Tao : the One – Being & Non-Being, Beginning & End, the Way, the Road to Heaven.
... alternative reading: "Everything that was words was life in him." I shall be interested to see your succeeding letter. Do you know Capra's Turning Point, which is even more remarkable than The Tao of Physics? Yours sincerely, BEDE GRIFFITHS 21 rue Francois Martin, Pondicherry - 605 001 16.2.83 Dear Father Griffiths, I was glad to hear from you. I have been keeping... highly recommended as a truly scientific survey is Pagel's The Cosmic Code (Simon & Schuster, New York). After writing to Father Martin in connection with you I wrote out a long piece on The Tao of Physics. It has been lying among my papers and one of these days I'll put it in Mother India and let you have a copy of the issue. In the meantime my regards - as also my admiration which has remained... like any other serious religion is not a product of rational understanding and cannot be understood by human reason. It is a transcendent mystery (like the mystery of Brahman, of Nirvana or the Tao) which can only be understood by the illumined mind (as Aurobindo might have called it). The presence of the Holy Spirit (which is the divine Spirit) in the Church enables the Church (that is, the ...
... C., (3) about the middle of the 7th century B.C. and (4) about the middle of the 9th century B.C. The 5th century B.C. in which Tao-Suen's "dotted record" puts Buddha's death does not figure at all in Hiuen-Tsang's four-faceted report made in the very period in which Tao-Suen lived. As Hiuen-Tsang gleaned his information during his extensive 1.Romila Thapar's Aśoka and the Decline of... Cantonese dotted record of 489 A.D., taken from India to China by Sungabhadra... although scholars now usually accept the date 483 B.C. proposed by Fleet and Geiger." It is the Chinese priest Tao-Suen who speaks in 664 A.D. of this record 2 in which up to the year 489 A.D. a dot is said to have been put for 975 years for each year after Buddha's death. Thus the first and only reference to it... -there is an amazing fact to be noted from what we learn from another Chinese visitor to India: the famous Hiuen-Tsang. Hiuen-Tsang was in India during 630-643 A.D. and not only was a contemporary of Tao-Suen (664 A.D.) in China but also collected all traditions current in his time for the epoch of the PariNirvāna. Sircar 2 cites four different traditions reported by Hiuen-Tsang: (1) about the end ...
... The moment we postulate such an exclusive Nothing we land into the Adwaitic difficulty of reconciling this phenomenal world with that sole Reality without contents in it. “Tao is there in what you see, but Tao is not what you see.”—tells us the sage. Between these two seeings there is an unbridgeable gap and we have no clue as to how this gap has arisen. This is also the dilemma of the mysterious... this appearance, by whatever method it might have arrived here, becomes meaningless, a strange creation which has no issue and no solution even to invoke the indescribable Nothing. There is then no Tao, no divinity, no Divine Will, no Divine Grace. By a strange process we land into the most frightening kind of a desert in which even that perception has no perceiver. If this is so there is nothing much ...
... Brahman while Buddha preferred not to give any name or say anything about that into which the nirvana took place. Some later schools of Buddhists described it as Sunya, the equivalent of the Chinese Tao, described as the Nothing which is everything. The feeling of the Self as a vast peaceful Void, a liberation from Page 431 existence as we know it, is one that one can always have... many kinds and the entirely nihilistic kind is only one variety. Most Buddhism admits a Permanent as beyond the creation of Karma and Sanskaras. Even the Sunya of the Sunyapanthis is described like the Tao of Lao Tse as a Nothing which is All. So as a higher "above mental" state is admitted which one tries to reach by a strong discipline of the consciousness, it may be called spirituality. There ...
... beyond even the highest spiritual substratum (the "foundation above" in the luminous paradox of the Rig Veda) of cosmic existence and consciousness. As it is evident from the description of Chinese Tao and the Buddhist Shunya that that is a Nothingness in which all is, so with the negation of consciousness here. Superconscient and subconscient are only relative terms; as we rise into the superconscient... find there a consciousness other than our own at its lowest mental limit and therefore ordinarily inaccessible to us. The Inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it—"an inert Soul with a somnambulist Force". The ...
