Tao Te Ching
Continuity
Continuity is a central teaching in Vajrayana Buddhism (the literal meaning of "Tantra") and a major factor in understanding culture, evolution, history, and our own psychology. Too much and we become more like animals and insects with very little or no art, creativity and innovation. But when not enough, society and individuals fall into confusion, chaos, and insanity. When our focus is too narrow, we lose track of our place in the evolutionary panorama, we lose awareness of our deep and meaningful but egoless place in the continuity of life and wisdom. When we realize this and understand our place in evolution’s relay, self-focus dissolves and we join the Great Conversation discovering the profound meaningfulness of life.
Quotes (78)
“Continuity beyond the realm of things, unthinkable thought beyond imagination.”
“The highest and humblest, wombs of the world, continuously, endlessly, give birth.”
“This world has always been, is, and always shall be: an everlasting fire rhythmically dying and flaring up again.”
“Man, who is an organic continuation of the Logos, thinks he can sever that continuity and exist apart from it.”
“When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don't want to, they will be compelled to follow what is destined.”
“The Tao gives birth to the beginning. One gives birth to yin and yang. Yin and yang give birth to the breath between them,the mixture of clear and turbid. These three breaths divide themselves into Heaven, Earth, and Humankind and together give birth to the ten thousand things.”
“The beginnings of fortune and calamity are subtle, so people are heedless of them. Only sages see the beginning and know the end.”
“We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”
“now here, now there, the vital forces conquer and, in turn, are conquered; with the funeral dirge mingles the wail that babies raise when they reach the shores of light.”
“Happy the man, who, studying nature's laws,
Thro' known effects can trace the secret cause.”
“An owl, noiseless as a feathered cloud, glided away in the moonlight, a songbird in its left foot. Fate goes ever as it must.”
“When there is continuous awareness from mind-moment to mind-moment you will naturally meet the Source on all sides.”
“The moon accompanies the current… understanding and the the changing world fulfill each other… go forward and see for yourself.”
“When one thought arises, another thought follows. When the first thought springs from enlightenment, all subsequent thoughts are true.”
“Charcoal does not become ashes... Everything is just a flashing into the vast phenomenal world.”
“The timeless ground, the innately abiding ground, is the ground that is at the very heart of enlightenment... do not stray from the lucid expanse that is the ultimate meaning of awareness!”
“As long as art lives, never shall I accept that men are truly dead.”
“Men are linked with animals, these with plants, and these again with fossils which in their turn are connected with elements that sense and imagination represents to us as completely dead”
“We are not people because of our bodies but because of our spirits... 'death' means resurrection and a continuation of life.”
“The body of B Franklin (Like the cover on an old book, it's contents torn out)... lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be lost; for it will appear once more, in a new and elegant edition revised and corrected”
“What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.”
“As soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.”
“the reason man's life is more full of suffering than the animal's is his greater capacity for knowledge... at each stage of animal life there is a corresponding increase in pain... the will is the string, its frustration the vibration of the string, knowledge the sounding -board, and pain the sound.”
“Every book is a quotation, and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries, and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”
“Out of every fruition of success, no matter what, comes forth something to make a new effort necessary.”
“Everything lives and perishes through magnetism; one thing affects another one, even at great distances, and its 'congenitals' may be influenced to health and disease by the power of this sympathy, at any time, and notwithstanding the intervening space.”
“New truth is always a go-between... It marries old opinions to new facts so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”
“there is some kind of continuity in any case since every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences”
“What we call our love or our jealousy is not a single continuous passion. It is composed of an infinite number of successive loves, of different ephemeral jealousies, which, following each other without interruption, give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.”
“I found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past... whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompany me through all my new experiences.”
“time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains qualities which can manifest themselves in relative simultaneousness in different places and in a parallelism which cannot be explained, like in cases of simultaneous appearance of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic conditions.”
“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.”
“In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.”
