Where do I start with the tao?

[Anonymous No.20014301]

[Anonymous No.20014307]

by going outside

[Anonymous No.20014341]

By KILLING YOURSELF

[Anonymous No.20014343]

He who knows does not tell, he who tells does not know (get fucked)

[Anonymous No.20014395]

>>20014341
Daodejing ''Making This Life Significant'': A Philosophical Translation
Ballantine Books
Roger T. Ames, David L. Hall
this is for a scholarly translation
also check out Dao De Jing by Gia Fu Feng, a beatnik who hung out with the Dharma Bums

After that read Zhuangzi, Inner Chapters by Gia Fu Feng

Read it many times in many different moods to crystalize the values in your head. It's a gift that keeps on giving and any other way to live is a cope and will be cut short.

[Anonymous No.20014422]

tao of pooh

[Anonymous No.20014562]

>>20014301
Creation, Gore Vidal

[Anonymous No.20014657]

>>20014301
1.Daodejing
2.Zhuangzi
3.Grass

You have now tasted the exit level for all philosophy, religion, and honestly most aspects of life and can begin to actually enjoy things

[Anonymous No.20014675]

>>20014395
>>20014657
Finally something substantial on this board. Where does the I Ching fit into all of this?

[Anonymous No.20014746]

>>20014675
you can divine the future and find out in advance if your orchard is gonna have a good year
or what spot is good for fishing on your local river

[Anonymous No.20014888]

>>20014657
>just go with the flow bro
eh...?

[Anonymous No.20015058]

>>20014422
I prefer to Tao of Poopoo Peepee.

[Anonymous No.20015550]

>>20014301
here ya go

[Anonymous No.20015612]

>>20014422
Banned in China

[Anonymous No.20015683]

>>20014301

If you need to learn about the Tao you probably already don't know the Tao. If you don't know the Tao at least read the Tao Te Ching. If you still feel you need to read anything else just fucking give up.

[Anonymous No.20015704]

>>20014301
Lao Tzu was a Christian
>The Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things. All things leave behind them the Obscurity (out of which they have come), and go forward to embrace the Brightness (into which they have emerged), while they are harmonised by the Breath of Vacancy.

[Anonymous No.20015711]

>>20014301
The Holy Bible. The same Hebrew word is used for both Enoch "walking" with God and the Hiddekel river flowing.

[Anonymous No.20015743]

>>20015704
>>20015711
Both of you are going to Hell

[Anonymous No.20015815]

>>20014301
Daode Jing, Zhuangzi, Leizi, and an introduction to Wuxing (Chinese elemental, medicinal, geomancy system) and Qi.
Then maybe some Tai Chi and Zen Buddhism (Taoism but syncretised with Chinese Mahayana Buddhism and later Japaneseified)
>>20014675
I Ching is traditional Chinese divination, typically taking the form of 6 coin flips (usually done by taking said coins into the enclosed palms and shaking like die) the coins' face signifying either a whole or broken bar for the Hexagram to be constructed. Once the Hexagram is made one consults the I Ching for the Hexagram in question and it's meaning in relation to the question asked. The I Ching does not give YES/NO/MAYBE answers so questions are best asked in a more open sense e.g.
>What would the effect of engaging in X be?
Rather than
>Should I engage in X?

The I Ching (Book of Changes) predates Laozi's Tao Te Ching (The Classic of the Way and Virtue) but is of the same cultural background that would later influence what we know as Taoism, the I Ching also contains some
commentaries which were cannonized by Emperor Wu of Han and while not part of the Daozang (Daoist Cannon in the Daoist ecclesiarchy) is of great importance to eastern mystics.

[Anonymous No.20016555]

>>20014301
You can not speak of the tao since that is not the eternal tao.
You must feel it. You must preform wu wei (effortless action). Aka go with the flow. Be you and live in the moment.

[Anonymous No.20016641]

>>20014301
I started with the Tao Te Ching, working on the Zhuangzi now

[Anonymous No.20016643]

>>20014888
Yes, you should also take up surfing.
>>20014301
If you know anything about software development, the Tao of Programming is a fun short read. I read it roughly once a year when I'm trapped in a meeting but have my laptop in front of me.

[Anonymous No.20016686]

Just realise that the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi aren't central texts in historical Taoism nor actually existing Taoism

[Anonymous No.20016758]

>>20016686
How come, why are they misunderstood to be so, and what are the central texts if not them?

[Anonymous No.20016928]

magic mushrooms, in a forest setting with a couple of close friends and u will know the Tao

[Anonymous No.20017212]

>>20015704
>>20015711
>you made this?
>I made this
Christlarpers are embarrassing

[Anonymous No.20018394]

>>20016928
based

[Anonymous No.20018924]

>>20014301
Is there really anything more to Daoism than "Go with the flow bro"?

[Anonymous No.20019021]

>>20014301
>>20014675
Just smoke weed like a retarded junkie.
>>20017212
And yet you're a white western male obsessed with oriental religions.