... strike the historian as nations that can be said to have lived from remote antiquity onward with a general touch on this infinite Cosmic Self. The sense of Page 17 Atman, the sense of Tao meet us throughout. Not that there have been no counter-currents, but, by and large, the inmost universal Reality has been felt by them across the millenniums. And that is why they have persisted with... other nation contemporary with their early careers has done. Modern China has gone through a revolution which appears to run against such a continuity at last. But can a nation that has kept a Tao-toned identity for so long lose its character under the sweep of Dialectical Materialism? It hardly seems probable. Certain economic changes may come to stay; permanent change of essential genius is ...
... mind and has no absolute significance; there is no such thing as an absolute Nihil or Zero. It is agreed even by the philosophies of the Nihil, Tao or Zero (Sunya) that the Non-Existence of which they speak is a Nought in which all is and from which all comes. Tao, Nihil or Zero is not different from the Absolute or the Supreme Brahman of Vedanta; it is only another way of describing or naming it. The... by mind or speech; no definition the mind can make, affirmative or negative, can be at all expressive of it or adequate. To the Mind this Unmanifest can present itself as a Self, a supreme Nihil (Tao or Sunya), a featureless Absolute, an Indeterminate, a blissful Nirvana of manifested existence, a Non-Being out of which Being came or a Being of Silence out of which a world-illusion came. But all... Existence beyond what we know of our existence and therefore only it can seem to our mind as a Zero, a Nihil, a Non-Existence. There is nothing there of what we know as existence, for though all is in Tao, yet all is there in a way of which our mind can have no conception or experience, therefore to the mind it has no reality and brings no concept of existence. The manifestation in the Ignorance, that ...
... spiritual substratum (the "founda- Page 51 tion above" in the luminous paradox of the Rig Veda) of cosmic existence and consciousness. As it is evident from the description of Chinese Tao and the Buddhist Shunya that that is a Nothingness in which all is, so with the negation of consciousness here. Superconscient and subconscient are only relative terms; as we rise into the superconscient... find there a consciousness other than our own at its lowest mental limit and therefore ordinarily inaccessible to us. The inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it "an inert Soul with a somnam-bulist Force." ...
... beyond even the highest spiritual substratum (the "foundation above" in the luminous paradox of the Rig Veda) of cosmic existence and consciousness. As it is evident from the description of Chinese Tao and the Buddhist Shunya that that is a Nothingness in which all is, so with the negation of consciousness here. Superconscient and subconscient are only relative terms; as we rise into the superconscient... find there a consciousness other than our own at its lowest mental limit and therefore ordinarily inaccessible to us. The Inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it— "an inert Soul with a somnambulist Force." ...
... PURANI: As an authority on Buddhism, Mrs. Rhys Davies seems to be the best person. SRI AUROBINDO: No, she is not very reliable. The Mahayana conception of Nirvana seems to be something like Laotse's Tao. Tao, according to him, is a condition of nothingness that is beyond all present construction, and that is the nothingness which contains everything. (Addressing Purani) Do you know anything about the ...
... even the highest spiritual substratum (the " foundation above " in the luminous paradox of the Rig Veda ) of cosmic existence and consciousness. "As it is evident from the description of Chinese Tao and the Buddhist Shunya that that is a Nothingness in which all is, so with the negation of consciousness here. Superconscient and subconscient are only relative terms; as we rise into the superconscient... find there a consciousness other than our own at its lowest mental limit and therefore ordinarily inaccessible to us. The Inconscient itself is only an involved state of consciousness which like the Tao or Shunya, though in a different way, contains all things suppressed within it so that under a pressure from above or within all can evolve out of it—" an inert Soul with a ______________________ ...
