Master Lii-tsu said:
That which exists through itself is called the Way. (Tao).
Tao has neither name nor shape. It is the one essence, the one primal spirit.
Essence and life cannot be seen. They are contained in the light of heaven.
The light of heaven cannot be seen. It is contained in the two eyes.
To-day I will be your guide and will first reveal to you the secret of the Golden Flower of the great One.
text is available free from the internet archive as a downloadable pdf, and other forms as well.
“There's a thread, invisible, umbilical, that goes from before birth to the destiny of one's soul.
And so, when calling occurs, it's an outside calling to something that already exists inside the person
Various talents and abilities
And specifically the genius, which is like the spirit in the life of a person, which is there to respond to the call,
but also as a guide to keep a person finding this gradient on which their calling can unfold.”
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/living-myth/id1192810215
“Yes. It is not a safe project. It's the core, unique project of one's life.
But it requires descent into the depths of the soul and the depths of the underworld.
And it requires the beginning of the process of healing. And so it's actually the major project, I would say.”
“What's that old idea? The obstacles aren't on one's path are not the problem. Sometimes the obstacle is the path.”
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“the calling is related to the gods. The calling is a divine calling.
So that's another way to go at it. Each person is not only unique, but the seed of their uniqueness is a planting of something divine. And so in some cultures, it was imagined that the calling is coming directly from the divine.
And that brings in the idea that it has a big, a numinosity. It has a numinous presence. And for some people, that's a good reason not to go."
a problem in the modern version of hope:
it is typically seen in a linear historic perspective. The felt sense that we have lost essential dimensions of life becomes necessary
hope often becomes limited by being tied to the sense that life continues to evolve, and we can be pulled along by that evolution.
This now common sense of change and the hope for change tends to be primarily horizontal, just as the contemporary version of the web of life has become the horizontal worldwide web.”
“It is when we see through the lens of vertical hope and deep imagination that the next phase of life can be envisioned as different in kind from the history that preceded it.
The great opportunity in times of radical change does not lie in the literal sense of either going forward through evolutionary steps or going back to a theoretically better time."
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/living-myth/id1192810215
"despair means to be without hope, but hope hides within despair.
despair becomes the deeper ground and the darker earth from which our most enduring visions of life arise. When life becomes darkest, the eye of the soul begins to see.
Hope springs eternal when people learn to trust the deeper values of individual life
The sense of connecting to the underlying spirit of life and the hidden resiliency of the individual human soul is the source of all genuine hope.”
“Human beings are and have always been on edge.
And it is at those extreme edges that things become both impossible and more possible at the same time, so that right when it seems that a dead end has been reached, new designs and new possibilities can appear.
Humans are by nature part of the edge, where creation continuously plays with collapse and renewal
Humans are on the cutting edge of creation with each individual soul being a unique unrepeatable experiment."
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/living-myth/id1192810215
“the modern sense of hope implies that the future place is but a horizontal extension of the past history.
the sense of historical progress lies at the core of both the current sense of hope and the nearby sense of despair.
When hope does not have its vertical dimension and its natural connection to imagination, then hope is but short-lived and can easily, readily convert to its opposite, which is despair."