Saturday, February 16, 2019
Reflections on The Tao Te Ching Essay -- Ancient World Culture
Reflections on The Tao Te ChingWhen the early Christians had to keep their faith against the persecutions of the papistic Empire, they had -- evidently -- a visible enemy. Once their religion was legalized and constituted, however, they had new questions to ask concerning who they were, what could sustain their souls and their way of life. Some of them, at least, concluded that the physicalism of the dominant Roman way of life was a non-agressive, but equally corrosive upshot that would destroy them -- non physically, but spiritually. These Fourth Century Christians, men and women, wherefore left their societies and withdrew into the desert to be able to find true paradise, not in a safe, secure niche in society, but in their relationship with God. That is, they had to escape the values that so comprehensively enveloped them that they could not judge or feel clearly about deeper matters. Thus freed in the desert, they could receipt what a full human life was in practice. The se spiritual discoveries of a way to live, to be, could then be used to challange the complex and tempting materialism that seemed to dominate the culture of the time.In a much briefer, easier, and less rivet way, Henry David Thoreau, someone better known to our own time, tried his experimentation by lifetime for two years in the woods by Waldon Pond in order to drive life into a respite and find out just what it really was worth and what it essentially meant. tally to Thoreau, people too readily accepted one already established set of ideas or another, good or bad assessments of life, and didnt seek answers for themselves. He too in his course of events wanted to make known what he learned, wanted to publish, as he said, the essential goodness or meanne... ...ind hits it. Those who by the age of eighteen have thick calendars organizing their too-complicated lives, those who have learned that a branch does not have real meaning, those whose religion tries to teach control but does not get discoverd (consider the lilies of the field, they do not spin nor toil, yet Solomon in his glory was not so bright arrayed) -- can we enter the vision of the writings of one of us who lived 2500 years ago and left the city of confusion to find learning? Can we find in the tensions of his writings -- as they are the shapes of the tensions of living in a confused world -- the way of life that is virtually natural? Can we be at home in the earth that produces us and mirrors so readily what we are when we stop and look, wary as those crossing the ice, listening for cracks that might freeze them before they drowned, we see and hear the signs?
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