Check One Off the Bucket List
This is chapter 81, the last chapter of the Tao Te Ching. My journey on this Taoist path began almost 50 years ago in Vietnam, as did my learning to read and write Chinese. Over the years, I have translated parts of chapters that puzzled me. This revealed a subtle problem I found in all translations: The process of translating the Chinese phrasing into another language looses some of the straightforward meaning. Continue reading ‘Chapter of the Week: #81′
Karl Marx had is wrong. It is prosperity, not religion, which is the opiate of the masses. The United States has experienced decades of surefire prosperity. Most have lived their whole lives accustomed to what is actually a historically rare era of unusual affluence.
Now, much of the population is going ‘cold turkey’, unwillingly sobering up without knowing the deeper causes for the withdrawal symptoms they now feel. I’ve found prosperity has a real dark side linked to desire and pleasure— not surprisingly. (1) Continue reading ‘Opiate of the Masses’
I sometimes wonder why rich people often keep upping the anti, buying increasingly more expensive things. It follows a progression I first noticed when I experienced my own wealth upgrade after arriving in Japan (see Peaches and Pleasure). It is a fact of life; we soon convert any upgrade in our standard-of-living into the new bottom-line in our standard-of-living. Never long content, we soon seek to upgrade again. Biologically speaking, the hunter gather in us reaches outward from the bottom line, driven by a kind of ‘grass is always greener’ instinct. Continue reading ‘The Wealthy Poor’
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