Weltanschauung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Tao te ching

  • Tilting at Windmills

    Tilting at Windmills

    I wonder whether I am guilty of “tilting at windmills“.

    A kind friend told me today that she had spent many hours reading my posts and was at a loss to know how to describe them, other than as a “diary”.  My diary, my thoughts.  I felt a little uncomfortable at that but had to realise she was probably right. It made me feel rather exposed, somewhat uneasy.

    I am shaking my fist at the universe.  Confronting an imaginary enemy, pursuing a vain goal, searching for ideals, looking for justification, betterment.  For me, for everyone perhaps.  I am really not too sure.

    I look around and I see such divide and unhappiness.  I wonder whether it need always be thus, whilst reminding myself that it always has been.

    I am neither religious nor altruistic. More of a hermit than anything else and yet I find there are things I want to say. Even if I am baying at the moon.

    I am sure things need not be what they are and yet I find myself so puzzled and disturbed that at every level of society strife and conflict seem inevitable.

    It is just very difficult to get on with each other.  I find people very difficult and I am not the most competitive of souls.  How much more damaging could I have been had I been more grasping, dramatically successful, driven, determined to enforce my will, my aims.

    So the windmills I am tilting at are the ills of the world, whether perceived only by myself or real and objective.

    I would say to my friend: these are simply my thoughts on life.  My thoughts on how to combat my own destructive emotions.  My thoughts on what is important to me and the many, many things that are not.

    To quote the Tao Te Ching:

    Empty yourself of everything.
    Let the mind rest at peace.
    The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.

    (translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

    Who knows, some may find my ramblings helpful, many will not.  Perhaps this is a diary after all.

  • In Search of the Soul

    In Search of the Soul

    There comes a stage where some hand over responsibility to the next generation and gradually withdraw from the world.  Some are born to that stage and lead no other life, some come to it much later.  Some, perhaps the majority, never reach that point in their lives and remain devoted to the material and the worldly.

    It is a search for the soul, a search for the very essence of meaning.  It is not a giving up, it is a progression.   Are they seeking the divine? Almost certainly, but divinity is not to be narrowly defined by religious dogma.

    It is hard not to use religious imagery to illuminate and explain that search, since from time immemorial mysticism has been at the very heart of it.  A yearning for the numinous  has invariably been linked to the concept of a god, or at least to some explanation for the origin of creation and consciousness.

    We are creatures of our background and of our cultural history and are bound to think in terms of the images we have been brought up with. In the West we might think of plainsong, a gothic cathedral or a quiet monastic garden. In the East we might think of the stunning beauty of Zen or the moving words of the Tao Te Ching.

    It is wiser by far to see the common essence of all such traditions and not to be blinded by the sad divisions resulting from the reification of dogma.  Religion is a mere finger pointing to the moon.