LETTING GO OF TRYING TO CONTROL LIFE

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“74

If you realise that all things change,

there is nothing you will try to hold on to.

If you aren't afraid of dying,

there is nothing you can't achieve. Trying to control the future

is like trying to take the master carpenter's place.

When you handle the master carpenter's tools, chances are that you'll cut your hand.”

SOURCE: 
Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation & commentary : Te III


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CHINESE WISDOM FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A CUP OF TEA

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“There was a mad horse getting crazy in my stomach, hitting my lungs and heart with his hooves like he was trying to get out from there. That tea was really weird (…) At first put in an empty pot and being burnt, afterwords boiled, full of strange bitterness and smell of burning. I felt like spitting it out, screaming and escaping from there, but I stayed. That's what politeness and being a traveler requires from you. (…) I was sitting in the house of the Bai people and wondering how to disappear. (…)

- More tea – my hostess said.

It wasn't a question. It was an order.

- Xiexie, thank you – I got up very fast, trying to put on my face something that could eventually be called a smile. The bitter taste of tea was twisting my tongue.
- Sit – the Chinese ordered.
I sat down.
- Drink.
I drank. And I was surprised because the second cup didn't have this terrible bitterness - at the contrary - it was a bit sweet and tasty! I breathed a sigh of relief. I finished the tea, put back the cup and got up.
- Sit – repeated Chinese. - More tea.

More tea? Really, the hospitality of Bai people was starting to be annoying.

- Drink – the girl put a cup in front of me.
I wanted to say 'no', refuse and go away but I smelled an extraordinary fragrance. Violet, honey with a bit of spiciness. I swallowed unspoken words and drank the third tea.
- Good tea? - the Chinese asked.
- Delicious! - I answered immediately and totally honestly.
- You see – the Bai woman leaned over me. - Tea is like our life. The first cup - it is youth. Bitter, full of disappointments and difficult lessons that you're getting from life. It's the time of learning and gaining experience.
- Oh! - I sighted, impressed. That tea was so bitter that I could still feel the pain inside me.
- The second cup is like an adulthood. Then you are able to use the knowledge that you've gained before and you're eating sweet fruits of what you've learnt in your youth.
It's true that in the second cup I could taste nuts and cane sugar.
- And the third cup? - I asked.
- The third cup is like an old age. A bit bitter and a bit sweet, with a bit of honey and ginger, because the wisdom of old age tells you that the life has a lot of different tastes and all of them are worth trying.”



SOURCE:
My own translation & interpretation of: Blondynka w Chinach, Beata Pawlikowska, National Geographic 2012




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CONQUERING THE NATURE OR COOPERATING WITH IT?

COMING INTO THIS WORLD, OR OUT OF IT?

THE ILLUSION OF BEING ISOLATED EGO IN THE BAG OF SKIN.

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 “But the problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body – a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. 'I came into this world.' 'You must face reality.' 'The conquest of nature.'

This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from the tree. As the ocean 'waves', the universe 'peoples'. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in the theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated 'egos' inside bags of skin.

The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world 'outside' us is largely hostile. We are forever 'conquering' nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. In America the great symbols of this conquest are the bulldozer and the rocket- the instrument that batters the hills into flat tracts for little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the great phallic projectile that blasts the sky. (Nonetheless, we have fine architects who know how to fit houses into hills without ruining the landscape, and astronomers who know that the earth is already way out in space, and that our first need for exploring other worlds is sensitive electronic instruments which, like our eyes, will bring the most distant objects into our own brains.) (…) The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events-that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies-and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

The second result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien, an mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda is the worst possible source of control for a powerful technology.”

SOURCE: Alan Watts, The book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, ABACUS, 1966

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DIFFERENT VIEWS ON EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN AND THE PROBLEM OF STIFFNESS.

