doc benway

Anger is a reaction, a response. It is usually an indication of underlying fear, insecurity, dissatisfaction. Anger often comes from a defensive posture. It is born of our illusion of independence and separation. I was conditioned to express anger and used it, unknowingly, as a primary reactive mechanism for many years. It created a lot of damage to the lives of loved ones, including myself. I was able to let go of the majority of my anger. You've already taken the two most important steps! You've recognized that you are responding to the world with anger. You are unsatisfied with that approach. The good news is that change is virtually guaranteed! First, look at the anger very closely and very deeply. Not in an analytical or intellectual way but rather become that anger. Feel it in your body. Feel it as deeply and completely as you possibly can. Let it be there for as long as necessary. Don't repress it. Don't take action to diffuse it. Just be with it and look into it's face, into it's heart, and see if you can determine exactly what it means to "be angry." Recognize that you ARE NOT angry. Anger is an experience. It comes and it goes. It is not who or what you are. You were there before it came and will remain when it passes. Recognize that the anger is in you, not in reality. In similar circumstances, another person might feel no anger whatsoever. Once anger is looked at very deeply and seen for what it is, it may lose some of it's power over you. It will come and it will go. And the one who experiences it will remain. And that is who should make choices and take action. And it is valuable to make sure that the action taken is consistent with what you value in life and not simply a conditioned response, like the anger. Good luck - it may take a long time but I guarantee it is worth whatever energy you are able to invest to liberate yourself from being a slave to conditioning like anger responses. And at the same time, anger is a valuable and useful experience. It has a legitimate place in our lives. I like this quote by Maya Angelou, referring to her childhood abuse - "Bitterness is like cancer, it eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean." But like fire, it can become a bad thing when out of control.

My point is that there is no such thing as a literal translation of Hanzi. As a rule, characters have multiple potential translations that vary with context and perspective. Chinese translation into Western language is necessarily interpretation (of course there are some relative exceptions).

Show me a translation of Chinese characters that is not an interpretation, please.

PS - another, very similar translation comes from Derek Lin. In fact, in his book he refers to the more 'negative' translations, (those that refer to Dao as 'unkind', etc...) as misinterpretations of the characters. I don't have the book handy to quote him but it's worth a peak for anyone interested in this.

I believe that is Jonathan Starr

The Way of Energy by Lam Kam Chuen is a good book. For intermediate to advance practice, I'd recommend a live teacher rather than a book.

Just starting to catch up on this thread... One translation which I like is: Heaven and earth are impartial; they see the 10,000 things as straw dogs. The sage is not sentimental; he treats all people as straw dogs. I'm not sure that this excerpt really relates to compassion, but rather non-duality. While we can feel love and compassion and want to ease the suffering of others, the sage understands that individual lives come and go but that there is that from which they flow that is unborn/undying. Yes, and it is also sometimes misconstrued as a realization and not a path... View and action are both necessary.

Nice post TI. I wonder about the "third party" reference here, however - maybe just semantics. As long as there is a "third party" there is duality, yes? And the infinite regression of that which observes, observing the observer. There is no third party, just spaciousness imbued with clarity.

I don't need to read about it, I'm already full of shit...

when you dress so plain the subtle beauty of life shines through, unrestrained

Are you trying to say that Daoist shit don't stink?

I think different people are saying and implying different things when they say to 'be natural' or 'be yourself.' I don't know for certain what wise people mean and I'm not sure we'd all agree on who they are, but I'll share some of my perspective on it. Most of our thought process and behavior is, indeed as you say, programmed and conditioned from childhood. And it stretches back through generations as our parents and teaches have been a product of their conditioning and so on throughout the history of "civilized" humanity. And we are further conditioned by our life experience, social mores, cultural factors, and so on. So there is the "me" that is the creation of, steward of, and perpetrator of all of that conditioning. The "me" is, in fact, that conditioning. There are some of us who take an interest in who that "me" is and there are traditions that give us some guidance. And the process of investigating and understanding the me inevitably leads to changes and may eventually lead to a dismantling of that sophisticated programming, whether gradual or abrupt. When the "me" is seen for what it is, there is the opportunity for very profound change and, in fact, liberation. The one who is liberated is natural. Their actions are a reflection of our true, human nature - naked, aware, free of concerns for security and liberation. And I think you can recognize that, as dawei points out above. I think those people exhibit qualities like love, patience, generosity, compassion, tranquility, contentment, and so on, because these are natural qualities. The "me" takes it's rightful place in awareness, no longer the doer and the thinker but rather a helpful and concerned advocate - a very useful tool. And once the "me" yields to the space and awareness from which it arises, actions and choices become natural. "Me" is no longer interfering with nature and things occur 'of themselves so.' This is what I would currently refer to if I were to describe someone as natural.

Hi Roger, I'm sincerely glad that's helpful. John's talks and poems are wonderful and this is one of my favorites among his quotations. Best wishes,

We all are simply looking for what works for us at this point in our lives. It looks like you've got it figured out. As long as you're getting what you want out of life and not preventing others from doing their thing, congratulations!

Sounds like you have a good teacher - very nice!

FYI - B6 can be neurotoxic in high doses - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16320662

When Krishnamurti speaks of the observer being the observed, I believe that he is referring to the insight that the 'observer' is simply another thought or thought process that is tagged as the thinker, the doer, and yet is no different from the other thoughts. It's been a while since I've read him, but that seemed to be a significant focus in his work. Very true, and the other thing that I found particularly stimulating and helpful was his constant admonition for us to look for something beyond what is in the realm of the known, never telling us what else might be there or even if it is possible but it made me look (and I'm still doing it). We may well be saying the same thing although I think there is a subtle variation there.

