tao1776

Did you ever vow one day to work with your anger, only to find that the emergence of anger making situations increased exponentially in equal proportion to the seriousness of your vow? Or you finally plan to start a diet; and you're serious this time. Then you find that your unused social calendar suddenly fills to the brim with dinner parties and other such social gatherings where food is in beautiful displayed abundance. Or maybe you decide to give up smoking - and you get a stack of buy one get two free coupons in the mail. You know what I'm getting at?

I "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."  Mark Twain I know. I indicated that my days of posting may have come to an end. But as the old saying goes; "When the student is ready, the teacher will come". I have a few new teachers now.  Reminding me of that which I already know. An undetermined mind. Not fixed on the past or the present but on the watercourse way. I am returning to a simple Qigong practice.  I am reminded to hear once again, the words of my old teacher: "The art of living...is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.  Life is like music for its own sake. We are li...

"We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of grater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our [forebears] sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Neitzche called the spirit of gravity. -  Carl Jung  I am at a point in my life where I find myself more reclusive than I have ever been before. Although I try to address the conflicts within that separate me from my former sense of self,  I am often made sp...

I'm not sure about what you're doing this 4th of July. But I will be celebrating in true American fashion. Beer, BBQ and bang, bang, bang...Gotta love those fireworks! I eat too much I drink too much I want too much Too much! No one wants to hear it but this holiday is about celebrating our Independence from the King of England's rule. This marks the beginning of this grand experiment which we call democracy . No ruler to dictate what you should think;what you can read, to tell you who to worship. You have rights!   It must be remembered that the way of things before the founding of America has always been anything but a democracy. And don't believe for one minute that we are a Christian Nation. It was the intent of the founding fathers  that as a nation, we should be free from church rule. The world had already experienced centuries of Papist and Kingly rule. The Pope was seldom Christ-like and the King seldom father-like in their rule.   What fathe...