Tao Te Ching

On another blog, I copy poems which I like. I feel it is a good way to read slowly, typing in the words, letting it play a little more in the head. I am currently copying Tao Te Ching.

I think of the paradoxes and vastness of thought explored in Gita and Tao Te Ching. There is a liberating freedom of thought which does not bind the heavens for human purposes or enterpise which so much of western thought and philosophy seems to do. May be I do not know enough. But I keep looking for western thinkers and philosophers, deep thinkers, poets who do not consider the universe as bound with human purposes only. 

I feel we happen to be. We happen to exist. And yes, reality is only there because we perceive it, but this thought itself is a little construction of language, bound in its own formation. Any formation is foregoing of a formlessness and its freedom. Language constructs the world for us, so does thought, and at some level, our perception and our senses, picking the universe out in a form, from a formless mass. But underneath it all, it is something beyond us, our temporary ephemeral presence on this vast scene. 

Some of the Eastern thought, perhaps because East could continue uninterrupted for a long long time, the grammar and language and stillness allowed for certain thoughts to emerge. They sound more secure, wise, beyond the human fumbling, stumbling around the purposes, means and ways of existence. Perhaps the time and place allowed these thoughts to emerge, the relative security of the people with a long continuous history at a particular place. Perhaps. Because both Gita and Tao Te Ching allude to a universe bigger than our limited purposes. Underneath all is the Way. It comes closer to modern science than trying to bind the purpose of universe around human existence.

Yes, to us, being human is the all, but being human, is perhaps the only way that we can perceive the vastness and timelessness of eternity, and the limited fact of us, and yet the beauty and wonder of it all. I prefer the humbler, quieter, stiller approach to contemplate this universe rather than making it a playground of judging, loudly interacting Gods. There is a calm contemplation which cannot be anything but beautiful, which cannot be anything but true, which cannot be anything but good under all the fragmentary ephemeral purposes of vanishing actors on this stage. This I feel.

As the last verse reads:

The Way of heaven profits without destroying.

**

Later - I asked ChatGPT for some suggestions of thinkers from the Western world which echo or reflect perhaps the wider, less anthromorphic philosophy of universe - and it points me to: Heraclitus, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Meister Eckhart, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Pascal, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Emerson, Thoreau, AN Whitehead, Martin Buber, Heidegger, Weil, Thomas Merton, David Bohm, Alan Watts, Blake, Rilke, Robinson Jeffers, Heaney, Thomas Traherne....a long list amongst others to keep reading from, to keep looking up, to meditate, contemplate, think about this vast reality on which we appear for an instance, like a drop to the ocean.

**

From Ursula K Le Guin's notes on TTC:

Christian or Cartesian dualism, the division of spirit or mind from the material body and world, existed long before Christianity or Descartes and was never limited to Western thought (though it is the “craziness” or “sickness” that many people under Western domination see in Western civilization). Lao Tzu thinks the materialistic dualist, who tries to ignore the body and live in the head, and the religious dualist, who despises the body and lives for a reward in heaven, are both dangerous and in danger. So, enjoy your life, he says; live in your body, you are your body; where else is there to go? Heaven and earth are one. As you walk the streets of your town you walk on the Way of heaven.

**

One of the beautiful verses:

63. Consider beginnings

Do without doing.

Act without action.

Savor the flavorless.

Treat the small as large,

the few as many.

Meet injury

with the power of goodness.

Study the hard while it's easy.

Do big things while they're small.

The hardest jobs in the world start out easy,

the great affairs of the world start small.

So the wise soul,

by never dealing with great things,

gets great things done.

Now, since taking things too lightly makes them worthless,

and taking things too easy makes them hard,

the wise soul,

by treating the easy as harrd,

doesn't find anything hard.