What Is Tao?

Remember that your heart beats “self-so” — and, if you give it a chance, your mind can function “self-so,” although most of us are afraid to give it a chance.

And so, the secret in Taoism is to get out of one’s own way, and to learn that this pushing ourselves, instead of making us more efficient, actually interferes with everything we set about to do.

The order of li, of the infinite complexity of organic pattern, is also the order of our own bodies, and of our brains and nervous systems. We actually live by that order, for as I have often noted we do not figure out in words or ordered thoughts how we grow our own bodies, structure our bones, or regulate our metabolism. In fact we really have no

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

The warning for us in this, whereby we might take advantage of their mistake, is to realize that we are doing the same thing with scientific method. There are certain kinds of personalities who tend to become very rigid in their scientific ideas and thereafter automatically exclude certain possibilities because they do not happen to conform with al

If you look at what I would rather call the order of design, however, and not the order of words, you find a rather different situation because all of the elements of the design come at you together. They are, as we would say, “of a piece,” and you see their relationship to their context and meaning all at once, much as you see the image appear whe

In the same way, you will find that if you look up “to be” in a dictionary, it is defined as “to exist.” Then when you look up “to exist,” you will find it defined as “to be.” And are you any the wiser? A dictionary cannot really completely define itself; ultimately it can only put words together that correspond to other words. In this sense, to tr

Many a time I have had intense delight listening to some hidden waterfall in the mountain canyon, a sound made all the more wonderful since I have set aside the urge to ferret the thing out, and clear up the mystery. I no longer need to find out just where the stream comes from and where it goes. Every stream, every road, if followed persistently a

Now I am of a somewhat skeptical temperament, and I very much doubt if in fact this way of coming to decisions really works. But I say this with a certain qualification, because we can never really prove whether any method of coming to a decision really works. I may make a supremely foolish decision and as a result of it I get killed, but there wou