Geof Nanto

An interesting video here .....

Yeah, it's there now. I browsed the preview and liked it so I tried to download it and got this message...... "This title is not currently available for purchase." I will try again at a later date.

“Our age is proud of the progress it has made in man’s intellectual development. The search and striving for truth and knowledge is one of the highest of man’s qualities - though often the pride is most loudly voiced by those who strive the least. And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choices of a leader. This characteristic is reflected in the qualities of its priests, the intellectuals. The intellect has a sharp eye for methods and tools, but is blind to ends and values. So it is no wonder that this fatal blindness is handed from old to young and today involves a whole generation.” (Einstein, Out of My Later Years.)

Neither your Amazon link or Heshang Gong link work for me. I got this message..... Looking for something? We're sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site And this message...Your search "Heshang Gong" did not match any products. However I found the book using Google and clicking on the Cached file dated 10 Dec 2015 for.... www.amazon.com.au/Ho-Shang-Kung-Commentary-Tzus-Ching.../B018...... Commentary on Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching eBook: Heshang Gong, Lao Tzu, Dan G. Reid: ... translation of the Tao Te Ching, and Ho-Shang Kung commentary. But no luck on the current Amazon site.

Actually my thinking was in terms of de - of maintaining emotional / spiritual health. I thought my sentence, "However, I can also see it could be an excellent form of practice; an appropriate role for some people, like poison for others." made it clear I was referencing appropriateness, rather than some universal understanding of strength or weakness. After all, the Dao finds strength in weakness, which immediately blurs the distinction between the two. And, once again, that insight needs to be applied appropriately. Nevertheless, yours is an interesting observation with many possible interpretations. Perhaps you could elaborate on what you meant?

You and all the moderators certainly have my thanks. I wonder if the moderators aren’t sometimes trying to be a tad too understanding in dealing with difficult members to the detriment of their own well-being? I know I personally would agonize over the fairness of any decision I had to make in that role. However, I can also see it could be an excellent form of practice; an appropriate role for some people, like poison for others. But please be aware your role is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Richard Wilhelm is an interesting and relevant case for sure. But to my reading of Jung’s eulogy for Wilhelm, he was not “killed by the intellectual efforts he had to make”. Rather it was because he was unable to intellectually acknowledge the deeper reality of his Chinese experience; an experience which, according to Jung, “overwhelmed and assimilated him” by way of empathy. “Since it was [so Jung thought] a passive assimilation, that is to say, a succumbing to the influence of environment, there was the danger of a relatively unconscious conflict, a clash between his Western and Eastern psyche. If, as I assumed, the Christian attitude had originally given way to the influence of China, the reverse might well be taking place now [that he had returned to live in Europe]: the European element might be gaining the upper hand over the Orient once again. If such a process takes place without a strong, conscious attempt to come to terms with it, the unconscious conflict can seriously affect the physical state of health.” In other words his failure was in his inability to make conscious and integrate vital aspects of his emotional / spiritual self. Jung concludes….”Wilhelm's problem might also be regarded as a conflict between consciousness and the unconscious, which in his case took the form of a clash between West and East. I believed I understood his situation, since I myself had the same problem as he and knew what it meant to be involved in this conflict. It is true that even at our last meeting Wilhelm did not speak plainly. Though he was intensely interested when I introduced the psychological point of view, his interest lasted only so long as my remarks concerned objective matters such as meditation or questions posed by the psychology of religion. So far, so good. But whenever I attempted to touch the actual problem of his inner conflict, I immediately sensed a drawing back, an inward shutting himself off — because such matters went straight to the bone. This is a phenomenon I have observed in many men of importance. There is, as Goethe puts it in Faust, an "Untrodden, untreadable" region whose precincts cannot and should not be entered by force; a destiny which will brook no human intervention.” In my OP I’ve characterised this conflict between the conscious and the unconscious as between the masculine and feminine forces within us all. As Wu Ming Jen notes in his comment above, it could also be framed in terms of yang and yin.

I've had off-grid solar for many years and I'm reasonably well researched on the subject. I've found the skeptical comments here to be well informed and a welcome change from the usual starry-eyed nonsense with which otherwise intelligent people uncritically laud anything with so-called 'green' credentials..

