Over the next 3 months I hope to write a post for each of the 81 chapters of the immortal Tao Te Ching. I will be using my three favorite translations; those of Jonathan Star, Stanley Lombardo, and David Hinton.

In my own ‘spiritual’ life, it was the Tao Te Ching that opened the first door. I read it for the first time when I was around 17. A Chinese woman I knew said that it could not be understood by a westerner and even the wisest people in China are profoundly challenged by its mysterious words. But for me, I felt that I understood its many themes and over-riding understanding of this world the first time I read it.

I could understand the Tao because it needed no understanding. It is not a matter of understanding, but of an openness to the real; the underlying thread that connects everything in its perfect changeless and ever-changing web. The Navajos (Dinè call this spiritual energy Grandmother Spider woman, the weaver of all the stories.


A painting of a Chinese sage - described as “like” Lao-Tzu

Explicitly, the Tao Te Ching was a manual for leaders. Its 81 chapters were put together around the 5th century BCE, the time of the Buddha and the compiling of the Hebrew Bible. While we are told that its author is the mysterious Lao Tzu, many scholars assert that the text has more than one author. Perhaps Lao Tzu is the main one, but we will probably never know for sure. It is believed that the age of many of the chapters of the Tao are much earlier than the approximate age of its first known compilation.

The Tao Te Ching is the primary text of the Chinese way of art and thought called Taoism. Its sister writing is the equally powerful and transformative Chuang Tzu. Like the Tao, the Chuang Tzu is believed to have more than one author. Scholars claim that it was written in a particularly chaotic and war-like period in Chinese history in the 3rd century BCE. Some scholars have said that the section of the Chuang Tzu called the Inner Chapters might have a single author; perhaps the semi-legendary Chuang Tzu.

One of the most beautiful aspects of the Tao is that is so deeply personal. Thus my own words reflect only my own experience. While it may have been a manual for leadership it is so much more. its short chapters possess immense depth and we will attempt to plumb these depths in these posts. I offer them to you as an invitation for each of us to re-enter this majestic text with an open heart and mind. Always feel free to contribute your own insights and experience.

Tags: Awakening, enlightenment

James Cameron’s new blockbuster Avatar is really 3 separate films. Let me explain.

I saw Avatar on a vast IMAX screen in 3D. And, speaking of IMAX and 3D, I think it would be a good idea to ‘take a look’ at its presentation technology before talking about the movie itself.

This is the first commercial release film I’ve ever seen in an IMAX theater. I have had some experience with 3D watching Disney’s Up and Henry Selick’s Coraline. But combining IMAX and 3D was more than a bit jarring. I suspect that the curvature of the enormous screen created distortions in the film. These distortions became, for me, a bit of a problem. I found that most of the screen was blurry and only a small portion was in relatively crisp focus. I say ‘relatively’ because no part of the screen seemed to be as crisply focused as a conventional non-3D film. I suspect that the technology has a way to go before it really clicks, at least for me. I would like to see the film on a conventional screen in 3D to make a proper comparison. If I do, I’ll get back to you with the results of my ‘investigation’.

As I said, Avatar is really a movie with 3 discrete levels (maybe that’s what is meant by “3D” ). The first level really consists of two parts the opulently visual and the hokey, predictable dialogue/storyline. In this perspective, Avatar is, essentially, a run-of-the-mill children’s flick. The language is unsophisticated, hackneyed, and lacking in nuance. The baddies are real bad and the goodies (the alien Nav’i) are real good. The visual presentation of the film is Disney-like and recalls far less expensive films (like FernGully). The lines spoken by the goodies are like something out of a marine training manual (for example, the proud cry of “Outstanding” said by a marine when a bomb shot from high above kills innocent and lovable aliens) and the lines of the goodies seems to be taken from a sympathetic movie about Native Americans and their inherent balance and harmony with all living things.

On this level Avatar was, for me, a big flop. It’s story was simplistic, it’s language banal, and its scenery, beautiful, but, ultimately, just not enough to carry the film.

My daughter saw Avatar a week before me. She is someone who is both hugely analytical, as well as a person who processes life in a strongly politically left way (very much like her father). She told me that the movie was beautiful, but, like Dances With Wolves, it’s politics were disgusting. She found Avatar’s enviro-political message so bad, that she said that she felt “soiled” by the experience of watching it.

Viewed from my daughter’s perspective, the hero of both films has to be a white guy. In Dances with Wolves, the obviously flawed Lakota (Sioux) people needed a white man (Kevin Costner) to help them fend off starvation by finding a herd of the fast-dwindling buffalo. As this film showed, the white man not only waged ceaseless blood-thirsty war against the Indians, but they also took immense pleasure in slaughtering the once vast buffalo herds out of the sheer joy of killing, as well as the added benefit of starving the native people. This same plot device is used in Avatar. I don’t want to give away too much about the film, but the involvement of the white man (Sully) into the life of the now vulnerable Nav’i becomes essential to their own survival.

