Mastodawn

I'm feeling moved to read the #Tao Te Ching today, and I have some thoughts about the chapter I read. I'll talk about them later.

I hope your #morning is going well #today.

Do you think it's #human #nature to fill your #free #time with more stuff to do until you realize you can't fit in anymore? My #wife does this a lot. If we have to be somewhere in 15 minutes and it takes 10 minutes to get there, she will squeeze something into those spare 5 minutes to maximize how much stuff she can do for the day.

I'm the kind of person who just gets to the location 5 minutes early, but she doesn't feel rushed even though she might be late.

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Patrick Stewart Mar 2, 2023

Article is now live over on The Taoist Online publication on #Medium

https://thetaoist.online/tao-te-ching-chapter-20-e20fa639c4cb

Tao Te Ching Chapter 20 - The Taoist Online

In 2019, I began a journey to study the Tao, which is to explore the nature of the universe. You may think, “How can anyone study the universe?” And to that, I would respond, “Look inside yourself.”…

The Taoist Online

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splicer Mar 2, 2023

@Patrickstewart I've always been struck by the value given to the "bad" person (as in ch 27, but more poignantly in 41: "without that laughter it wouldn't be Tao". I know this isn't the same as what's in ch 20 when Lao Tzu is describing himself, but it seems like the flip side of the same coin. There are all these judgments and they're OK as far as they are useful but we ought not forget that they are ultimately empty. (And perhaps if they are ultimately empty, maybe that is why they can be useful? I dunno.)

Thanks for your article.

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Patrick Stewart Mar 2, 2023

@splicer 27 has one of my absolute favorite lines.

"What is a good person but a bad person's teacher?
What is a bad person but raw materiel for his teacher?"

This totally blew my mind the first time I heard it, and I just laughed.

Taken as a whole, I think the examples and explanations of "good man" and "bad man" contradict purposefully. It would be hard to describe his kind of world view without putting it into good/bad terms. So he is showing how both good men and bad men are just men. And how close their relationship really is. Notice at the start of 20 he even calls out that they are not really different.