Here's a more lengthy description of the Dao as cosmological process from David Hinton's Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China....... Tao originally meant "way," as in "pathway" or "roadway," a meaning it has kept. But Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu redefined it as a spiritual concept by using it to describe the process (hence, a "Way") through which all things arise and pass away. We might approach their Way by speaking of it at its deep ontological level, where the distinction between being (yu) and nonbeing (wu) arises. Being can be understood in a fairly straightforward way as the empirical universe, the ten thousand living and nonliving things in constant transformation; and nonbeing as the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of being perpetually arises. Within this framework, Way can be understood as a kind of generative ontological process through which all things arise and pass away as nonbeing burgeons forth into the great transformation of being. This is simply an ontological description of natural process, and it is perhaps most immediately manifest in the seasonal cycle: the emptiness of nonbeing in winter, being's burgeoning forth in spring, the fullness of its flourishing in summer, and its dying back into nonbeing in autumn. In their poems, ancient Chinese poets inevitably locate themselves in this cosmology by referring to the seasonal cycle—for as we will see, deep wisdom in ancient China meant dwelling as an organic part of this ontological process. The mechanism by which being burgeons forth out of nonbeing is tzu-jan [ziran]. The literal meaning of tzu-jan is "self-ablaze." From this comes "self-so" or "the of-itself," hence "spontaneous" or "natural." But a more revealing translation of tzu-jan might be "occurrence appearing of itself," for it is meant to describe the ten thousand things emerging spontaneously from the generative source, each according to its own nature, independent and self-sufficient, each dying and returning into the process of change, only to reappear in another self-generating form.

Although I agree with your description as far as it goes, it's only the Dao as cosmological process. You seemingly discount mystery / sacredness / the unknowable. From Louis Komjathy’s The Daoist Tradition…… Dao (Tao): Pinyin Romanization of a Chinese character meaning "Way" (cosmic order) and/or "way" (lifepath). As a Daoist cosmological and theological category, utilized by Daoists to designate their sacred or ultimate concern. In the case of Daoism, best left untranslated as "Dao." From a Daoist perspective, the Dao has four primary characteristics: Source of all existence; unnamable mystery; all-pervading sacred presence; and universe as cosmological process.

Thanks for your excellent insights. The only paragraph I thought could be better researched is this one..... "The excessive legality and stultifying social rule-making of Confucians was the provoker of this letting go of forms that had become too rigid and deadly and quite devoid of the immediacy of "flow". Life as against death.This appears as an historic extreme." Sure, Confucism became too rigid with institutionalisation but then so did Daoism. Neither started out this way. The former sought to align society with the Way of humans, the latter sought to align humans with the Way of the cosmos. Both have their validity as ideal guiding forms. I found Arthur Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China a good reference. I quoted a little from his text in a previous thread on the difficulty of describing the Dao ... http://thedaobums.com/topic/38221-the-meaning-of-tao/?p=623101

Tawny Frogmouths looking like a panel of judges from the Spanish Inquisition. Gang-Gang cockatoo - the quintessential Aussie larrikin.

A male peacock spider Maratus volans puts on a full courtship display. Australia's spectacular peacock spiders are living proof that hard work pays off for males trying to woo a partner. Males who succeeded in snaring a mate were those that put in the most effort and paid the female a lot of attention, according to the study published today in Royal Society Proceedings B. (for the full story see http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-02/male-peacock-spiders-must-work-hard-to-win-the-ladies/6991106 )

To clarify my previous comment....it wasn't the whole of KenB's signature I was objecting to, only his 'special offer' line highlighted in red. As he has kindly deleted this line, it's no longer an issue for me. On the subject of signatures in general......Loud signatures aren't to my taste. I like the quiet, the subtle, the understated - but that's purely a personal preference; it's not something I'd want to hold others to. Indeed, as the saying goes, "variety is the spice of life." As to the moderators on this site, I can only add my voice to those who have come to their defence. In fact, from what I've seen in my 9 months of membership, I can only praise the fairness, tolerance and openness they display in the many discussions on this forum addressing their actions.

Agreed!

