Stewart

I’m about ready to throw in the towel on the Tao. When I first came here (Dao Bums) I said I was looking for a purer form of the Tao. Something free of Buddhist teachings about Karma, Dharma, reincarnations, Suffering and the eight fold path. I also asked if someone could tell me what a Tao Sage was and if there were any still around that I could meet. Now I walked into this conversation knowing full well that I would encounter people trying to be clever, and others being true believers of their interpretation of the Tao trying to convince me that their way was THE way. But what I did not expect to find was nothing. There doesn’t seem to be any serious cannon beside the 81 verses. I find parts of the verses helpful, but they kind of echo ideas that I have already come across. I suppose my experience would be much more meaningful had I found a mentor. Forget a Sage, just a knowledgeable person. Recently I purchased a book call “Taoist Meditation” translated by Thomas Cleary and was disappointed at what I read. Example: Human life is the ultimate; when the ultimate goes into action it produces positive energy as fire. Fire is spirit. When the ultimate becomes quiescent it produces negative energy as water. Water is vitality. The fire of spirit and the water of vitality combine subtly and congeal between the two kidneys to constitute the root of original energy. You would have to search far and wide to find a bigger load of horse-pucky than that. That Gertrude Stein quote about Oakland CA, “there is no there there”, sums up my current experience with the Tao. but just maybe that is the point of the Tao.

From Failure I learn to expertly fail.

Pedophilia.

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment" - Rumi 13th century Persian poet.

Sadly, no.

Okay, I'm done. I am out of here. The level of bullshit here is drowning me. Ya'll need a check up from the neck up, as Kinky Friedman used to say. Anyway I shall run naked and screaming into that good night. Good day.

My main interests are twofold. First I would like to know about a more pure Tao. Yes, oxymoron aside, a system, methodology, or approach to the Tao that does not contain concepts of Buddhism, Hinduism or any other Ism. For me the Buddhist concepts of reincarnation, Karma, the Dharma are irrelevant to what I seek. I don't seek to avoid suffering, as I suffer very little or possibly not at all, so the eight-fold path holds little value for me. I suppose that what I would like to know more about is the Tao itself. A tall order indeed, given the unknowable nature of the Tao, but that is my direction. My concept of the Tao is like in the Katha Upanishad, the discussion of the unmanifested self. It seems obvious to me that when the 10,000 manifestations came about that dualism was born and that dualism has been echoing down thru (linear) time. And it would be helpful to return to this (pure) Tao to shake off the remnants of our "creation". To do this I don't want to go down the isles of the spiritual supermarket throwing what ever catches my eye into the cart. This cherry picking of what appeals from various systems and adding them to our current pursuit is just clouding the water. Second I would like know more about (Tao) Sages. Are there any Sages today and if so how does one access them? What constitutes a Sage and how does one know the qualifications of a Sage.

noun, plural ox·y·mo·ra [ok-si-mawr-uh, -mohr-uh] /ˌɒk sɪˈmɔr ə, -ˈmoʊr ə/, ox·y·mor·ons. Rhetoric. a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in “cruel kindness” or “to make haste slowly.” e.g. Military Intelligence.

no

I can have my fill of horse hockey?

Surely you jest. Well how about this one then. Verse 82. Ignore verses 1-81, pet your dog, and try to stay sober. My point being, we have no way of verifying what you are proposing is a true rendering of the verses higher than 81. Unless of course I have completely missed your point and am making an ass of myself here.

I am always suspicious of the word happy. You hear parents wanting only that their children be happy. And everybody seeks happiness as if they were junkies and happiness was their drug of choice. To me the end all, be all of life is not happiness, rather it is fulfillment. Instead of raising a generation of bliss-ninnies we would be better to raise a generation of doers. People who accomplish things and feel good about having done this. Otherwise, happiness is just a choice available at the Neurosurgery center.

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner.

"Cheap spirituality" - I love that phrase. I put it up there with fake Asian sprituality, "Kung fooey".

Back in the days when I worked in Data Processing (Information Technology in today's parlance) we used the term Daemon which was like a Bot today. Usually it was connected to email servers and handled simple tasks. I have had communications from Daemon which were terse and led me to wonder if Daemon was just a name a human used or was a very clever Bot. Subsequently I have decided it was the former and not the later, but I could be wrong. On another topic, am I wrong in assuming that Tao Bums is a tip of the hat to Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums"? Or is that some sort of cosmic coinkydink?

Hooboy!!! what have I started here?

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. - Rumi

The first rule about Tao Bums is there is no talking about Tao Bums.

Us Noobs could use a help function. I am still not sure how to make an entry in the welcome section and thus be a qualified poster.

And yet he seems to be a Buddhist. I am looking for Tao Sages, if such a thing exists. I have no interest in reincarnation, the Dharma, Karma, being a Bodhisattva, or sayings from the base of the Bodhi tree. I am looking for a more purely Taoist tradition.

In keeping with your transparency I admit a flirtation with Atheism but I have a cosmology stuck in my mind that says before anything was manifested, the unmanifested-self was existent. Then, probably out of curiosity, the unmanifested-self wanted to know what existence in all its various forms would be. *BOOM* That was a Big Bang type of event, but not out of infinitely dense matter packed into a singularity, rather it was a ripping apart the matter/antimatter of nothingness. Hawking talked about this, where on the edge of a black hole matter and antimatter are created in a process that looks like running the clock in reverse on a matter and antimatter collision. Thus the creation of the universe has a by-product of dualism. Light/dark, hot/cold, male/female, yes/no and so forth echo thru our reality. It was/is this non-time before the creation event is where the unmanifested-self dwelt. It is near impossible for me to not think of that unmanifested-self as God. This unmanifested-self is a pretty workable definition of the Tao. Your mileage may vary.

a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect. People often joke about Military Intelligence being an oxymoron. In the case I used, it seems obvious that a "Tao System" is a contradiction in terms. If that didn't produce a chuckle, that's OK because it wasn't meant to be humorous.