The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real - but then so must consciousness be real since its effects are so tangible. The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication - but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind - sorcery.

• taoism
• consciousness
• perception
• intoxication
• awareness
• realism
• conditioning
• existence
• experience

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one who instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

• other
• self
• self-awareness
• taoism
• stoicism
• blame
• awakening

Jung loved to repeat a story about a Chinese rainmaker which his friend Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower, told him was a personal experience. Wilhelm was visiting a village devastated by a drought at a time when they sent for a rainmaker. When the rainmaker - who, as was normal in China at the time, was a Buddhist priest - arrived, he was asked what he would require. He asked only for a small hut to live in at the edge of the village. He then retired to that hut. \r\nAt the end of three days, he came out of the hut and it began to rain. While the people of the village scampered in delight, Wilhelm asked the priest how he had brought the rain. The priest said that when he came to the village, he could feel that it was 'out of Tao'; that is, emotionally disturbed. That made him feel 'out of Tao' as well. So he withdrew to the hut until he was once more 'in Tao'. When he did so, the rain came. \r\nThe goal is to experience life simultaneously as both a personal experience and a symbolic act. This is hard to describe, but it can become normal to look at every action in the day, every person we come into contact with, every event we hear about in the world as symbolic. Outer events seem to speak to our inner needs. Personal experience seems to speak to outer events. Out lives seem synchronous with those around us, for better or worse.

• experience
• myth
• taoism
• tao
• symbolic action system
• synchronicity
• balance
• life
• time
• jung

The more we know of particular things, the more we know of God.

• spinoza
• taoism
• zen
• god

People who feel a profound need to justify themselves have difficulty in understanding the viewpoints of those who do not, and the Chinese who created Zen were the same kind of people as Lao Tzu, who, centuries before, had said, 'Those who justify themselves do not convince.'  For the urge to make or prove oneself right has always jiggled the Chinese sense of the ludicrous, since as both Confucians and Taoists - however different these philosophies in other ways - they have invariably appreciated the man who can 'come off it.'  To Confucius it seemed much better to be human-hearted than righteous, and to the great Taoists, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, it was obvious that one could not be right without also being wrong, because the two were as inseparable as back and front.  As Chuang Tzu said, 'Those who would have good government without its correlative misrule, and right without its correlative wrong do not understand the principles of the universe.

• ji-ji-mu-ge
• justification
• lao tzu
• taoism
• government
• understanding
• zen
• other

William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury) told us a story about Sir Walford Davies, who was then Master of the King's Music.  He had been present on an occasion when Sir Walford was instructing an untrained choral group in hymn-singing.  He started them out with some familiar hymn which they bellowed forth with gusto to impress the Archbishop, and the musical effect was terrible.  But there was also present a small professional choir, and Sir Walford asked them to go through several verses of a completely unfamiliar hymn so that everyone could memorize the tune.  'Now,' he said, 'we're all going to sing this new hymn.  But one thing is absolutely important: you must not try to sing it.  Just think of the tune and let it sing itself.'  The result was such a marked improvement that he turned to the Archbishop and said, 'Isn't that also good theology?

• music
• education
• zen
• theology
• taoism
• tao

The 'kingdom of heaven' is a state of the heart - not something that is to come 'above the earth' or 'after death.' The whole concept of natural death is lacking in the evangel: death is no bridge, no transition; it is lacking because it belongs to a wholly different, merely apparent world, useful only insofar as it furnishes signs. The 'hour of death' is no Christian concept - an 'hour,' time, physical life and its crises do not even exist for the teacher of the 'glad tidings.' The 'kingdom of God' is nothing that one expects; it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it will not come in 'a thousand years' - it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.

• christ
• death
• heaven
• mysticism
• taoism
• time
• being
• eternal present
• god
• life
• will
• experience
• crises
• transition

Take it that you have died today, and your life's story is ended; and henceforward regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.

• peace
• stoicism
• taoism
• life
• time
• nature

Put from you the belief that 'I have been wronged', and with it will go the feeling.  Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.

• stoicism
• taoism
• self-control
• magick
• conditioning
• emotion
• negative emotions
• will
• belief

Above all, never struggle or strain; but be master of yourself, and view life as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, and as a mortal.  Among the truths you will do well to contemplate most frequently are these two: first, that things can never touch the soul, but stand inert outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within; and secondly, that all visible objects change in a moment, and will be no more.  Think of the countless changes in which you yourself have had a part.  The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.

• stoicism
• taoism
• soul
• life
• will
• change
• struggle