I like this description of how the self (in the sense of ego), rather than dissolving away, becomes one of the ten thousand things for the Ch'an poet Po Chu-i…… Po Chu-i (772-846) The Chinese poetic tradition consistently valued clarity and depth of wisdom, rather than mere complexity and virtuosity. In this, Po Chu-i is the quintessential Chinese poet. He was a devoted student of Ch'an Buddhism, and it was Ch'an that gave much of the clarity and depth to his life and work. This is immediately apparent in his voice and subject matter, but Ch'an is perhaps more fundamentally felt in the poetics shaping Po's poetry. In Ch'an, practice, the self and its constructions of the world dissolve away until nothing remains but empty mind—empty mind mirroring the world, leaving its ten thousand things utterly simple, utterly themselves, and utterly sufficient. This suggests one possible Ch'an poetry: an egoless poetry such as Wang Wei's. But there is another possibility for Ch'an poetry: the poetry of an ego-less ego. The quiet response of even the most reticent poem is still a construction. Po knew this well, but it seems he came to realize that the self is also one of those ten thousand things that are utterly themselves and sufficient. Taoist thought would describe this insight rather differently, as the understanding that self is always already selfless: it is but a momentary form among the constant transformation of earth's ten thousand things, and so is, most fundamentally, the emptiness of nonbeing, that source which endures through all change. This insight results in a poetry quite different from Wang Wei's, Rather than Wang Wei's strategy of emptying the self among the ten thousand things, this poetics opens the poem to the various movements of self, weaving it into the fabric of the ten thousand things, and Po Chu-i was a master of its subtle ways. As such, he initiated a major strand in Chinese poetic thinking: an "interiorization of wilderness" that came to be the most distinctive trait of Sung Dynasty poetry. In a culture that made no fundamental distinction between heart and mind (hsin), Po Chu-i inhabited everyday experience at a level where a simple heart is a full heart and a simple mind is an empty mind. Such is his gentle power: the sense in his poems of dwelling at the very center of one's life, combining the intimacies of a full heart and the distances of an empty mind. (from David Hinton’s Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China)

I little unravelling can be a good thing for personal cultivation - allows us to see what's hidden within us; our own shadows.

I know nothing of your forums and consequently have no opinion on their worth. However I don't like seeing any advertising for commercial ventures on Dao Bums. I'd like there to be a clear rule banning such posts.

“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The later procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” C.G. Jung (New Age thinking is, in part, an outgrowth of theosophy - arguably a further degeneration into one-sided blindness.)

Yes, that's why I've found Jung such a valuable reference over many, many years. As my inner experience grows, so too does my understanding of Jung's insights. He validates and legitimizes the innermost essence of myself. And the conscious communication of these insights further helps me to grow my own inner experience. He wrote " The concepts of complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formulations, but names for certain areas of experience, and though they may be described they remain dead and irrepresentable to anyone who has not experienced them."

Unfortunately there's nothing clear or simple about Jung's psychology - and that's especially the case when it comes to an explanation of archetypes - but here's a passage I like from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious...... Not for a moment dare we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be finally explained and disposed of. Even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language. (Indeed, language itself is only an image.) The most we can do is to dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress. And whatever explanation or interpretation does to it, we do to our own soul as well, with corresponding results for our own well-being. The archetype—let us never forget this—is a psychic organ present in all of us. A bad explanation means a correspondingly bad attitude to this organ, which may thus be injured. But the ultimate sufferer is the bad interpreter himself. Hence the "explanation” should always be such that the functional significance of the archetype remains unimpaired, so that an adequate and meaningful connection between the conscious mind and the archetypes is assured. For the archetype is an element of our psychic structure and thus a vital and necessary component in our psychic economy. It represents or personifies certain instinctive data of the dark, primitive psyche, the real but invisible root of consciousness. Of what elementary importance the connection with these roots is, we see from the preoccupation of the primitive mentality with certain "magic" factors, which are nothing less than what we would call archetypes. This original form of religio ("linking back") is the essence, the working basis of all religious life even today, and always will be, whatever future form this life may take. There is no "rational" substitute for the archetype any more than there is for the cerebellum or the kidneys. We can examine the physical organs anatomically, histologically, and embryologically. This would correspond to an outline of archetypal phenomenology and its presentation in terms of comparative history. But we only arrive at the meaning of a physical organ when we begin to ask teleological questions. Hence the query arises: What is the biological purpose of the archetype? Just as physiology answers such a question for the body, so it is the business of psychology to answer it for the archetype.

This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water…..where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me. C. G. Jung The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (from http://jungcurrents.com/jung-munch-scream-shadow )

