01
One of the rules for life is
If you want someone to change in relation to you,
you have to change in relation to them.
How do you need to be different?
How different can you be?
What happens when you do what?
What might you do instead?
Our entire world is shaped
by the way we respond to
our entire world.
When we change our response,
we change our world.
This doesn't mean we will have
a better world.
We will have a different world.
The keys to a better world are
balance and harmony,
rhythm and flow,
integrity, sincerity, spontaneity,
emptiness, stillness, silence,
reflection, realization,
experimentation, reflection...
02
It is easy for me to think
that the happiest people
are the most easily satisfied.
And the unhappiest people
are the most difficult to be satisfied,
and are, perhaps, never satisfied.
I do not know if this proposal
will stand up under scrutiny,
investigation, examination.
Perhaps the happiest people
are happiest when they are struggling
to be satisfied against all odds,
and can never be satisfied
because their ambition for further achievement
exceeds all of their accomplishments.
And the unhappiest people
will never be happy
because they have never excelled
at anything.
We should launch a study!
Make inquiries!
Conduct interviews!
Get to the bottom of it!
03
Zen is what happened
when Buddhism met Taoism.
The core of Taoism/Zen
is the spontaneous arising
from the heart of stillness and silence
that is at once knowing/doing.
It has nothing to do with understanding.
We simply know what is to be done and do it.
That is the magic of Taoism/Zen.
How do we know what we know?
There is the Tao that cannot be said/explained told.
“The path that can be discerned as a path
is not a reliable path,”
(Martin Palmer’s translation of
“The Tao that can be told/said/explained
is not the eternal Tao.”)
04
The power of the Way
is influence, not control.
We live best when we live in harmony
with the flow of life--of circumstances--
in the moment of living.
Our place is to align ourselves--our influence--
our power--our Te--
with the outer natural order,
or Way, of things, the Tao.
And be in accord with,
at one with, the Tao
in each situation as it arises.
This is not to live in the service of
getting or way/having what we want,
but to live in the service
of doing what needs to be done
no matter what that may mean
for us personally.
05
Take the thinking and believing
out of religion
and you have the knowing and doing
"spontaneously arising"
of Taoism and Zen,
so that what is done
"happens of itself"
in a Wu-Wei kind of way.
We get there by cultivating
the right kind of
emptiness, stillness and silence.
06
Suffering is a perspective,
a way of interpreting things
not going our way.
Flip the perspective
and you have maturation,
wisdom,
knowing,
seeing,
understanding
letting be what is,
enlightenment which doesn’t care
what its chances are,
and is here to do
what needs to be done,
when,
where
and how it needs to be done,
no matter what,
anyway, nevertheless, even so.
Jesus in Gethsemane,
saying okay to death,
"rising from the dead,"
laughing on his way to Galilee.
Doing what is called for
all the way to the next thing,
and the thing after that…
All the way—that is the way!
07