Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!udel!princeton!phoenix!cme.nist.gov
From: klm@cme.nist.gov (Ken Manheimer)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Taoism
Keywords: elusive participate
Message-ID: <14661@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 19 Mar 90 14:28:14 GMT
References: <14530@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <14554@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: mukund@phoenix.Princeton.EDU
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The net is amazing.  Taoism is such an elusive topic.  It's very nice
to have an opportunity to compare with some interested people things
we've noticed.

And speaking of elusive, 

I've been fascinated for as long as i can recall with apparent
inevitability of inexactitude with which we seem to formally be
acquainted with the universe.  It seems like we *can't* know anything
absolutely.  Yet at the same time there does seem to be some beguiling
correspondence, some internal corroboration, between what we know and
some universe that's out t/here.  It seems to me that Taoism is a lot
about ways to develop the ability to be involved with the real and
human reality and reduce the ways we are diverted by inessential or
misleading avenues and byways...

I think that people seek religions in order to reconcile discrepancies
and lacks in the world models that are products of peoples rigorous
rational endeavors, particularly in how those world models relate,
or fail to relate, to both the larger and smaller aspects of people's
personal, more immediate concerns.  Ie, not just what is the world,
but how can we live with it better?

I believe that what we can explicitly say is less than what we can
know, and what we can know is less than what we are prone to
(consciously) apprehend, and what we tend to consciously apprehend is
(very likely) less than what's out t/here.  I think Taosism says that
in a way we really do apprehend everything, but there is an art to
integrating it, to cooperating or collaborating with reality.  I think
Taoism (and many offshoots and alternatives, one way or another)
suggests that there's an art to participating more fully in the world,
and that the key to honing these intuitive and rational sensibilities,
to getting them in tune with the world, is in increasing the degree to
which we aim for participating in our situations at any and every
moment.  Further, that developing this encompassing participation is
the key to reconciling one's misgivings and mistakings in the
world....

Sweet.

 "Confucious said, 'Your will must be one.  Do not listen with your
  ears but with your mind.  Do not listen with your mind but with your
  vital energy.  Ears can only hear, mind can only think, but vital
  energy is empty, receptive to all things.  Tao abides in emptiness.
  Emptiness is the fasting of mind.'"  - Chuang Tsu inner chapters,
					 trans. Gia-Fu-Feng and Jane English

Stink u smelly mulch,

ken.

(I won't be able to follow this discussion for a few weeks, i'm
supposed to be leaving for two weeks of vacation (will in a moment,
thanks)...  Cheers.)