Gerry

I read that as in "all kinds of people" in contrast to " good and evil". I did not think of Christian slant. But I have said enough for now.

I am going to try to be less of the skunk at this party.

My personal choice is: 5 The Tao doesn't take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil. The Master doesn't take sides; she welcomes both saints and sinners. The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less you understand. Hold on to the center. P.S. edit. For much the same reason I like your choice.

The point was, I hope, that how we express as emptiness and what that meant to one 2500 years ago can not be compared. It influences that language one uses to express their meaning, understandings. As I read "straw dogs" I have no idea what the that implied to an ancient. Likewise for "void" or "emptiness". If the author of the Tao Te Ching was composing today, his idiomatic and idiosyncratic choice of language and imagery would differ greatly from that 2500 years ago. Today we read various translation, most translations with several degrees of separation, and try to understand their meaning while lacking any temporal relationship to the source. I also tried to say that even if we struggle with ancient expressions, or we try to use a modern understanding of the Universe, we are still trying to express exactly the same thing, Tao, and that is not different.

Actually is this world of the subatomic, that is a fair point.

Bottom line, it does not matter. The point was that what we call the "ten thousand things" is actually 99.99999% void. It has nothing in that space. 99.99999% is no thing even when we put our coffee cup on the table. It is "all" void. Now some of us, not all of us know that. The ancients did not have a clue about this. So how we speak about the void and how they spoke about the void involves elements we do not understand. Language, knowledge, changes how we understand and see the world. Thus when we read any version of the Tao Te Ching we have to use more than the verbiage to grasp it. How one apprehends the Tao is not tied to what we know or what we do not know. Personally I am deeply involved with cosmology, and the emergence of consciousness. [Two distinct topics] These are of interest to me. They inform me of this universe. They are different cognitive approaches to "The world" than those of the ancients. So should one believe that this will lead to different apprehensions of the Tao? My answer is no, but my relationship to the idioms in 2500 year old expalnations, language, of the Tao Te Ching gets fogged at times. Please tell me your question should be followed by a grin.

But that is not what I am doing. As I said, "More to the point this understanding does not differentiate an ancients apprehension of the Tao from anyone's in modern times." FLowing hands: "The energy that has created all things is still the same as when the first energy was released." Exactly, but the language, the idiomatic relationship to it is differentiated. What you and I see withing the universe of being, "the ten thousand things" may be the same, but our relationship to grasping it is affected by our time. 5 [Derek Lin, 1994 ] Heaven and Earth are without bias And regard myriad things as straw dogs The sage is without bias And regards people as straw dogs The space between Heaven and Earth Is it not like a bellows? Empty, and yet never exhausted It moves, and produces more Too many words hasten failure Cannot compare to keeping quiet Lin points out "Straw dogs are literally small dog figurines made from straws. They were used in ancient times for rituals." In common parlance you might get “I’m just putting this out there as a straw dog.’" Another is "A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man". I suspect the ancient that wrote that may have a different sense of it. In this verse what is meant as "straw dogs" can be problematic because of our lack of understanding of the cultural understandings of the author. Should those lines be read as "Heaven and earth are without bias / they are indifferent to myriad of all things / The Sage without bias / is indifferent to the ways of man " ? The language we use today is not reflective of the idiosyncratic expressions of the ancients. Non the less, our linguistic expressions of the Tao reflect a different and fuller knowledge of our universe. This is neither better nor worse in coming to our understanding of Tao. FLowing hands: "But the Dao is inside us, for we are born of the universe and we return to it. To realize ourselves we must look within and then out." For the most part, but it is no more inside us that it is not inside us. BTW, your analysis of science is flawed. We are not born of the universe, we are ever in the universe. Your awareness of the universe as consciousness, is merely an organizational happenstance of the universe. This is what it is. FLowing hands: "But the Dao is inside us, for we are born of the universe and we return to it. To realise ourselves we must look within and then out." Realize ourselves? We are ever within and without of Tao even without our seeing that. It is still as it is. If all you got from my atom story was I look into atoms to find the Tao, I am sorry. It was a way to say what ancients understood by "empty", "the void", "nothingness" and what that can mean for us are quite distinct. Regardless as I said " More to the point this understanding does not differentiate an ancients apprehension of the Tao from anyone's in modern times." Inside atom is No-Thing. As this is true of all material objects this means that 0.00000138% of all that you see, touch, and feel is No-thing. Yet it is within and without Tao. This is a modernist understanding of the "ten thousand things" as the ancient might say. Does knowledge of this affect the Tao, or ones apprehension of the Tao. Of course not. But it might make it harder to read an ancient's text and filter it against the idiomatic constraints of today. I guess in short I'm saying I never, well sometimes, understand every thing those ol' guys said. I need to work this out on my own terms.