“I began to think of reincarnation as a manifestation of stability amidst flux, of continuity in tradition, of intellectual life, of individual life that transcends time”
“In each of us, the entire history of the world is reflected. And however autonomous our soul, it is indebted to an inheritance worked upon it from all sides—before it came into being—by the totality of the earth's energies.”
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
“Only the immortal dead entice me, the great Sirens Christ, Buddha, and Lenin. From my early years I sat at their feet and listened intently to their seductive love-filled song. I struggled all my life to save myself from each of these Sirens without denying any one of them, struggled to unite these three clashing voices and transform them into harmony.”
“As the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of a group lies in the continuity of its traditions; in either case, a break in the chain invites a neurotic reaction... To break sharply with the past is to court the madness that may follow the shock”
“In every generation, civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority.”
“It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at the moment. The preset is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time.”
“Where I had seen omnipresent death, I saw now everywhere the pageant and triumph of life.”
“In spite of earthquakes, epidemics, famines, eruptive migrations and catastrophic wars; the continuity of history reasserts itself and the essential processes of civilization are not lost – snatching them from the conflagration, some younger culture takes them up”
“In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.”
“The faculty of continual transformation... is a profound expression of the dynamic character of the mind.”
“It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation.”
“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”
“Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.”
“A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity.”
“in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the 'metaphor that is meant,' the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than an outward and visible sign, given unto us.'”
“Each existence depends on something else. Strictly speaking, there are just many names for one existence… We have nowhere to escape… That is why we emphasize everyday life rather than some particular state of mind. We should find the reality in each moment, and in each phenomenon.”
“Life lives by killing and eating itself, like the moon, casting off death and being reborn.”
“The principles of the I Ching apply at the highest levels to the great planets and stars wheeling in their courses and, at another level, to each individual person like you and me... We use the I Ching to trace arising situations back to their origin and/or forward to their completion; in this way, we learn the ways of life and death... This book is too sacred to be used for trivial purposes.”
“Respect ethical tradition not because is is sacrosanct but because it is the only way of being in communication with others.”
“...the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.”
“Many organizations dedicated to ‘Jewish continuity’ are running a heart and lung machine to keep a dying patient alive. They don't have a sense of how to build a future for Judaism, because most of the time they want immediate results.”
“If we believe in the continuity of mind, then love inconspicuously connects us to the ones we love with continuous positive energy, so that even tangible separations between people who love each other do not reduce the intangible power of love.”
“Change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons. Only that which can change can continue.”
“Unrepeatability is a characteristic of culture everywhere... culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition... Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished”
“We live in an historical river of wisdom but often only dwell on the banks. When in the river itself, our role is helping shape the channel to the modern times and issues.”
“The aspect of continuity is extremely important. When we change from one thing to another thing, we just get lost in change. Either continuity, or the image revealed in the water is always filled with ripples.”
“Emotionally, spiritually, domestically, politically; things don't seem to be associated or connected with each other and somehow these isolated situations, which from our confused way of thinking seem to have nothing to do with the basic quality of continuity, are the continuity itself.”
“Nothing is fatalistic, everything is continuously growing, as an evolutionary, developing process. Rebirth takes place every moment, every instant is death; every instant is birth.”
“The best approach is a long-term approach,,, trying to develop some trend of continuity in a different direction rather than believing there will be tremendous good news if the right person is elected. It takes the work of centuries.”
“I'm not afraid of death because I don't believe in it. It's just getting out of one car, and into another.”
“As enlightenment begins to dawn, reality, which had seemed all chopped up, turns out to possess an underlying continuity, a kind of infrastructure of interconnection.”
“Reincarnation is a continuity of everything we have learned, like lighting one candle from another, or a face and its reflection in a mirror.”
“We can see our lives as a series of choices extnding through time with the potential to shape not just what we do but who we are.”
“Letting go is itself is an example of dying. But recognition of this dying is what allows us to inhabit the continuous cycle of dying and being reborn with ease.”
“If you can understand what happens to you as one moment ends and another moment begins, you will also understand what will happen to you at the moment of death.”
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