[Anonymous No.20019658]

>>20018924
No but it's one thing to intellectualize it, another to do it

[Anonymous No.20019671]

>>20019021
Unlike you, larper, my family has been orthodox since there has been such a thing as orthodoxy. I'm as close to "ethnically christian" as it's possible to get, but I realized it was bullshit pretty early on. I'll leave you to your larping and seething, maybe someday you'll grow out of it

[Anonymous No.20019678]

>>20019021
>le “Buddhism and spirituality is for stoners” meme
The mental gymnastics people will do just to avoid learning about other cultures. Is it so difficult to think that people can study these things without fetishising the orient?

[Anonymous No.20019707]

>>20019678
Philosophies that make more sense than this guy's larp feel threatening to him so he's built this strawman to avoid having to confront the fact that his beliefs are silly.

[Anonymous No.20019803]

>>20019658
That's true I suppose. I've read many books on it, but it's still very difficult for me.

[Anonymous No.20020346]

>>20016758
Confucius is way more relevant to actual life.
You have to at least be a gentleman before you can manifest the Dao.

[Anonymous No.20020356]

>>20014301
A) You don't start. It started you.
B) You can't stop. It stops you.

[Anonymous No.20020392]

>>20015550
Shouldn't this have the jade dragon sex book on it at some point? The Sexual Teachings of the Jade Dragon?

[Anonymous No.20020400]

>>20015704
Is this an orthodox metaphor for the trinity and it's relation to creation?
It seems a bit wrong to me but I'm not a Christian

[Anonymous No.20020420]

>>20015815
Thanks anon

[Anonymous No.20020912]

>>20015612
Stop making shit up you braindead faggot

[Anonymous No.20022396]

bump

[Anonymous No.20023526]

>>20015704
Passages like these indeed refer to a primordial “perennial philosophy”, seeds of which are found in many authentic major religious traditions. In Hinduism, it’s the trimurti — the three-faced All comprised of Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer). In Christianity, an analogous concept is presented with the Holy Trinity, being the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

If you look at Genesis 1:2:
>Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

This is essentially parallel to this passage about things emerging from the Obscurity into Brightness, as well as the distinction in certain forms of Hindu theology, such as Advaita Vedanta, between Nirguna Brahman (Brahman without attributes), also referred to as Para Brahman (beyond Brahman), and Saguna Brahman (Brahman with attributes). “Guna” being Sanskrit for “qualities,” and thus it could also be translated as “Unqualified Brahman” and “Qualified Brahman.” In modern Latinate theological terminology, you could call this panentheism. Crude pantheism would be the idea that “The universe we see is itself God” (analogous to the concept of Saguna Brahman). In crude theism, we would have the idea that, “A God Who created the universe exists beyond the constraints of the physical universe which we witness and experience” (something like the idea of Nirguna Brahman). In the true wisdom and revelations of all great sages, saints, and mystics, however, the two ideas are inseparable. Yin and yang form Tao, being a continuum that transcends duality (as in Advaita teachings, meaning literally “not-two”).

In the words of the Greco-Armenian sage, traveler, and esoteric Christian philosopher Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, ideas and teachings like these are “objective knowledge,” corresponding to reality as it actually is, as opposed to mere “subjective knowledge,” such as of the minutiae of history, literature, various fields of science, arts, craftwork, etc., or even the “subjective knowledge” of knowing about religious terminology and rites and scriptures but not understanding the deep truth and concepts behind them. The difference between the two types of knowledge is as vast as that between having a cake in your hand, and eating that cake and tasting it.

In the words of the Sufi sage, Rumi, “A donkey stabled in a library does not become wise.”

Hence, the best way to start with the Tao is in a study of all authentic major religious traditions, as well as by practicing and applying those teachings to your own life with the practice of wu-wei (non-doing), a state of heightened awareness attained by relaxing one’s incessant striving for what one does not immediately have in the moment, and realizing the enlightenment you seek is primordially, eternally, and always already-there.

[Anonymous No.20023599]

>>20023526
An analogous idea is also presented by Heidegger in his “Being & Time”.

>Phenomenology is our way of access to what is to be the theme of ontology ...
Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.

Phenomenology (the study of experience) and ontology (the study of being) make up an inseparable continuum. Without an “experiencer” there would be no “experience,” and “experiencer” and “experience” in fact make up an inseparable continuum transcending the crude distinction between the “experiencer” and “experience,” as if “you” were something apart from the “reality” you experience as “something outside yourself.” “You” are not like, so to speak, a goldfish inside a fishbowl, the fishbowl being the “physical reality environment and reality outside yourself.” You are simultaneously the goldfish, the water, and the fishbowl, the undifferentiated Being manifesting throughout everything, the basic awareness which makes all this possible.

This is not the Satanic prideful idea of “Your personal ego being equivalent to God, you yourself being a god,” but entirely different from it and something to be experienced, not put in words. Meister Eckhart is also well worth reading for his insights into this same primordial philosophy or “objective knowledge.”

