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Stuart Wilde on the Tao
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The Eternal Tao
My ol’ teacher was a Taoist. He taught about the old sages in China and their wisdom and their gentle ways. There is a concept in Taoism called wu wei that literally means non-action or non-doing.
The Taoist writer Lao Tzu explains that beings (or phenomena) that are wholly in harmony with the Tao behave in a completely natural, uncontrived way.
The Middle Way
Aligning to nature and its softness is the middle way. It involves no struggle, or confrontation. You can act coherently in life, but you do not need to force your way along, as the emotion of that often pushes things away from you. It’s like the Zen philosophy, it’s a solid calm, it’s the way of love and the path of least resistance.
The Tao is full of love because it respects animals and nature and other humans. Also in the calm of the middle way you can communicate more clearly with yourself, aware of your feelings and intuition.
The Tao Philosophy of Detachment
The Taoist philosophy aligns to the spirit of nature and its purity.
When I first started my journey I studied with a Taoist teacher. He emphasized the central Taoist philosophy of detachment, which he said was achieved by emotional discipline, calm, meditation, and a comprehension that the world of people’s egos takes to many torments and half truths, and so backing away you stay safe, and you can still respect people by allowing them to do whatever they want to do.
Love is letting people go. By pulling out of their emotion you can be there for people from a higher perspective.
You walk by the banks of the Tao in an eternal calm, so your strength builds, you grow spiritually. And you learn to detach from your emotions and see them in a proper light. It is important to be able to laugh at yourself and keep an open mind about things.
The Tao is very beautiful the more you enter into the Tao and Gaia the more free you become. There is such a simple truth in this.
The Mysterious Female
The concept of the Tao as a river of light in all things was very advanced when the idea was first suggested in 500 BC. Very few people could read in those days and beliefs were very rudimentary, there wasn’t any metaphysics in that age, which makes the text of the Tao so extraordinary.
Lao Tzu knew of the power of the feminine saying, “...the Tao is the mother that rears the ten thousand things”, and he and the Taoists wrote of their reverence of the ebb and flow of the spirit of nature, that today we call Gaia.
These lines below show a great understanding of the concept of the mysterious female.
“The Valley Spirit never dies
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang.
It is there within us all the while;
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry”.
The Tao: She was there when you were conceived and she will be with you when you take your last breath and she will count to make sure that none were missed...
When you are scared and sad and lonely perhaps you should go to her and stay in her arms a while. For she is the mountain mist and the dew on the magnolia tree, she is the song of the grass and the hopes of rabbits.
She is tender, more tender than us. We can learn a lot from that.