The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give to those who do not have enough. Man’s way is different. He takes from those who do not have enough to give to those who already have too much. (verse 77. Tr. Gia Fu Feng)Gia-Fu Feng (1919 - 1985) was prominent as both an English translator (with his wife, Jane English) of Daoist classics and a Daoist teacher in the United States, associated with Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, The Beats and Abraham Maslow.
He was born in Shanghai in 1919 into a fairly wealthy family of some influence. His father was a prominent banker, one of the founders of the Bank of China; his mother died when he was 16. He was educated privately in his own home in the classics of the Chinese tradition and in private boarding schools. He was for several months tutored by the wife of the British Consul-General. His family members were Buddhist. For the springtime holiday, they travelled to the ancestral tombs in Yu Yao, in Chekiang Province, for the spring festivals. During the Japanese Occupation, Gia-Fu went to Kunming in Free China to complete his Bachelor's Degree at Southwest Associated University in the liberal arts. Gia-Fu once commented that he had become a millionaire three times in his life, giving his money away each time. The first time was when he worked for the bank in Kunming.
Xiuzhen TuThis is the Yin-yang symbol or Taijitu (太極圖), with black representing yin and white representing yang. It is a symbol that reflects the inescapably intertwined duality of all things in nature, a common theme in Taoism. No quality is independent of its opposite, nor so pure that it does not contain its opposite in a diminished form: these concepts are depicted by the vague division between black and white, the flowing boundary between the two, and the smaller circles within the large regions.
Secret of the Golden Flower
Chinese Taoists believe this bright image has close relation to the "Original Essence", "Golden Flower", and "Original Light" . If the practitioner sees the Mandala, that means he/she see part of "Original Essence", and he/she are entering the beginning level of the immortal essence. In the book of Wilhelm's translation, he describes some of the pictures of the Mandala.
Some might know of my references to the Mandala throughout this blog and more specific the understanding of what the "Pure land" means. If you had never known of what the Koan symbolizes then how would you know to understand that the communication of that "very essence of quality" is transmutable to another human being in it's most pure from?
The Golden Flower is the Elixir of Life (literally, golden ball, golden pill). All changes of spiritual consciousness depend upon the Heart. Here is a secret charm, which, although it works very accurately, is yet so fluent that it needs extreme intelligence and clarity, and complete absorption and calm. People without this highest degree of intelligence and understanding do not find the way to apply the charm; People without this utmost capacity for concentration and calm cannot keep fast hold of it.
This is a photograph of author and philosopher Robert M. Pirsigtaken by Ian Glendinning on the eve of the Liverpool conference of 7th July 2005.
What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Part 1 Chapter 1.(Bold added by me for emphasis)
This article is more about what Robert Maynard Pirsig accomplished. What I had learnt as I came to realize what the value of thought I had taken from the reading. I had already read a lot over the years, and it was that reading that brought it together for me, so that now I can describe what I feel needs to be done.
The title of this post is specific in that the Tao here is the realization that we can constantly move in this relation. Is still to remain part of the earthly state of existence, as the "square" shows in my model of thinking.
Here in this mandala it is interesting to see how such a construction of the diagram becomes focused. Foursquare. If you look at the pyramid and us being over top of, then we can keep this in mind. The Seal of Solomon or Star of David is a symbolism of a kind that warrants the mind to think of involution and evolution. The central location is the place of the heart. Those six smaller triangles then become what?:)
Central to this evolution of the thinking, and the rising above this duality, is to recognize "the Heart" in this relation. It is the idea of the quality that must come into one's thinking to see that what transpires after the distinction of such dualism is to become part of the quality of the new thinking mind. Then the thinking mind has been raised in a "energy configuration" that holds all thoughts to a transforming hierarchy within the pyramid, as a colour of gravity depiction and ascension, as possible in each and every person.
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousness extends.... All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. Carl Jung
The very image at the bottom of this blog page again is a type of koan that was given to me "in literal form" to come to understand it's message. I pass it onto others so that they might consider it's message. It is about life, and about the transformation to a spiritual person. This is a necessary recognition of when we choose to "rise above that dualism" to become situated in the heart mind.
This is also the time when we take the earthly design, and move over top of the pyramid, to see that what lays before us is a recognition of the cyclical nature that dualism enfolds into the living of, as a human being. One needs the heart in order to rise to the higher principals of the intellect, taking that energy and transforming it into new thought processes. So then the pyramid then becomes a dynamical model of the human body and mind.
To ever get the sense of this momentum of opposites transforming into the one other is to realize that a pressure exists on the forearm. IN this contact a oppositional force will cause the realization that if you were empty, no resistance, to allow that opposing movement to move forward. You allow it to become centrifugal, as if, in a rotation, to return the force back onto itself.
Such momentums are the things which propel my own mind through the vast journeys of space on a imaginary spaceship, that while in the Lagrangian mode, one can understand how such rockets can travel with the least amount of energy expedited.
Such an exchange is the idea then that the economy in caught in this kind of action of dualism?
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