... destruction of men in battle and did not some of them sing Te Deums over a victory won by the massacre of men and the starvation of women and children? The Taoist who believes only in the Impersonal Tao is more consistent and the Vedantin who believes that the Supreme is beyond good and evil, but that the Cosmic Force the Supreme has put out here works through the dualities, therefore through both good ...
... The ancient peoples had in a very large measure this foundation of satisfaction and harmony, took the greatest interest in the reality of the inner self, as once in India and China, the Atman, the Tao, and life and the world as its field of expression and self-experience or, like the Greeks, felt at once the naturalness and profundity of human existence and gave to it an immediate and subtle aesthetic ...
... is a reflection or from which it has become detached, and then it calls it Self or Brahman and qualifies it variously, always according to its own conception or realisation,—Existence, Non-Existence, Tao, Nihil, Force, Unknowable. If then we seek mentally to realise Sachchidananda, there is likely to be this first difficulty that we shall see it as something above, beyond, around even in a sense, ...
... consciousness state, 67-76 Sri Ramakrishna, 27, 28 on spiritual path, 42, 43 stillness, 100, 101 śuddhi, 120 surrender, concept of, 52, 55, 63, 105-111, 121 T Tao Teh Ching, 44 tapasya, 28 teachings ego, self and being, 77-80 evolution of consciousness, 81-84 instruments of the teacher, 161, 162 method of spiritual practice, 112-121 ...
... Paperbacks, 1989). 9. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, SABCL Vol. 18, p. 440. 10. Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious (New York: Dutton, 1976). 11. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambala, 1975). 12. Sri Aurobindo, Essays Divine and Human, pp. 337-38. 13. Ibid., p. 291. 14. Sri Aurobindo, "Materialism" in The Supramental Ma ...
... stream— becomes intense Presence in the now. It's important to realize that surrender is also a very dynamic state. It is passive and active in one. It's not one or the other. And this paradox—the Tao Teh Ching often speaks about this paradox—the sage no longer does anything, and in that not doing anything, everything gets done, [laughter] Also, Presence that is an intrinsic aspect of the surrendered ...
... 175-79, 192-94 Surface being, see Outer being Sushupti ( su ṣ upti), see Sleep-State svapna, see Dream-State Tamas. 108, 39, 110-15 passim, changed into ś ama, 118 Tao, 9 Tart, Charles T., 315, 321 Telepathy, 82, 178, 248 cf. Psychical phenomena Thinking mind, see under Mind Trance, yogic, see Samadhi Transcendent (Transcendence) ...
... consciousness. The Nihil contains all and so it does all including waking, speaking, breathing, maintenance of the cell-shape and cell-harmony. Savitri is passing through the great experience of the Tao. 3 Steeped in the womb of Nirvana, Savitri could well see the other possibility taken advantage of by the souls with the push to Nirvana as their elected and chosen destiny. It is the absolute ...
... mind-existence and world-existence, that has been variously termed as Turiya or featureless and relationless Absolute by the monistic Vedantins, the Shunyam by the nihilistic Madhya-mika Buddhists, the Tao or omnipresent and transcendent Nihil by the Chinese, and as the indefinable and ineffable Permanent by the Mahayanists. 5 Many Christian mystics too, notably St. John of the Cross with his ...
... and deliberate choices are not sufficient in themselves, they are only a second best, yet they mark the rise of self-consciousness and have to be utilised to pass on into the unitive knowledge that is Tao. This explanation or amplification seems to us somewhat confused and irrelevant to the idea expressed in the apophthegm. What is stated here is much simpler and transparent. It is this that when the ...
... e Peace, a stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom. 118 Sri Aurobindo had gone straight into what the Buddhists call Nirvana, what the Hindus call the Silent Brahman or That; the Tao of the Chinese; the Transcendent, the Absolute, or the Impersonal of the Westerners. He had reached that famous "liberation" (mukti) , which is considered the "peak" of all spiritual Page 131 ...