I empathized with my daughter’s point-of-view. I felt the sham of this story-line when it finally emerged in the film. But I think that both she and I missed the bigger picture. A Facebook friend of mine wrote me in response to a comment I posted that expressed this criticism. He said, “Having seen and enjoyed both movies I don't really think that's a fair criticism...especially in the case of Dances With Wolves. If anything in both films the natives, collectively, were saviors of the white protagonist.  In both movies the protagonists walked into their situations with stereotypical preconceived notions of native culture and in both movies the main character arc of the story involved a discovery and awakening to the fact that everything they had been taught was false.  At no point in either movie was it suggested that, left to their own devices, the natives in any sense "needed" help from the whites-- they were never portrayed as helpless, except in the face of the mindless destruction wrought on their societies by the invaders.  Again, in both movies the "white protagonists" were a simply a resource for the natives in-as-much as the former helped the latter understand what they were up against.  If anything, in both films it seemed as though the whites, and their flagrant disregard for the principles and harmonies of nature, were being portrayed as the true savages.  On a whole there was a definite underlying spiritual consciousness to Avatar that is far too often lacking in our society, something which helps the film have an almost magical effect on some of its viewers (myself included).”

I stand corrected. This person’s insights feel ‘spot-on’ to me and I now feel that the way Avatar showed the evolution of the white hero’ consciousness was, in retrospect, compelling and beautifully crafted.

My Liberation books and this site are dedicated to the realization of our innate connection with all of life. Until we wake up from the trance of the fear-based conception of the separate self (I/me/mine), we will never realize this most fundamental of connections. This is the third level of Avatar. The film shows two mutually exclusive worlds; that of the high-tech white man which treats the world as a dead thing; and that of the Nav’i that views everything as alive. That is the key difference. In a world where everything is dead, in such a world, everything (including people) are assessed from their “use value” as determined by the powerful - the rulers. This is the dead and deadening world of our current civilization, which tramples the earth as if it had no value at all. As the old chief said in Little Big Man, “There are many, many, white people, but very few human beings.” For a human being is alive and lives her life in connection with all other living things - meaning everything, for everything is alive. Viewed from this perspective, Avatar depicts the conflict between life and death and its power lies within this battle. If one is awakened in the reality of life everywhere, Avatar can uplift powerfully. This is the theme that elevates the film way above that of level one and many other films I have watched in the last several years.

You might also want to take a look at this brilliant article from truthout.org.

See it for yourself and tell me what you think.

Tags: Film, Connection

Let’s pretend that we have lost our sight. We are blind because we cannot see our eyes.

Have you ever tried to see your eyes without using your eyes? Why not give it a try? Find your eyes and make sure that you look everywhere. Keep on looking. Don’t give up the search easily. Find your eyes.

You will discover that it can’t be done.

What sees cannot, itself, be seen. It’s an interesting irony.

The very same principle applies to spiritual seeking. When we ask ourselves the question, “What am I?” and we continue to ask ourselves the question, we discover that all we will ever find is our mind responding with the word “me”. This is the best it can do. It tells us, time and again, that what we are is “me”. And this answer is no help at all, because it just takes us back to where we started for now we must ask, “Who is this “me”?”

If we dig deeper, we will discover that this word “me” is just a label that the mind applies onto life experiences out of habit. It’s a deeply entrenched habit, but it’s just a habit that we learned from our parents and our world as we grew up. Socialization requires us to refer to this mysterious me until we believe that this simple word is who we are.

It isn’t. It’s just a pointer to something a lot more elusive yet ever-present.

Just like we cannot ever find our eyes by seeking, we cannot find ourselves by seeking. You see - the game is over even before we begin the search! We are prior to any thought. This presence, this sense of being is there and yet it can never be grasped or defined. But it is there. We can more certain of this than anything else in our experience.

It is the only the mind that demands that we seek for what can never be found. And the mind does this because it is identified with lack. Aligned with this identity, we come to believe that we lack something and, it just so happens, that all of the literature of enlightenment confirms our fears. We are nothing like these enlightened sages. We are just these poor saps wandering about our pathetic lives searching for the one thing that can never be found.

This is what happens when we become a slave to the psychological identity of our already invalidated minds. We embraced the identity of the Wound (see the Liberation from the Lie book) and covered it up with the many masks of the False-Self (again see the book).

The key to our prison lies in simply watching and observing the mind with the knowledge that our identity is not it (the mind). We are the vast river upon which all of life is seen, felt, tasted, heard, and perceived. We are THAT.

The mind is an object to this living presence. We can never be an object of ourselves. We are, rather, the subject of everything in our experience without exception. Even our conceptions of God cannot be an exception. Even God (if you have this belief) is an object to this living presence. Perhaps God is this presence.

Disengage from the trance of the mind and find the empty freedom that is our true awakened self.

Tags: Awakening, enlightenment