Sorry, that's the biggest size image I could find. In every religion, for every thoughtful person there comes a time when they have to make a decision about traditional texts. Are you going to read them as being literally true---like a cookbook---or you going to read them as metaphors and myth? The decision you make will inform every aspect of what you do after that. Readers of this blog will know that I am someone who reads Daoist literature as being evocative and metaphorical instead of literal. Three Pines Press has recently published a book, Internal Alchemy for Everyone,&nbs ..read more

Livia Kohn, the noted Daoist scholar and practitioner has recently published a new book titled Daoist Livia Kohn, image c/o Boston University  China: Governance, Economics, Culture. It's available at the Three Pines Press for a little under $30, US. It's a simple book with a lot of useful information. It consists of a lot short little essays that deal with a specific issue in modern China---usually from a Daoist perspective. Each chapter ends with a list of links so anyone with an interest can pursue their exploration of the issue in greater depth. The list of chapters pretty m ..read more

Mencius, public domain image. C/o the Wiki Commons I've been working my way through the David Hinton translation of Mencius for quite a while because I think that anyone who is interested in Daoism should also have a bit of an understanding of Confucianism too. Indeed, the temple that introduced me to the Way not only made the Classic of Filial Piety one of its core texts, it allowed Confucians (the "priests of Ru") to perform rituals in the building. (According to my teacher, the Temple belonged to the geographic community, not any one particular religion. Indeed, he o ..read more

Like most people, I am a little confused about the concept of "free will". Actually, that's not true. I've come to the conclusion that it really doesn't exist---at least as most people understand the concept. Increasingly, I find the idea of "Fate" much more appealing. Let me illustrate one aspect of it using an idea that came to me the other day. &&&& Not an uncommon sight where I work. Public Domain Image c/o Wiki Commons I work in an academic library of a University that has a veterinary college. As a result, it is very common to see dogs in the building. Most of ..read more

Last month I got an email from one of my regular readers asking if I'd be interested in reading a book he just published titled Voice of the Elders. When I answered in the affirmative, Greg Ripley (the author) sent me a review version and I've spent the last month reading it in dribs and drabs whenever I had the time. (Between this blog, my other one, working full time, etc, I have to measure my time with an eye-dropper.) I'm glad I made the effort. Greg Ripley The plot revolves around a young woman, Rohini Haakonsen, who attends a youth conference on Climate Change at the Uni ..read more

I have a hard time watching videos where people do embarrassing things. I have a really hard time. So much so that I generally have to stop, walk away, and do something else. If this becomes a "regular thing" in a series, I have to stop watching altogether. This is annoying, because a fair number of otherwise very funny programs base a significant amount of their jokes on people doing "over the top" stupid things and then making the character "twist in the wind" as they realise how dumb they've been. And because of some quirk of my mind, I totally self-identify with this situation and it makes ..read more

It's been a vacation time for me lately. Part of that has been some total sloth binge-watching Netflix. In particular, I've been immersing myself in "Marvel's Agents of Shield". For those of you who don't follow such stuff, "SHIELD" is an enormous, incredibly well-funded, secret police agency who's task is to protect the entire world's population from the dangerous "super people" who keep popping up in the alternative "Marvel universe". Watching episode 7 of the 3rd season of the series I heard a little speech by Rosalind Price---a US intelligence leader---talking about how scary it is to li ..read more

When someone asks me "what is a martial art?" I generally wax on about the spiritual benefits of a sustained discipline aimed at excellence:  kung fu. But in this post I want to talk specifically about the practical, self-defense element. This is a very small part of why anyone should pursue a martial art---the health and spiritual gains are far, far more important. But I do think that it is useful to think about self-defense, primarily because it is a way of understanding a little more about what life is all about. If nothing else, I'd like to try and "push back" against some of the sill ..read more

Part of my life involves trying to "hold onto the One" as much as possible. This involves trying to pay careful attention to everything in both the world around me and my consciousness. If you do this, you start to notice subtleties that you would miss otherwise. One thing that I notice that I find somewhat creepy is the "smile mask" that a some women wear. I walk along the street and sometimes this involves looking at the faces of other people. When I do this, I sometimes see that a woman notices me and instantly breaks out a fake smile. It's too fast to be a conscious choice. Nor, I suspect ..read more

A long time ago I had a conversation with a Zen priest. It was when I was still much more engaged in "cloud-walking" (ie: finding out spiritual people from various traditions to see what I can learn from them) than I am today. Someone mentioned him to me, and it turned out that he worked as a sculpture technician in the fine-arts building right next to library where I work. So there was no excuse not to seek him out. He was a gruff old man who was very close to retirement. He'd gone to Korea as a soldier during the war and ended up staying on in one of the Temples. I mentioned that I was inte ..read more