wandelaar

What are the major advantages and disadvantages of trying to be like uncarved wood? And are there concrete examples of how those advantages and disadvantages manifest in actual practice?

So you see it as that the sage should not let society spoil his true natural state, and thus pu doesn't have to do with the skills or mastership the sage does or does not have?

That could be. But the idea of only developing skills where there is a need to do so rules out developing and enjoying a specific mastership for the sheer fun of it. I think there is a difference here between Lao tzu and Chuang tzu. Lao tzu is the more rigorous one of the two, holding up one ideal picture of the sage for all to follow. Chuang tzu understands that people are different and cannot all be forced into one and the same ideal sagely mould. Further Chuang tzu appreciates humor and playing around for no reason in particular.

Yes OldDog, that makes sense.

@ LiT That is too good to be true. No human being can be a master of all things. There is no time for that. Trying to do so would only result in not being good at anything at all. But maybe Lao tzu did think it possible, and thus was simply wrong here? Or maybe he was referring to a superhuman ideal of the sage?

Lets take as our translation "uncarved wood". Now we have the question in what sense the sage should stay simple, natural, etc. Somebody who by hard work and training has reached mastership in some special art would seem to have deviated from the ideal of the uncarved wood. Would Lao tzu disapprove of such a way of life?

Looks like Lin is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu_(Daoism)

So Marblehead was serious after all?

Don't know what to think.....

The problem in the translation appears to be the term "block". I never understood why it had to be a block. But when the block-part of the translation is simply wrong, the term becomes much easier to understand.

Derek Lin's interpretation can be read on Google Books:

@ Lightseeker The problem might be that you are essentially asking the same thing over and over again. You want power or control over other people, and preferably in a magical and cost free manner. Now even apart from ethical questions most spiritual paths involve a diminishing of egocentric concerns and behaviour. So from a spiritual perspective you want to move in a completely wrong direction. Should we help you get into that kind of trouble?

The diagram of the frequencies would have to approach a symmetrical bell curve with its top at 22 stalks when the division of the bundle of 44 stalks is repeated many times over. But just as in the case of a bundle of 49 stalks even with a 100 divisions there still is a big error-range. On the basis of the found results, the assumption of a bell curve with its top at 22 stalks, and the large error-range I have estimated the ideal (= probabilistically most likely) outcome of the frequencies in column B of this file: estimation (44stalks).xls And this is the corresponding diagram (for the division of the bundle of 44 stalks):

In this topic I will empirically investigate the yarrow stalk method. My goal is to estimate the probabilities of the different types of lines. I have ordered yarrow stalks and they arrived today:

And here is the corresponding table of the frequencies for the number of stalks in the right heaps (for the division of a bundle of 44 stalks): frequencies (44stalks).xls

I have now also performed the division in half of a bundle of 44 stalks for a total of a 100 times. The division was again done roughly in half with open eyes, without trying to achieve any particular division. I redid the division a few times when a stalk fell to the ground or when I saw even without counting that the division wasn't even roughly in half. I have counted the number of stalks after the divisions in the right heaps. See the uploaded files for the results. iching (44stalks).xls iching (44stalks).pdf

@ OldDog Lets take the weather. A sage may possibly know all the processes that make up the weather, but that doesn't mean that such a sage could forecast the weather for say a month or a year. Same with political developments in crisis situations. Non-linear processes combined with chance events may cause things to develop in a completely unexpected direction. So I agree that understanding underlying processes allows us (or the sage) to see much, but not all and especially not where it concerns long term predictions. The sage will have to leave his home from time to time to actually see what is happening...

That's also what I thought. Because the Tao manifests everywhere you don't have to visit far away places to experience how the Tao works. But there is a limit to the knowledge about events outside of ones own house that one can have without actually looking what happened. The Tao consists not only of patterns but besides and within those patterns it manifests spontaneous changes, and these put a limit to what one can predict on the basis of Tao's patterns alone. But perhaps Lao tzu is using hyperbole (as he often does) when he claims that the sage need not even look outside to know what is happening.

Yes - what kind of knowledge is that?

I have just now finished reading the book by Harold Roth: Original Tao, and I can now say that my "halfway description" of yesterday is also correct for the whole book. A free article by Roth can be found here: https://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/60818.pdf

@ OldDog If such and such were so, than we would have something you consider undesirable. And thus you think it can't be so. That's the way of make-believe, not the way of Tao. There is no reason to believe our own functioning is beyond the natural processes that operate everywhere else in the world. And both science, mysticism and Taoism point in the direction of the fundamental unity of the world including ourselves. Tao manifests both in spontaneity and in (cyclical) patterns. So there is no explanatory need left for extra autonomous human entities besides Tao. But I know the illusion is hard to break. The Buddhists almost succeeded, but they kept reincarnation and karma for ethical reasons. Same problem here: not being able to accept that the world on a fundamental level just isn't benevolent.

How could it be otherwise? Because Tao is supposed to be the foundation of everything it also has to be the foundation of what we consider ourselves. But that means that our inner life is what Tao does within us. So what we think, feel and do is actually a manifestation of Tao. The only thing hindering the realisation that this is so is the illusion that our Self would have to be an autonomous entity apart from the world and Tao. But in that way we are fooling ourselves, because - by definition - there are no entities independent of Tao. So it is al just a question of logic. Most of philosophical Taoism can be understood by clear thinking alone, although meditation will be of use to let the intellectual understanding sink in and integrate into our personality and way of living.

It is quite common for small children to have invisible (imaginary?) friends and helpers. I don't remember having had them myself but I read about it in books on child psychology.

Personally I think our mind/spirit/soul is not a thing but a process such as a flame or a tornado. When the conditions for its existence are no longer there, the process will simply die out without it having to go anywhere. So in that sense I may also be called a materialist. But the natural consequence of considering our mind/spirit/soul as being not a thing but a process is that there is no essential difference between what happens inside of us and outside of us. The fixation on what happens inside of us as being what we are and what has to be defended is just a trick of natural evolution to make sure we are concerned about our own survival. Now this instinctual way of viewing things automatically leads to the illusion that there actually is a difference between our inner world and the outside world. Our "self" comes to be seen as something autonomous that stands opposite to the rest of the world. This is an illusion, and mystical practice is a way to break through that illusion. Science is another way. So one can be a mystic and a (materialistic) scientist at the same time!

The subject of survival after death can be endlessly debated, and there are countless ways of explaining away the apparent inability of the dead to communicate with us. As I said the possibility of survival after death cannot be absolutely ruled out. But the same is true for the possibility that we change into a kind of muppets after death in some other dimension, or that we are reborn on some planet far away as creatures with three eyes and seven arms who like playing in the mud. With a couple of beers to loosen our imagination almost anything can seem possible, as long as we take care to provide for an "explanation" why nothing of the kind can be demonstrated to be true in our present life. So unless one wants to live in a world of fantasy the most healthy thing is to take a sceptical or agnostic attitude to those things that cannot be demonstrated to be (probably) true. And as I don't like to see this topic degenerate into another senseless debate I will leave it at that.