“That spring I have realized with surprise that I can fight. Although I came back home with a nose injury, I've had a lot of satisfaction. (…) My dad was upset because since then I've been fighting quite often. He was asking if I had been behaving well and I was answering all those uncomfortable questions with 'I don't know'. I remember till now what I heard from him: everybody, either a child or an adult, has to ask himself a question – did I act honestly? Children are asked the same question in a different way – were you behaving well? It is the most important question of our life and it can not stay without any answer. You shouldn't wait till somebody else asks you this question, you have to ask it yourself every day. Buryats don't hit their children, they don't even shout at them. Dad used to say that unwise behavior can happen to every person, even being as clever as his daughter is. A mistake can be changed into something good, one just has to be able to come to right conclusions. The best is to learn with somebody's mistakes, some people can do that.”

SOURCE:
My own translation & interpretation of: Urodziłam się nad Bajkałem, Bełła-Chan Skwarska, MWK 2012; 

THE RSA ANIMATED VIDEO ABOUT CHANGING EDUCATION PARADIGMS:

“76

Men are born soft and supple;

dead, they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant;

dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible

is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding

is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail.”

SOURCE: 
Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation & commentary : Te III

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 THE UNIVERSE & US

“The universe implies the organism, and each single organism implies the universe – only the 'single glance' of our spotlight, narrowed attention, which has been taught to confuse its glimpses with separate 'things', must somehow be opened to the full vision, which Schrödinger goes on to suggest:

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end. ¹

1. Erwin Schrödinger, My view of the World. Cambrige University Press, 1964, p. 22”

SOURCE: 
Alan Watts, The book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, ABACUS, 1966

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EMOTIONS & CONTROL

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<<“Nothing wrong with anger or any other emotion. Just pay attention to how you behave.” (...)              

“Anger is a powerful tool to transform old habits (…) and replace them with new ones.” (…)
Fear and sorrow inhibit action; anger generates it. When you learn to make proper use of your anger, you can change fear and sorrow to anger, then turn anger to action. That's the body's secret of internal alchemy.”

Back in the office, Socrates drew some water from the springwater dispenser and put on the evening's tea specialty, rose hips, as he continued. “To rid yourself of old patterns, focus all your energy not on struggling with the old, but on building the new.”

“How can I control my habits if I can't even seem to control my emotions?”

“You don't need to control your emotion,” he said, “Emotions are natural, like passing weather. Sometimes it's fear, sometimes sorrow or anger. Emotions are not the problem. The key is to transform the energy of emotion into constructive action.”

I got up, took the whistling kettle off the hot plate, and poured the steaming water into our mugs. “Can you give me a specific example, Socrates?”

“Spend time with a baby.”

Smiling, I blew on my tea. “Funny, I never thought of babies as masters of emotions.”

“When a baby is upset, it expresses itself in banshee wails – pure crying. It doesn't wonder about whether it should be crying. Babies accept their emotions completely. They let feelings flow, then let them go. In this way, infants are fine teachers. Learn their lessons and you'll dissolve old habits.”>>

SOURCE: 
Way of the peaceful warrior, Dan Millman; HJ Kramer, New World Library, California 2000



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 STABILITY & FEAR

“13

Success is as dangerous as failure.

Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

your position is shaky.

When you stand with your two feet on the ground,

you will always keep your balance. What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?

Hope and fear are both phantoms

that arise from thinking of the self.

When we don't see the self as self,

what do we have to fear? See the world as your self.

Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self;

then you can care for all things.

(...)One can be stable and efficient when one avoids ambition. This does not mean to not take opportunities which arise of themselves, but more to not try and raise those opportunities artificially. (...)

Hope and fear run contrary to the 'as such-ness' of events. Hoping, as it were, is to prefer one way to another; fear is that the not preferred way will come about. In both cases, it is the skin-contained ego trying to impose itself on Nature.

(...)When we can accept and love all things the Universe is doing, all of its 'wiggles', there is no need for ambition, hopes or fears (...). We do not need advantages, for everything and everyone is 'advantaged'. And one does not apply one's stability toward an isolated security, but to the well-being of all.”

SOURCE:
Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell translation) & commentary : Tao I


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