Why does the image of a Rave come to mind.

Let me add a Materialist example of how modern Taoist and the ancients have totally different world views. When Lao Tzu, or any of the Zen master or any of “the Buddhas” expressed the concepts of the void or the No-thing that is neither nothing nor emptiness they had a basis for that. They understood that in the context of the world, the times, in which they lived. Some would say they were exploring the “knower and the known” within the idiosyncratic understandings of their day. Today I start with a vastly different understanding of what a nothing can be, or better what it is not. For some time, at least 80 years, we have understood what an atom is. I will stay out of the weeds of the quantum world. An atom has a nucleus of protons and neutrons. About this nucleus there are electrons which for much of my life I thought of as orbiting little planets. The larger the nucleolus, the more the planets. As “size” increase you get more orbits which can hold more planets than the inner orbit(s). Now we understand the notion of orbit to be a misunderstanding and these “orbits” are more like spheres, shells, and the electrons for a particular shell are somewhere “on” that shell. The term “electron cloud” comes into play and then we get to the planets also being waves, but now I have wandered in the quantum weeds. So let me step back. So if we have a hydrogen atom, the first and simplest, It has a single electron. One center. One orbit. Think of a football field. Place a marble on the 50 yard line half way between the side lines. If the marble is the atom's nuclei, that electron's orbit is a sphere whose diameter is the length of the field. Interesting, no? Matter is the protons, the neutrons, and the electrons. So explain to me what “occupies” the inside of the orbital sphere other than the nuclei, the marble? How can I not have a different relationship to “nothingness” than did Lao Tzu? More to the point this understanding does not differentiate an ancients apprehension of the Tao from anyone's in modern times. “Dao is in the heart, it can be found by self cultivation and only that.” The Tao that is in the heart or the mind is not the Tao. IMNHO.

FWIW, the governing of actions is not the Tao. Within a social context one can see the "Tao" governing all actions.

Can you explain what you mean by "Living Dao is the experience"? It is not just "philosophical Dao" that is misguided. To converse about the Tao is misguided or at least lacking in knowing. Make that "knowing" more of lacking clarity or as being expressive. But whether or not [one] seeks to know the "Living Dao [as] the experience, or they snicker at the notion, the Tao in no less present. The knowledge of the presence, the "living Tao", is irrelevant. The Tao is. We all come to the Tao, or some sense of the Tao through language, but that language stains on our consciousness with it limitations and it preconceptions. [Here I mean the innate preconceptions built into our given language.] What 50 years ago I understood as the Tao I was clearly influenced by that, but I also developed upon reflection an apprehension of the Tao that is neither being nor Being.

I believe I was saying more or less the same thing. But we today lack a context for the language usage of individuals living 2500 years ago. What is understood as the Tao by the wise man then and today differs less than the language used to express that understanding. I do not understand any form of Chinese be it ancient or contemporary. But what is clearly true is language defines and nurtures the way consciousnesses experiences and interprets the world. If I were to call myself a Taoist and to claim I have a personal experience of the Tao, I would not be claiming to have had the same experience of the world as an ancient which led him to express his experience of the Tao. Lao Tzu's relationship to the natural world is significantly different that ours, mine. The cultural structure of his world is beyond our ken. This is from the Jane English translation of ch. 5: The space between heaven and Earth is like a bellows. The shape changes but not the form; The more it moves, the more it yields. More words count less. Hold fast to the center. The sense of breath is clear. We breathe in and we breath out. The bellows of Tao are creative and destructive, but no-thing is born nor is it extinguished. The Tao that we acknowledge is as "More words count less." . What man, as the awareness of the "ten thousand things" and as the consciousness of being that awareness via language/ words, may experience is neither the "anthropomorphous explanations" nor the "ten thousand things". In so far as this is the experience of the ancient sage or a fool in modernity, what they apprehend is the same.