... and is—of what we in truth are. The imaginary character of this world which brought forth Buddhism at the same time as it declared the Void alone to be real; the impregnation of the universe by Tao; the one God apparently distinct from his creation of Judaism and later religions—Christianity and Islam—; the supreme Being, Purushottama, who, in the Gita, is both the immutable Being and the ...
... it stayed the fatal woman wearing As a forehead mark destiny's black sun. From the dreadfulness of her nixie past Peered eyes that deepened the mystery of hell Even as she proclaimed the Tao of evil. But in that cave too Aswapati saw Vishnu. 4 May 2002 Page 14 Canto Thirteen In dismal river was born the tadpole ego Who claimed forthwith the universe ...
... and Company, 1991.) 5. Two well-known examples of how recent scientific discoveries can be used to argue against materialism and to support the mystical philosophies are Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Berkeley: Shambhala Publications, 1975) and Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1979). 6. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, SABCL Vol. 22, pp ...
... complete in being, in consciousness of being, in force of being, in delight of being and to live in this integrated completeness is the divine living." 17 REFERENCES 1. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics. Boston & London: New Science Library, Shambhala, 1983. 2. "Rational-Emotive Therapy" in Virginia Binder, Arnold Binder & Bernard Rimland (Eds.) Modem Therapies. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall ...
... where the form of the Good is found.” (David Berlinski 30 ) Scientists Pro and Contra Ken Wilber was one of the thinkers who reacted strongly against the thesis of popular books like The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. He “disagreed entirely” with such books “which had claimed that modern physics supported or even proved Eastern mysticism. This is a colossal error. Physics ...
... for the destruction of men in battle and did not some of them sing Te Deums over a victory won by the massacre of men and the starvation of women and children? The Taoist who J^Yes in the Impersonal Tao is more consistent and the Vedantin who believes that the Supreme is beyond good and evil but the Cosmic Force the Supreme has put out here Page 49 works through the dualities, therefore ...
... answer a body that never acted on its own initiative anymore. Bertolt Brecht has written a poem about the unknown person who must have begged Lao-tze for his wisdom and to whom we therefore owe the Tao-te Ching. Without Satprem’s questioning presence, cultural baggage and analytical intellect, the conversations which constitute the Agenda would never have taken place. That afterwards he put himself ...
... foam on this Infinite, the mobile ego with its attachments and repulsions, its likings and dislikings, its fixed mental distinctions, is an effective image that veils and deforms to us the one reality, Tao, the supreme All and Nothing. That can be touched only by losing personality and its little structural forms in the unseizable universal and eternal Presence and, this once achieved, we live in that ...
... speech or defining experience. It is the silent Unknowable, the Turiya or featureless and relationless Absolute of the monistic Page 83 Vedantins, the Sunyam of the nihilistic Buddhists, the Tao or omnipresent and transcendent Nihil of the Chinese, the indefinable and ineffable Permanent of the Mahayana. Many Christian mystics also speak of the necessity of a complete ignorance in order to get ...
... interesting and quite sound—the processes recommended can, if one can carry them out, help greatly in the quieting of the mind. The Tibetan Nirvana as described in the last extract is very much like the Tao of Laotse. It is more and more said now that that is the real teaching of Buddha and of Buddhism. People here became very enthusiastic about that book by Evans-Wentz. But I think their reading ...
... word without putting into it the conviction that is needed to make it fully effective. In China, a similar effect is obtained with a word of identical meaning and somewhat similar sound, the word "TAO". Our western languages are less expressive; in their present form, they are too far removed from the root language which gave birth to them. But we can always animate a word by the power of our living ...
... Lao Tse calls spontaneous is this: instead of being moved by a personal will—mental, vital or physical—one ought to stop all outer effort and let oneself be guided and moved by what the Chinese call Tao , which they identify with the Godhead—or God or the Supreme Principle or the Origin of all things or the creative Truth, indeed all possible human notions of the Divine and the goal to be attained. ...
