Enjoyable, short talk. Some highlights –
“The Tao is not a manufacturer and it’s not a governor. It doesn’t rule, as it were, in the position of a king….Tao is not really equivalent with any Western or Hindu idea of God, because God is always associated with being the Lord…..”
“’Mutual arising’ is the key idea to the whole thing, and if you want to understand Chinese and Oriental thought in general, it is the most important thing to grasp, because you see, we think so much in terms of cause and effect. We think of the universe today in Aristotelian and Newtonian ways. And in that philosophy the world is all separated. It’s like a huge amalgamation of billiard balls. And they don’t move until struck by another or by a cue. And so everything is going tock-tock-tock-tock-tock all over the place, one thing starting off another in a mechanical way.
“But, of course, from the standpoint of 20th c. science, we know perfectly well now that that’s not the way it works. We know enough about relationships to see that that mechanical model that Newton devised was alright for certain purposes, but it breaks down now, because we understand relativity and we see how things go together in a kind of connected net, rather than in a chain of billiard balls banging each other around. So then, the whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating, self-governing, indeed, democratic organism.”
Note how this relates to synchronicity.
The phrase for “nature” in Chinese translates literally as “self so.”
“The Tao’s method is to be so of itself.”
“Things are allowed, not controlled.”
“The idea of the Tao is the ruler who abdicates and allows all the people, trusts all the people, to conduct their own affairs, to let it all happen. So, this doesn’t mean, you see that there isn’t a unified organism, that everything is in chaos. It means, the more liberty you give, the more love you give, the more you allow things in yourself and in your surroundings to take place, the more order you will have.”
