Just maybe it isn't all about me. Being truly spontaneous without an agenda, takes no discipline. Always the "cause" gets in the way, and remains contained within a small sphere of self. http://thetao.info/tao/weiwuwei.htm
The Tao Te Ching was written by the isolated community and primitive tribes in the isolated mountains of southern China. It was the civilized Chinese who added the mystical concept of wu wei wu (do without doing) merely because an actual pragmatic philosophy would never have survived the political and social reality, so, they turned it into a religion.
Do you happen to have a source for this information? I would be very interested in reading it.....thanks in advance.
https://www.amazon.com/Dao-Jing-Philosophical-Translation-Mandarin/dp/0345444191 I don't have a source for all the anthropological evidence and would love to see someone come out with a single comprehensive book on the subject. The 12,000 year old Pakua or Bagua is the shamanistic origins of Taoism that were later perfected in the I-Ching. A ten year cross disciplinary study of the I-Ching concluded that, for introspective purposes, it was word perfect and could not be improved upon. The archeologists have determined that it appears the first half of the Tao Te Ching was written some 2,500 years ago by the isolated communities and tribes in the mountains who combined imported Indian Pantheism with their well developed shamanism to give it more of a rigorous formal logical foundation. India at the time had become the land of a thousand religions due to its central location in the silk road trade and fighting between different sects encouraged them to produce more formal foundations for their religions and often combine them. The second half of the text appears to have been written by civilized Chinese scholars when the famous Yellow Emperor adopted it as a religion with the intention of uniting China and ending the infamous "Warring States" period. The archaeologists had suspected this was the case for some time when they noticed that the older the text the less mystical it became. Primitive tribes can be extremely pragmatic about such things due to the fact that without writing and living in small groups they naturally tend to adopt very flexible philosophical and religious beliefs that anybody can interpret for themselves because that's what people are willing to pass on from one generation to the next. Organized religion in civilization tends to be much more political and conservative.
I looked up "Dao de jing" , the title of the book in the link you provided. I found this. http://indiana.edu/~p374/Daodejing.pdf There are 6 renderings of "non-action" in the translation. So you may be right about that being added later, but for most all practitioners of Taoism, it is a very important concept/or non-concept. :scholar:
It's the civilized Chinese version that everyone has come to know and there are over a hundred English language translations of the text. I'm extrapolating poetry from the text myself, but using a more pragmatic approach of replacing the mystical wu wei wu with the concept that when we no longer make distinctions between who we are and what we are doing we become more authentic. It's not that I have anything against Chinese mysticism, but it's better to have a solid philosophical foundation when translating such concepts into English which is a more dualistic language. In English speaking cultures the idea that we are more honest and authentic when we don't distinguish between who we are and what we are doing is quite commonplace. For the original text it makes a lot of sense to use mysticism because the text itself is a minimalistic representation of a fractal dragon equation meant to twist your mind into knots, but I'm expanding upon the text and attempting to clarify a great deal of what has traditionally made English readers go cross-eyed. In general, the more mystical the more the Chinese love it, while English speaking cultures prefer pretty prose and romanticism and I am attempting a more humorous extrapolation of the text that explains in plain English a lot of things the minimalistic versions only allude to. Even in plain English a lot of it is not easy to follow, but I try.
That sounds fantastic!!! I wish you ALL the best in doing the translating! If/when you finish, I would love to read your work. Let me/us know how to get it if you make it public.
I've posted quite a few of the poems here at this website for anyone to read. Just look in the poetry section. They aren't quite finished yet, but good enough for now. I'm attempting to extrapolate a systems logic from the Tao Te Ching, it's a metaphorical Theory of Everything and Nothing. By treating every word as a variable with no intrinsic meaning or value it can describe multifractal of a fractal dragon within a broader Mandelbrot pattern which is what the theorists all say is required for a fractal geometry theory of everything.
selective inaction, can however, be a very powerful form of influence, by exercising the wisdom of time and place. this could also be one of the possibly intended meanings. a more enduring enjoyment does not come from excitement. (though it may well generate its own, in its own quiet way)
When placed in larger contexts all of our emotions become synergistically-normalized. The more thoughts and feelings we acquire the more their synergy diminishes the individual impact of any given emotion. The one exception is contentment, which comes at no cost and, without contentment, excitement is merely going through the motions which is why people often require progressively ever greater stimulation just to get their rocks off.
this ^^ well i won't say contentment is automatic nor free. its something who's value has to be learned and often isn't. and its often derided and under rated too. we do live in a universe though, that doesn't have to give a shit. but WE, create (statistically) MOST of the conditions we (individually) experience, by how considerate we choose to be, or not be, of all things. and at any rate, excitement is, as you also point out, an addiction, which in and of itself, gratifies no more then a passing moment, when it even does that.
Small children can sleep in the noisiest places precisely because we normally come into this world more content to begin with. Contentment is the lowest possible energy state of the complete system which can obtain any higher energy state the fastest while, going from faster to slower always takes more time. Someone spooks you on the couch and it takes time to pry yourself off the ceiling not merely because we are geared that way, but because it expresses a fundamental law of nature that applies to everything. As difficult as it might sound to us we are never more than one step away from contentment and it is our other affects which are assumed. Each higher energy state is assumed at the expense of some of our contentment which you could compare to a car engine idling nicely. When racing at high speeds it is harmony that is important and the more harmonious the idly the more harmonious the racing engine will become.
wei wu wei - cult sorry daoism lineages as tatras have been massacred by china - what is left is chinese fake daoism but there is still taii chi and daoist astrology
