Nice post DEB. Perhaps you would be so kind as to put it in the context of this thread.
A
Hi DEB,
Again, I llove your avatar. I see your snow as unneeded earthly desires. 
Hope you didn’t mind:
thelastwhy.ca/journal/2006/3 … -void.html
Creation imperfection,
You said you aren’t a Taoist, but the Tao is a philosophy not a religion, so can’t you carry this philosophy as you practice your faith? Ancient wisdom can only enhance it, eh?
LA,
I wish I had known the importance of being “ever desireless” years ago. When you can allow yourself to just be in the presence of God you become satisfied. Without the interference of earthly desire you rid yourself of needless worry over unresolved guilt, materialism, success, and approval. Our ego makes us suffer endlessly when life is so very simple. As humans we obsess about this feeling of a void in our lives, but ironically, we are happier when we empty our spirit of unwanted debris, which ultimately opens us up to the mystery.
I have seen Tao simply as my Soul Housecleaning .
Creation imp: see what I mean? My housecleaning just adds richness to my faith. It doesn’t have to BE my faith.
Sara
Hi DEB
No you’re not dumb. 
We are used to reasoning from the bottom up as in science: inductive. But she is superb at describing reason from the top down: deductive. I’m more used to this method from esoteric Christianity.
Say for example that you find the same thing both beautiful and ugly at the same time. You sense the force of a violent storm and nature in a fury and find this beautiful. Then you see how it has mangled a hundred people and find it ugly. Both perceptions, beauty and ugliness exist within you at the same time. How to understand this.
We cannot understand logically so are forced to BS are way around it. Finding this difficult, we consult an expert in BS to help create the best lie to satisfy us.
We have to adopt the strategy in the Tao
We desire to understand or pull the experience of contradiction down to our level of dualistic reason so cannot get beyond manifestations. But this apparent contradiction between beauty and ugliness can become understood when contemplated as a mystery free of our dependence on associative reason. Coming to this point is the doorway. What lies beyond the superficial or this doorway? This contemplation is desireless but instead just remaining open and impartial to the question.
It’s possible that desireless desire is simply another way of suggesting that one live in the present, and not project into an unknown or unknowable future. It isn’t that the present is not without desire. To be completely without desire is to be not human, but to understand our limitations and to simply be aware in our acting of the present is perhaps an explanation. There are many concepts within Taoist thoughts that support and reinforce this notion. If one understands the character Wu Wei, acting in concert and deferentially within an experience, one understands the conflict of desire attempting to force an unnatural happening. Li, the natural patterns of nature that resist imposed desires of man is another. There are many more references, but perhaps beyond the scope of this discussion. Must remember the KISS principle…
Desireless, one sees the patterns of the natural flow of coming into being.
Ever desiring, we interact with our experiencing of all that is coming into being.
Thanks for the invitation. To be honest I don’t know exactly what the thread is, but for Bessy I will address the significance of my Avatar. Bessy, since you have put a link to “Life: a reaction to the void” in your thread I hope you don’t mind me providing a link to “The Void” which you have read. If I do isolate the thread, let me know. http://www.thelastwhy.ca/journal/2005/6/24/the-void.html
The rose symbolizes the last “why?” as in “Why am I?”, “What is the meaning of life?”; you know, the question right at the bottom of the list that not many of us reach. The snow represents the void. So when we ‘pick’ the ‘rose’ we see the void because there is no answer to the last why. All who encounter it see the void as a negative black hole. I did too until I considered the picture I took. Then I saw the void as a positive white emptiness.
After picking the ‘rose’, most of us feel compelled to fill the void with unnatural activity in a vain effort to give meaning to our lives. We see the “manifestations” of these “desires” in our present fabric of existence. Until I read Tao last night I didn’t know the writer was one who confirmed my belief that the ideal reaction to the void was , not to fill it with “desires”, but to simply “reach out to the limits of our capacities, to others and to God”; to simply smell the ‘rose’. We all ‘know’ this instinctively. We are conceived with that natural urge. Occasionally we “see the mystery”, we experience the consequences of “reaching out…” because some measure of it is essential to life but this “natural activity” is pretty well replaced by the our present “desires”.
i’m not a buddhist either (as a philosophy or a religion) but i agree with many of the things it teaches. i just like taoism and buddhism. it’s more of a reinforcement to my faith than it is a philosophy to be actively practiced.
