[-empyre-] A world of cruel miracles

[susan charlton <brandsusan@yahoo.com>]

'People think they don't have to learn,
Because there is so much information available.
But knowledge is more than possessing information.
Only the wise move fast enough.'

Deng Ming-Dao, '365 Tao'


Thankyou Ollivier for your posting:

Interestingly, there was an unexpected convergence for
me between your text, which arrived electronically in
my digital inbox, and the hard copy reading for 16
January from a book of daily meditations beside my bed
which I regularly dip into.

'365 Tao' by Deng Ming-Dao (1992,
HarperSanFrancisco)offers a Taoist reading of the
contemporary world ('a book that searches for Tao in
the immediate'). To paraphrase you, it's 'searching
[through} an [old] language to create a new way of
looking at our world.'

I am attracted to it precisely because of it's
articulation of 'a world of cruel miracles'.

On the day of your posting, the reading pondered how
we could possibly keep up with the tsunami of
information crashing on our shores.

Apart from the intro above, its view was as follows: 

'We can't be passive; we have to internalize and place
ourselves precisely in the flow.'

It's not often that the seemingly different parts of
myself coincide (eg the private spiritual with the
public polemical). But they did yesterday.

And, as an interesting aside:
Because Taoist thought is so influenced by the cycle
of seasons as it is being lived in real time, '365 Tao
is read differently in the southern hemisphere than in
the northern hemisphere. Southern hemishere readers
start their 1 January halfway through the book
(summertime Christmas for us; midyear for you).

So, if I had been reading the book in the Northern
hemisphere it would have been an altogether different
reading.

Place still matters ...

Very best regards
Susan Charlton

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