As with all these ancient renderings of the source of how we came to be and how we stand in this universe, I try to see them through the prism of who we are today. How are these ancient renderings of truth affected by the matrix of what was understood then and what is understood today. The world, the audience, they were communicating with is socially and spiritually to distant to render meaning, for me, into their translations. Today we have a vastly different idiomatic understanding of the Universe and its emergence. A materialist knows these things but does not allow this understanding to color the Tao. As a Taoist Materialist I do my best to reject false narratives, straw dogs if you must. These narratives are the musings of awareness proselytizing itself. I would say the wise man understands this and knows such anthropomorphous explanations are not the Tao.

There was a day some 50 years ago when I had the insight that rocks were just another form of energy. Stored solar energy. Not receiving. Not giving. Just there. Over time this has evolved my understanding, relationship, with Tao. I recall conversations with Christian friends when I tried to ask them if Jesus was in all things. My sense of jesusness and most of their beliefs did not correspond well. I tried very hard back then to find a sense of consciousness that imbued all thing with Being. I do not feel that way anymore. What is is. What is not is. The source of what is and is not is not Being.

Funny I did not read that as vanity. I thought of "knowledge" or "teaching" or "explaining". The wisdom one knows and explains blinds not just the ones that listens and learns but also the one that proclaims and teaches.

Without focus on that verse, what do you mean by transcendence of life and death? I am troubled by notions of the Tao that are constrained by a resemblance of time as in "eternal time". Outside of being and awareness of being is their a transcendence that is Being?

I agree with you. Words cannot tell you what they cannot express. "Tao is." is my personal focus. Translations of words can confuse me in my apprehension of Tao. Still there are translations that "sing" to me.

As an old hippie, can you expand this?

How do these affect your personal understanding, relationship, with the Tao?

I have always like the Witter Bynner. The general question always makes me wonder why, or how, the translations affect anyone's understanding of the Tao. Mitchell's first verse starts "The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao". Words hold no magic here.

Contextually it might be rephrased as "Aware of what?" as a spiritual question. The depth of one's awareness of "the knower and the known" is perhaps what is in question. Our genetic inclinations are tilted away from self examination in favor of the ephemeral. In various ways we are xenophobic by nature and we are equally xenophobic of our selves.

Both phrases at some point in my life were goals, but neither of them make much sense to me these days. Add Satori to this list. I would call myself an absolute atheist, that is even the concepts of "mind" and "original mind" are unpleasantly agnostic expressions. Some Zenists have told me that I am materialistic, in the philosophical meaning of that word. At first I was put off by that, but have come to realize that I am exactly that. We are born. We live. We die. We are Tao, but so to is everything. Or perhaps everything bathes in Tao. You cannot know Tao, so how is one ever awakened or enlightened.

Is a teacher needed? Is a teacher the point? Is a practice needed? I have been aware of the Tao as a philosophical/spiritual understanding for 50 years, but I would have nothing much to say about the Tao other than the Tao is. I am new to this board and have little understanding of the nature and paths of Taoist views and Taoist practice expressed in the forums. If casual thoughts are what you want to pursue, I guess there is a PM function in the software.

My name is Gerry. I will explore what is on this site with an open mind. I have been a follower of the Tao for near 50 years in the way most friends are rightly known as acquaintance. I have no practice. Practice is not the Tao. The Tao, in my words, is a verb akin to being. As Heideggar Dasein and Sein differ, do not assume the "being" here is a noun or adjective. Tao is. I have not explored this forum, but if it includes a private message function I would be glad to converse there.