CenterTao.org – taoism, taoist thought, buddha, yoga, tai chi, shakuhachi

Taoist Thought

∞ Returning to Original Self ∞ This book is the culmination of an undertaking that began in 1964. It is largely an updated compilation of this website’s content. I feel anyone who finds this website truly useful should find this print version truly useful in other ways.

The Tradeoff

∞ Introduction ∞ Jñāna yoga Many of us find life troubling at times. Knowing how humanity got to where it is today and what to do about it can put to rest many a puzzling and disturbing aspect of life. Jñāna yoga is a spiritual practice that pursues knowledge with questions such as “who am […]

Buddha’s Truths Pertain To All Life

Buddha’s Truths apply to all Earth’s creatures, although only humans need to have truth stipulated. For me, this suggests that our desire for truth is a symptom of something we feel missing. For that reason, considering the widest possible scope of these truths gives helpful context for their application – profound sameness, as chapter 56 […]

Trump and the Mandate of Heaven

To better comprehend the Trump phenomenon, I need to examine it from a symptoms point of view (1). After all, judging circumstances at face value leaves out all the underlying causative forces at play, and this just perpetuates my ignorance. First off, I see Donald Trump as symptomatic of the deterioration of the cooperative politics […]

Refreshing Redundancy

Research reported in Science News, That familiar feeling comes from deep in the brain, sheds light on a cognitive problem for anyone who wants to remember their life priorities. This quote sums it up, “The research suggests that novelty and familiarity are two sides of the same brain cells. Turn them down, and even the […]

The Year Is 1915

This brief retrospective came across my screen recently. It can be profoundly sobering to see how much life has changed over the past 100 years. Such rapid change is unprecedented in human history, or almost any history that comes to mind.

We All Know We Don’t Know

I enjoy doing yoga on the beach because I can easily pause to look seaward and skyward to soak in eternity, or glance closer in to bond’ with my friends, the sand flies and the seagulls around me. Today I got to thinking how small and insignificant we are — they and me. Then I […]

Who are you? (Part V)

It’s about time I wrap up this “Who are you?” series. This time I’ll use a few observations from Lorna Marshall‘s research of hunter-gatherers to demonstrate what I’m really driving at. In my last post, Who are you? (Part IV), I pointed out how our ancestral old way just happens to mirror the core spiritual […]

Who are you? (Part IV)

The social qualities integral to our ancestral hunter-gatherer old way (1) just happen to mirror the core spiritual qualities that the world’s religions promote. That’s no coincidence. Indeed, those innate qualities of harmony we now seek are the very ones we lost when we left the old way for the alluring material benefits and security […]

Who are you? (Part III)

Recent posts, Who are you? and Who are you? (Part II), examine the losses of emotional security and comfort caused when our civilized way of life replaced our ancestral one. Common sense, personal experience, and timely mid 20th century ethnographic research reveals this. (See The Harmless People p.426) This post and the next cover some […]

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