... What then is this goal? It is one with the purpose of man's life and his mission in the universe. The goal: "Call him what you will, for to the wise, he is the Possessor of all names." The Tao of the Chinese—The Brahman of the Hindus—The Law of the Buddhists—The Good of Hermes—That which cannot be named, according to the ancient Jewish tradition—The God of the Christians—The Allah of the ...
... Taxila), 62, 271 Tambapamni (Tamraparni), Tambapamniya, 371-6, 378, 594 Tambyzoi, 262, 290 Tamralipti, 211 Tamraparni, 266, 373, 376-7, 594 Tamraparniyas, 265, 283 Tamsu, 69 Tao-Suen, 363, 364, 365 Taprobanè, 214, 375, 417-8, 421 Taranatha, 246, 344 Tathagatagupta, 404, 508 Taxila, 99, 100, 235, 322, 453 Taxila inscription, 427, 428 Taxiles, 62, 271 ...
... lengthened out inordinately. The new discussion must be reserved for some other time. I am not at home with Rupert Sheldrake's New Science of Life; so I shan't venture to treat it. Fritjof Capra's Tao of Modern Physics has been in my hands for quite a time and I think I can comment on it a little as well as on Griffiths's understanding of it. In the meanwhile please acknowledge this letter and accept ...
... Bennis, Warren and Burt Nanus. Leaders. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. 5.Bass, Bernard. Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations. New York: The Free Press, 1985. 6.Heider, John. The Tao of Leadership. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. 7.Crosby, Philip. Leading. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1990. 8.Covey, Stephen R. Principle Centered Leadership. London: Simon ...
... Suggestions for further reading Barnett, Lincoln. The Universe and Dr. Einstein. New York: Bantam Books, 1968. Calder, Nigel. Einstein's Universe. Penguin Books, 1985. Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Berkeley, Shambhala Publications, 1975. Einstein, Albert. Essays in Science. New York: Philosophical Library, 1934. The Evolution of Physics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967 ...
... the first half of the second millennium BC. Confucius had laid down theories of man and the way of human society around 500 BC. Lao Tzu is thought to have expounded his mystical vision of man and the tao or 'way of nature' around 300 BC. Taoism is particularly important to the history of the Chinese martial arts, although it is only recently that Taoist martial arts have spread beyond the bounds of Chinese ...
... either take up the negative or the affirmative path. By the negative you reach the Non-Being or what the Gita calls anirdeshyam (the Indeterminate). This Non-Being is the Buddhists Nirvana or Chinese Tao. The Buddhists consider it as Shunya, the Void, while to the Taoists this void, contains everything. Again, this Nirvana is not the same as the Brahmanirvana of the Gita. By following the affirmative ...
... to them. SATYENDRA: He has started with a handicap—having been proclaimed a Messiah. SRI AUROBINDO: That is why he is disgusted with Guruship perhaps. The Reality he speaks of seems to be like Tao. When you realise it you can't speak about it. It is simply "nothing at all". ...
... a reflection or from which it has become detached, and then it calls it Self or Brahman and qualifies it variously, always according to its own conception or realization, - Existence, Non-Existence, Tao, Nihil, Force, Unknowable." 51 Sri Aurobindo goes farther and points out that when the Object of realization is seized in awareness by rising above the mental being, we cannot either raise ourselves ...
... the strong autumn winds added to the beauty of the songs. I still remember some. Bir hanuman darpo kauro na. Kaular chuka khaorey buka, Bhunyer koley macch utheychey, tao pét bhaurey na. Bir hanuman darpo kaurona. Page 193 Here is another one: Dadarey - Bangali manush ar holo na. Chokhey choshma hatey ghodi, Bobkata ...
... between thought and spoken word, and often words get loaded connotatively over a period of time through long association. There are also words of mantric potency - AUM, for example, or the Chinese TAO - that at once evoke feelings of peace, serenity and timelessness. And occasionally the charged word - say, a mantric benediction - can become "endowed with the power of transmitting true gifts, ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.