A good question. He uses Christian terms such as ‘soul’ but only as a means of describing the reality of his own otherwise ineffable experiences. There are many references to the soul in his collected works but these are expressed in his more detached scientific language. (For example, in 1921, Jung equated the Hindu notion of Brahman/Atman with the self. At the same time, he provided a definition of the soul. He argued that the soul possessed qualities that were complementary to the persona, containing those qualities that the conscious attitude lacked. This complementary character of the soul also affected its sexual character, so that a man had a feminine soul, or anima, and a woman had a masculine soul, or animus.) For me his raw experiences are more revealing and these can be found in The Red Book. I’ve included a sample passage below, and I’m interested what you and others here make of what he was experiencing…… Refinding the Soul 1 When I had the vision of the flood in October of the year 1913 [foretelling the coming devastation of WW1], it happened at a time that was significant for me as a man. At that time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me .2 The vision of the flood seized me and I felt the spirit of the depths, but I did not understand him. Yet he drove me on with unbearable inner longing and I said: "My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know: the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths. I found the right way, it led me to you, to my soul. I return, tempered and purified. Do you still know me? How long the separation lasted! Everything has become so different. And how did I find you? How strange my journey was! What words should I use to tell you on what twisted paths a good star has guided me to you? Give me your hand, my almost forgotten soul. How warm the joy at seeing you again, you long disavowed soul. Life has led me back to you. Let us thank the life I have lived for all the happy and all the sad hours, for every joy, for every sadness. My soul, my journey should continue with you. I will wander with you and ascend to my solitude.3 The spirit of the depths forced me to say this and at the same time to undergo it against myself, since I had not expected it then. I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time, and thought differently about the human soul. I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object.4 I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul. Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul. From this we learn how the spirit of the depths considers the soul: he sees her as a living and self-existing being, and with this he contradicts the spirit of this time for whom the soul is a thing dependent on man, which lets herself be judged and arranged, and whose circumference we can grasp. I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system.5 Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed. He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the Soul. 6 If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things of the world. He becomes a fool through his endless desire, and forgets the way of his soul, never to find her again. He will run after all things, and will seize hold of them, but he will not find his soul, since he would find her only in himself. Truly his soul lies in things and men, but the blind one seizes things and men, yet not his soul in things and men. He has no knowledge of his soul. How could he tell her apart from things and men? He could find his soul in desire itself, but not in the objects of desire. If he possessed his desire, and his desire did not possess him, he would lay a hand on his soul, since his desire is the image and expression of his soul. 1. In the text, Jung identifies the white bird as his soul. For Jung's discussion of the dove in alchemy, see Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955/56) (CW 14, §81)- 2. In his lecture at the ETH on June 14,1935, Jung noted: "A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of the going down to death. It is clear that Dante found this point and those who have read Zarathustra will know that Nietzsche also discovered it. When this turning point comes people meet it in several ways: some turn away from it; others plunge into it; and something important happens to yet others from the outside. If we do not see a thing Fate does it to us." 3. Jung later described his personal transformation at this time as an example of the beginning of the second half of life, which frequently marked a return to the soul, after the goals and ambitions of the first half of life had been achieved. 4. Jung is referring here to his earlier work. For example, he had written in 1905, “Through the associations experiment we are at least given the means to pave the way for the experimental research of the mysteries of the sick soul”. 5. The Draft continues: -a dead system that I had contrived, assembled from so-called experiences and judgments" 6. In 1913, Jung called this process the introversion of the libido.

It’s taken me a while to respond, but when I read your comment connecting sunset and clouds it reminded me of some of the names of the women in Cao Xueqin’s classic 18th century novel The Story of the Stone. I’ve been reading the translation by David Hawkes and it’s interesting how he de-emphasises ‘cloud’ and emphasises ‘sun’ when he translates their names. For instance he translates the maid named Cai-xia (meaning: Colourful Red Cloud) as Sunset. It made me wonder if cloud names are common for women in China. In the novel there’s also: Qingwen 晴雯; Meaning: Fair Weather Cirrus. Hawkes translation: Skybright. Cai-yun; Meaning: Colourful Cloud. Hawkes translation: Suncloud. Shi Xiangyun 史湘雲; Meaning: Xiang River Clouds I very much like these names with their cloud images. I also like the way Ch'an poets use 'drifting clouds' as a metaphor for wandering monks. But I'm less enamoured when 'clouds' is used as a metaphor for obscuring thoughts that need to be cleared away to reveal the 'true' mind like a clear blue sky. According to an early Chinese saying recorded in the Hanshu, “When a tiger roars, the wind rises. When a dragon stirs, clouds gather".

Thanks. I've browsed that article and it's certainly well researched. However Jung is so extensive, any single article can only be partial of course. And that article was written before the publication of his Red Book; now acknowledged as the central book of Jung's oeuvre, I've been reading his works for almost 30 years and I still find new meaning in his words. "Jung is a curious one, he talks much about the Quest, yet it is clear that he never completed it for himself" Actually he did complete it. His Red Book gives the account of his 'vision quest' and initiation by 'spirit' itself into ineffable mystery..... "The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then." These are the words of the psychologist C. G. Jung in 1957, referring to the decades he worked on The Red Book from 1914 to 1930. Although its existence had been known for more than eighty years, The Red Book was never made available to Jung's students and followers until it was published to wide acclaim in 2009.