-Tao te Ching-
This has so many meanings to me. First of all, we are so tied to our bodies, for without them we cannot breath or walk, but what makes us really breathe is our spirit from within. Society is obsessed with beauty, yet we are taught from early on that beauty is only skin deep. We KNOW this and yet we ignore it, develop prejudice, find love in all the wrong places, and yearn to change our beautiful bodies never feeling that they are quite beautiful enough.
Some bodies are weak and some are strong and have the constitution of a large bears. The weak and unsavoring-looking seems to be “less than” while the beautiful, smart, elegant have the illusion of being “more than” and we feed into this from the time we are very little. The baby with the beautiful eyes gets all the attention even at the grocery store, and the baby with the unfortunate facial features gets no look at all. Yet, what are we really trying to say to each other when we do this? We know the heart is the thing and yet we are sucked into like a vortex.
We do it here. We listen to words that convey heart, and minds that inspire thought, but our picture (as always) speaks ten thousand words and the men are off giving attention and the women are complimenting the mens’ look and becoming tranfixed on the shell and not the core.
Try today to give one person who wouldn’t normally get that attention a kind word. QUNITESSENCE is a lovely thing and some people never get to show you their’s because you won’t let them.
Sara
CI
I am right there with ya, babe!
We’re all of the same at the molecular level.
10,000 ideas but only one division, and that’s between the Tao and God.
og, you always have the coolest avatars.
Bessy, I want to know what happened to
That was a beautiful thread I thought had a lot more yards in it. I looked for it this morning and there it was gone. I wanted you to at least understand the rose in the snow. Instead I am understanding more what happens in chat rooms.
Anyway, Old_Gobbo wrote:
I think we are all the same at a philosophical level as well. It is all a matter of definition. Rather than think of our bodies as the physical forms we see, consider our bodies to be an integration of physical activity, physical knowledge and realized physical capacity. Since our genetically determined potential physical capacities are unique, we can all be identically the same ‘shape’ but unique in ‘size’, like unique philosophical equilateral triangles. Thus,
nor any of the other bodies that you see.
Hi DEB,
Desktop Tao isn’t gone. You wrote in it just now, right? I did change the title from Daily Dose of the Tao to Desktop Tao. The other sounded like a bad hallmark card. 
Glad you are enjoying it. I am too. If you have any questions about getting around the forum, just PM me. If you are looking for titles on the homepage, they are only the last ones that have posted. Look in the INDEX/under PHILOSOPHY
I agree with you and plan on this thread running for awhile. 
Sara
CI,
DEB,
I agree, but in an ethical sense at least, it is perhaps better look at each other, and the world as a purely physical manner. Consider the fact that the native americans held a morality of equilibrium and harmony with the enviroment with allowed for their sustained growth, all the while ‘evening the equation’ so to speak. Such a world view is a caual sphere that governs actions as they reduce to nothing more than another motion of the particles within said sphere.
The native example is, as I’m not realizing, quite ironic as what I’m describing here is basically a more eastern conceptualization.
Mas said
I wanted to address this. The Tao is NOT about following the written word that you see in the Tao itself, but in taking your experiences as they relate to it thus giving direction to your PATH or WAY. It enhances all ways of life and religions, which is why I have been frustrated by the recent arguments over it being “just another” ohhhhmm-pseudo-cult based on magic chakra crystals.
From an outside POV though, I think that the language expressed in “talking” Tao can feel obscure and cliquish - thus giving anyone talking the wu-talk an elitist appearance - perhaps unfounded… but, it’s there.
Am I right, or am I right? 
I like Desktop Tao because all life’s lessons are so much simpler than we make them. Happiness is so easy to grasp. Contentment is as easy as cake and ice cream… Love is there. And when it all comes down to it, isn’t that what we all want anyway? We don’t want labels with “words” -----> we just want LOVE.
ooops… another hallmark card from Sara
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no records of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowldege, it will pass away.
- 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8
A
Again, in an entirely different place of ideology, is found the same principle. Knowledge, i.e. “knowing” will give way to the profoundity of the only absolute.
Thank you for your penetrative eye. I see what you mean.
A
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
-Anonymous-
Kindness and wisdom is the pathway leading to GOD’S LOVE!
-Anonymous-
The more you know, the less you need to show.
-Anonymous-
After all this is over, all that will really have mattered is how we treated each other.
-Anonymous-
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.
I have always been so darn fond of that guy, Anonymous.
2+2=4… Oh hey, I know that! So does that make me unwise? Hmm.
Bessy wrote:
Check this out Bessyhttp://www.thelastwhy.ca/journal/2006/2/27/love.html