Oh yeah, no question, but for me at least, getting the footwork and waist pattern is the most important place to start. The hands are more subtle, detailed, refined and are stage 2 (or later) in the process. Just my approach but it worked really well. I should qualify that - my teacher is really old school - he'd demonstrate a series of movements exactly 3 times. Then he'd walk away. You got it or you didn't. And the more advance you got, the more he'd give you at a time. He'd come back in an hour and ask if there were any questions. If you were lucky, he'd show it one more time. Then you worked on it for a week and he expected it to be pretty accurate when he asked you to show him next time... If it wasn't, you wouldn't move on until it was. So it was easier to sort of fake the hands but if you didn't have the footwork, it was a disaster. Then over time we would refine and correct. Try it sometime - focus on the feet and waist, get that solid. Then worry about the hands. Everyone's got their own style, but that was a huge breakthrough for me and it took me about 3 years to figure it out, duh...

The "goal" of Daoism is to not interfere with nature - compassion arises from being natural. The "goal" of Buddhism is to manifest your true nature - compassion arises from your true nature No difference in the outcome, only a difference in the methods to get there... Call me new age, whatevs...

Absolutely - the best teachers teach you how to learn, give you a foundation, then turn you loose to do the work for yourself. After a long time struggling, I finally realized that the best way to learn from my teacher was to focus on his footwork. Once you got the footwork and waist movement, the hands and upper body would generally come naturally.

Wonderful quote... Here's another favorite variation on the theme: "And if you want a point of departure for this new journey of soul, don't choose an intention, don't choose a prayer, don't choose a therapy, and don't choose a spiritual method. Look inwards and discovery a point of contradiction within yourself. Stay faithful to the aura and presence of the contradiction. Hold it gently in your embrace and ask it what it wants to teach you." - John O'Donohue

Your welcome. There are aspects of existence that go beyond research and comprehension. Belief is a bandaid we place over our ignorance to give ourselves the illusion of understanding and security. Fine details explaining how meditation can be helpful in this matter - That's something that could fill quite a few books but I'll try to be very concise. Most of our lives are spent looking at the world through our thoughts. When we do that, we are subjecting the world to a very sophisticated and very biased and programmed algorithm that's rooted in our conditioning. It's a product of our ancestors, our society, our culture, our teachers, our government, and so on. That algorithm is a complex filter that applies labels, preferences, and judgments on everything that is taken in. The system is a self consistent story that is essentially the story of our world as we experience it. The story and the algorithm are completely contained within our heads. They have virtually nothing to do with reality. So when we look at the world outside (or inside) we are really looking at an image created by our programmed image of that world. And that image is a very poor approximation that cuts off any possibility of deeper understanding. One example - I see something small and brown fly past the window and make a particular noise and I say to myself - sparrow. Oh, that's a sparrow - I know all about that. Next.... But how much do really know about it? How much do your really know about that particular, individual living creature? Do you know anything about it's life, it's experience, it's physiology, it's consciousness? Do you know what distinguishes it from other "sparrows"? Is it possible that there is more there than we can find in an encyclopedic entry? Another example - I bump in to someone I work with. Oh, that's Dave, I don't like Dave - he bumped me out of that promotion last month.... What do I really know about Dave? Is he happy? Is he ill? Is he a concert musician or a rapist? If I gave him a chance, he could turn out to be my best friend. But I know Dave, I don't like him... nothing will ever change. Same with everyone we meet. We make a quick assessment and judgment, based on the algorithm, slap on a concise label and the we "know" that person. And that "knowledge" sticks with us forever, unless something dramatic happens to shake it loose (which is extremely rare - how often do we markedly change our impression of a person?). So our intellectualization and "understanding" of the world inside us and around us is a sham. It's a very sophisticated story that we continually tell ourselves over and over and it forms the basis for our entire life. It's useful from a practical point of view but it's extremely limiting and it is what separates us from reality and Nature. It is our fall from grace. We never interact with the world, just with our image of the world. We never interact with other people. Our image of our self interacts with our image of the other person... It is an ongoing dance of thoughts, preconceptions, assumptions, and expectations. And the narrator never lets up. It's always there narrating our story because without the narrator the story would fall apart and we would have no security. So meditation gives us the opportunity to see the narrator for what it is and to possibly open ourselves up to what is rather than sleeping through life wrapped in the dream of our story. It takes enormous patience and dedication and the only way a person comes to see this for themselves is if they get dissatisfied or disillusioned with the status quo. And they have to be deeply dissatisfied because it's usually a difficult and slow process of breaking down the story. This is why it tends to occur most often in people who have been through profound and serious trauma. And all of those words are just about worthless. The only way to have any idea of what meditation can teach is to sit down and do it, preferably with some expert guidance to make sure you're on the right track initially. And there are plenty of excellent resources out there for the Buddhist methods, not so much for the Daoist methods...

still turns to motion as I peer deeply into apparent matter

Very similar to my school. Do you practice Stable Body Pounding (An Shen Pao 安身炮)?

Thanks My only response to your approach to DDJ would be - don't believe everything you think! (nor do I) Lao Zi points to things that go beyond rational thought and ideas. That's where meditation can be helpful. Best regards.