Tao Te Ching
Non-Thought
Most cultures over-value thinking. Belief in concepts helps political, religious, and philosophical tyrants control and enslave their followers. Without good quality thinking however, a good life would become almost impossible. Thinking is more helpful if we don’t believe our thoughts but instead understand them as symbols, sign posts pointing toward the deeper truth, the non-thought reality that nurtures wisdom, compassion, and enlightenment.
Quotes (73)
“No man knows distinctly anything, and no man ever will... all things are matters of opinion.”
“all these things are but the names which mortals have given, believing them, to be true”
“Whoever says salvation exists is a slave because he keeps weighing each of his words and deeds at every moment. "Will I be saved or damned?' he tremblingly asks. 'Will I go to heaven or to hell?'”
“Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home.”
“When the mind is always empty, you journey from place to place in the country of the Buddhas. When the mind is always moving, you travel from one hell to the next hell.”
“If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.”
“Outwardly in the world of good and evil, yet without thoughts stirring the heart—this is meditation.
Inwardly seeing one's own true nature and not being distracted from it—this is meditation.”
“Confused by thoughts, we experience duality in life. Unencumbered by ideas, the enlightened see the one Reality.”
“I smile, and am silent, and even my soul remains quiet: it lives in the other world which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom, the water flows.
”
“In ignorance, samsara and nirvana are separate; in realization, they are the union of pure pleasure.”
“when things come to us, we must understand them from the ground up... When in ordinary life one has the ability to react to thing by reflexes only, without any admixture of a thought of others or of oneself, that is a circulation of the Light arising out of circumstances. It is the first secret.”
“If you cling to the words with which you have learned to interpret the truth, you will be held in bondage by them and will never realize the truth.”
“The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.”
“Without self, not thinking, not achieving… I live in consummate pure delight and perfect awareness.”
“To free your mind from desire, visualize your body as the heavens and your thoughts as stars in the sky.”
“From the soil of unknowing and ignorance comes the clay of passion and thought.”
“If the thought that he is effaced from self occurs to one with a realization of fans ['no-mind'], that is a defect. The highest state is to be effaced from effacement.”
“Only if you can forget the words and embody the meaning will you (have)... the ability to kill people's false selves and conditioned perceptions”
“experience the absence of conditioned mind and observe that all phenomena are like dreams… enter into the uncontrived, uncluttered ocean of true nature.”
“My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull. I only hear the locusts chirping through the forest at night.”
“Understanding depends on things. Hence, it involves fabrication. Not understanding returns to the origin. Hence, it approaches the truth.”
“Within the essence of totally pure awakened mind, there is no object to view or anything that constitutes a view—not the slightest sense of anything to look at or anyone looking.”
“I have not heard of a single Buddha, past or present, who has been enlightened by sacred prayers and scriptures.”
“Without thinking of anything whatsoever, rest vividly awake in the practice of mind essence.” 
“Don’t hate the arising of thoughts or stop the thoughts that do arise; simply realize that our original mind, right from the start, is beyond thought, so that, no matter what, you never [actually] get involved with thoughts.”
“Originally, thoughts have no real substance… if they arise, just let them arise; if they stop, just let them stop. As long as you’re not attaching to these reflected traces, delusions won’t be produced.”
“Taking hold of the not-thought that lies in thoughts, in their every act they hear the voice of Truth… As the Truth reveals itself in its eternal tranquility, this very earth is the Lotus-Land of Purity, and this body is the body of the Buddha.”
“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”
“There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking, and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord”
“Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.”
“You can't prevent time passing. When something has passed, why do thoughts still loiter?”
“The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech... As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere.”
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”
“The opposition between the men who have and the men who are is immemorial.”
“when spirit began to degenerate into intellect, there set a reaction against it, … the dark, earth-born, feminine principle with its emotionality and instinctiveness reaching far back into the depths of time and into the roots of psychological continuity.”
“No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts [and] Thoughts are divine.”
“Wisdom can never be transmitted by words, only by examples and experience.”
“For a seeker of reality, there is only one meditation—the rigorous refusal to harbor thoughts. To be free from thoughts is itself meditation.”
“[Everyone has] an inner potentiality which can absorb the truth but cannot be activated as long as the mind is not disentangled from its attachments to the phenomenal.”
“But prejudice is the greatest enemy of objective observation and creative thought, while an awareness of yet unexplored possibilities will open our minds to new perspectives which reveal new facts.”
“Moment after moment we should renew our life, we should not stick to old ideas of what life is, or what our way of life is… If we always stick to old ideas and always repeat the same thing over and over again, then we are confined in our old way of life.”
“To do something without thinking is the most important point in understanding ourselves… when you just do something, and when your mind is just acting as it is, that is how you catch your mind in the true sense.”
“Happiness is indeed a Eurydice, vanishing as soon as gazed upon. It can exist only in acceptance, and succumbs as soon as it is laid claim to.”
“All great work artistic, poetic, intellectual or spiritual is produced at those moments when creators forget themselves altogether and are free from self-consciousness.”
“All phenomena are completely new and fresh, absolutely unique and entirely free from all concepts of past, present, and future.”
“All thoughts are completely without substance… Once you recognize this, they can no longer fool you.”
“Bliss and radiance occur of themselves when the mind is tranquil.”
“I felt that I understood nothing... In an instant all my doubts and the gloomy mist of my confusion vanished. Everything I had held in firm conviction, everything upon which I had ordinarily relied was swept away with the wind.”
“When we tie a child down with petty, microcosmic scientific knowledge, he loses the freedom to acquire with his own hands macrocosmic wisdom. If children are allowed to play freely in a world that transcends science, they will develop natural methods of farming by themselves.”
“It was the Impressionists who made an art of instantaneous, and Claude Monet who showed how it could be done.”
“The true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.”
“The passageway into the world of shamans opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off his internal dialogue.”
“The Buddhist approach is not based on hope. It would look at the chaos and problems that exist as delightful and something to work on relaxed with the turmoil in complete confidence.”
“The Tao that cannot be named is the intelligence of the universe: whatever is happening right now... the don't-know mind”
“If words are of any use at all, they are the words of the poet. For poetry has the ability to point us toward the truth, then stand aside.”
“What's important is being attentive, being alert to things, not prejudging but listening to what's going on, keeping our ears, heart and mind open.”
“Stop thinking about that shit. Some thoughts are poison. You can think them, but only when you've got the strength—or therapy... 'Til then? Right now? Close it off. Focus on right here and now.”
“The confusion that arises when we cling to our beliefs and expectations obscures the innate clarity of our awakened minds... this confused, conceptual mind simply does not have the capacity to understand mind beyond concepts.”
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