>The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Meister Eckhart

Those who had the most profound realizations of this insight, became known throughout history as saints, sages, prophets, even the founders of religions like Christ and the like. However, the original knowledge which they were pointing to became subverted into “religious traditions” which had a lot of historical and cultural accretions pasted over them as a sort of distraction from these primordial teaching of self-knowledge and heightened awareness meant to perfect the unregenerate human being, instead of merely turn them into someone repeating religious phraseology and carrying out rites which are secondary to the basic Truth (“subjective knowledge” as opposed to “objective knowledge,” in Gurdjieff’s phraseology).

[Anonymous No.20023702]

>>20023599
The non-traditional 20th century sage Jiddu Krishnamurti also gets into experiences of what Taoists would call wu-wei in rather beautiful ways repeatedly expressed throughout his life and writings, except without the use of Taoist, Buddhist, or Hindu terminology peppered over it. Krishnamurti called it the state of choiceless awareness. For Buddhists, it wouldn’t be entirely out-of-the-question to see Krishnamurti himself as a potential reincarnated Buddhist monk bringing over his deep experience of the studies of Buddhism and long meditation practices from past life into a 20th-century Indian body with a more Westernized, modern mindset and a disregard for religious conventions! However, ironically, the man Krishnamurti himself would, of course, have disliked such speculations as these, viewing them as beneath him, probably saying something like, “Why worry yourself about reincarnation and who I was in a past life (if past lives even exist) and things you cannot prove instead of simply getting into the state of choiceless awareness, which, paradoxically, is also not a state you should stress yourself into getting into like all these religious masters try to make you do?”

>And, as we have seen, the world is not different from you and me: the world is what we make it. We are the result of the world, and we are the world; so the transformation must begin with us, not with the world, not with outward legislation, blue prints, and so on. It is essential that each one should realize the importance of this inner transformation, which will bring about an outward revolution. Mere change in the outward circumstances of life is of very little significance without the inner transformation; and, as we said, this inner transformation can not take place without self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is to know the total process of oneself, the ways of one's own thinking, feeling, and action; and without knowing oneself, there is no basis for broader action. So, self-knowledge is of primary importance. One must obviously begin to understand oneself in all one's actions, thoughts and feelings, because the self, the mind, the "me" is so very complex and subtle. So many impositions have been placed upon the mind, the "me", so many influences - racial, religious, national, social, environmental - have shaped it, that to follow each step, to analyze each imprint, is extremely difficult; and if we miss one, if we do not analyze properly and miss one step, then the whole process of analysis miscarries. So, our problem is to understand the self, the "me" - not just one part of the "me", but the whole field of thought, which is the response of the "me". We have to understand the whole field of memory from which all thought arises, both the conscious and the unconscious; and all that is the self - the hidden as well as the open, the dreamer and what he dreams.
J. Krishnamurti

[Anonymous No.20023772]

>>20023702
In the system of teaching which Gurdjieff brought to the West from his travels in the East as a young man, practically identical teachings are given, as in his disciple Ouspensky’s account, highly worth reading, entitled “In Search of the Miraculous”

>Without self-knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
G. I. Gurdjieff

The “machine”, in this sense, referring to the automatic functionings of one’s physical sensate body, one’s emotions, and one’s thinking apparatus. The higher work consists of recognizing and detaching oneself from these functions which one is typically so caught up in, and finding the state of higher awareness or choiceless awareness which can view all these aspects one formerly regarded as comprising oneself, as merely being a mechanism created by and inseparable from the universe which one finds oneself in.

In the Indian philosophy of Samkhya, this is referred to as the distinction between the purusha (the soul, the witness-consciousness, pure unqualified consciousness) and prakriti (matter, mechanism, the very mechanisms of one’s body, heart, and mind). So Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Laozi, the Buddha, etc., could be said to be discussing a state of consciousness in which, instead of being in bondage to prakriti (mechanism, matter), the purusha (the soul, pure consciousness) truly recognizes itself.

>Jiva ('a living being') is that state in which purusha is bonded to prakriti. Human experience is an interplay of purusha-prakriti, purusha being conscious of the various combinations of cognitive activities. The end of the bondage of Purusha to prakriti is called liberation or kaivalya (Isolation) by the Samkhya school.

In John 3, with Christ speaking to Nicodemus, identical teachings are given.

>Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
John 3:3-8

The flesh being prakriti, and the spirit being purusha, in the terminology of Samkhya. This refers to a process of the soul extricating itself from blind identification with the body, and, so to speak, being reborn. This is like a second birth — the genuine birth of a soul in oneself, transcending the first birth of being incarnate in a physical body and caught up in the experiences of the world.

[Anonymous No.20024045]

>>20020392
I'm the guy who made the chart, honestly yeah you could probably put that on there too, I just started throwing random stuff on there for the last part (I might make another shorter/condensed one, I've made two so far but I keep overcomplicating it). I haven't read the Jade Dragon thing yet, although I know what you're talking about, that might be interesting.

[Anonymous No.20024199]

>>20014301
You don't. Tao: realized