that I want. If I go there I will learn how to get it.

 

In the dream there’s still an idea that enlightenment or liberation is something that’s attainable. And so there are teachings that reinforce the idea that you are an individual that has choice, so now you, as an individual, can choose to self-enquire or to meditate, or whatever else, and eventually you could become enlightened.

 

You can go all over the world and find teachings offering something to get. It is rare, however, to find an uncompromising communication that offers nothing at all to the seeker.

 

This aliveness is nothing being everything. It’s just life happening. It’s not happening to anyone. There’s a whole set of experiences happening here and they’re happening in emptiness … they’re happening in free fall. They’re just what’s happening. All there is is life. All there is is beingness. There isn’t anyone that ever has or does not have it. There’s nobody that has life and somebody else doesn’t have life. There just is life being life.

 

This message is so simple it totally confounds the mind. This message is too simple. Already your mind’s saying, “Yes, but come on … what about the levels of enlightenment and what about my emotional blocks, and what about my chakras, they’re not all fully open? What about my stillness – I’m not really still yet, and what about my ego? Somebody told me I still have an ego … it’s a bit reduced but it’s still there.”

 

But all of that, all of those ideas are adopted lessons about how it should be. The ego is what’s happening. The ego is just being ego. Thinking is just being thinking. There is only being. There is just being. There’s nothing else. There’s nobody that’s running that. There’s no destiny, there’s no God, there’s no plan, there’s no script, there’s nowhere to go because there is only timeless being. Being is totally whole just being. And it is alive and fleshy and sexy and juicy and immediately this; it’s not some concept about ‘there’s no-one here’. It’s not some concept about ‘there’s nowhere to go’. It is the aliveness that’s in that body right now. There is pure beingness, pure aliveness. That’s it. End of story.

 

Really it is simply that. So there is no-one, there is no choice. There is no choice at any level. Oneness didn’t choose to become two. There is just oneness. All there is, is oneness being alive with nobody doing it. Is anybody doing breathing? Is anybody doing blood circulation? Is anybody really doing anything? No. There is just apparent doing. Apparent life in freefall.

 

There is no answer to life because life is its own answer. It’s happening already. It’s this. You never lost it. That’s the amazing thing about liberation. When liberation apparently happens people say, “It’s amazing because the thing I was looking for has never left me. It’s the one thing that never comes and never goes – the one constant that can’t be known or held onto.” And the one constant is being"

- Tony Parsons (www.theopensecret.com)