Tao Te Ching
Openness
Openness sounds so simple and easy to experience but how rare and wonderful. Our life experiences continually provide a myriad of traps and seductions enticing us into fixed points of view, solid opinions, prejudice, and chauvinistic attitudes.
Quotes (85)
“Visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves… a heart free of prejudices and therefore open to truth… An egg is hollow. The light-giving power must work to quicken it from outside, but there must be a germ of life within, if life it to be awakened.”
“The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.”
“The sage commander moves beyond defeat by being victorious over his own aggression... the general who is not victorious over his anger brings destruction to his own troops as well as the enemy. Aggression gives the enemy something against which to fight. this mires the general in battle. The sage commander responds to aggression by creating space”
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”
“Can you stop looking to others and focus on your innermost self? Can you return to the beginning of the world and be like a newborn baby?”
“Not to understand is profound; to understand is shallow. Not to understand is to be on the inside; to understand is to be on the outside.”
“when the mind is open and free of its own thoughts, life unfolds effortlessly and the whole world is filled with light”
“The sage is full of anxiety and indecision in undertaking anything, and so he is always successful.”
“Nothing is certain, not even that.”
“A grain of corn contains the Universe:The hills and rivers fill a small cooking-pot.”
“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.”
“The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame;
Like space it knows no boundaries,
It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it;
You remain silent and it speaks; you speak, and it is dumb.”
“While the unrealized, spiritual child, five times poisoned, is lost in samsara, the realized sage rejects nothing whatsover.”
“From the soil of unknowing and ignorance comes the clay of passion and thought.”
“When the government leaves power with the people… makes no demands, the people respond with openness instead of deception. When the government makes demands, the people use every means to escape.”
“Understanding depends on things. Hence, it involves fabrication. Not understanding returns to the origin. Hence, it approaches the truth.”
“You are water, but in a whirlpool and engulfed; come down among us... we know nothing except singing these songs of unknowingness.”
“I speak and speak, ... but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. ... It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”
“All fools are fully convinced and everyone fully convinced is a fool.”
“the crudest or simplest people have something of value to say, something one can check through to the source and remember”
“At these words the samurai… sheathed his sword and bowed. ‘Here open the gates of paradise,’ said Hakuin.”
“In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by Faith,but by the lack of it.”
“Nurturing firmness with flexibility, solidity with openness, from striving enter into nonstriving, from effort into spontaneity and practice introspection in action letting true yin and true yang naturally unite.”
“But let no person say what they would or would not do, since we are not judges for ourselves until circumstances call us to act.”
“Now let me dare to open wide the gate/Past which men's steps have ever flinching trod.”
“to attain a clear consciousness, a main requirement is to comprehend anything that "goes without saying" as a problem”
“The only means of strengthening one’s intelligence is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”
“Sincerity is nevertheless the only enduring strength.The principle is universal, stretching from the highest purposes of Literature down to its smallest details. It underlies the labor of the philosopher, the investigator, the moralist, the poet, the novelist, the critic, the historian, and the compiler.”
“all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore”
“Genius is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work”
“Everything secret degenerates; nothing is safe that does not bear discussion and publicity.”
“There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given. Farewell.”
“Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise try to understand and to see the truth in ideas with which they do not agree.”
“Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of the little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.”
“Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.”
“Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.”
“Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart... live in the question.”
“I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness... There is nothing I'm quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really”
“If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life”
“there is an uncertainty which is more certain that certitude itself... there were no longer any such things as truth and falsehood; everything was a soft dough which I kneaded and rolled freely”
“Suppose it were forbidden to say ‘I know’, only allowed to say ‘I believe I know’?”
“Truth we shall never know; it is only clarity we are striving for... even more important than knowing the truths is the general unsettling of our complacent beliefs and gilt-edged assumptions... No one begins to think until he has some of that brute complacency thoroughly thrashed out of him with the rawhide of wiser minds.”
“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
“What matters most are the simple pleasures so abundant that we can all enjoy them...Happiness doesn't lie in the objects we gather around us. To find it, all we need to do is open our eyes.”
“the distribution of flexibility among the many variables of a system is a matter of very great importance. The healthy system... may be compared to an acrobat on a high wire... he must be free to move from one position of instability to another... If his arms are fixed or paralyzed (isolated from communication), he must fall.”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
“The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions, and to all people experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages...”
“Are you listening? Listening is the greatest gift I can give you as a teacher, and the greatest gift you can give another person.”
“I’d always rather err on the side of openness. But there’s a difference between optimum and maximum openness, and fixing that boundary is a judgment call.”
“You must keep don’t know mind always and everywhere. This is the true practice of Zen.”
“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”
“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
“and then there was the vast openness of open space and that vast openness was I , myself”
“I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.”
“This open-ended, or what I have called horizontal, way of thinking then penetrates every aspect of Buddhism. It cancels the claim that anyone, even the most accomplished Buddhists, or bodhisattvas, can say what Buddhism is truly about.”
“The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.”
“With the mandalic approach, nothing is excluded, everything finds its place and students move through a world of magic in which they are a tongue of the earth, chanting her song to the stars.”
“Energy is openness and all-pervasiveness. It is constantly expanding. It is decentralized energy, a sense of flood, ocean, outer space, the light of the sun and moon.”
“We cut our ground and have a frightening – terrifying – sudden glimpse of groundlessness… no one is standing on any ground, so communication can take place quite freely”
“we do not have to depend on feedback and we can relate with life as directly and straightforwardly as possible… Working with energy in a tantric sense is a decentralized process… energy is openness and all-pervasive… constantly expanding.”
“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.”
“Is it possible for one human being to understand another? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
“Genghis Khan... brought with him an all-embracing openness, a religious tolerance based on shamanic principles that was almost as much of a threat to his enemies as anything else. He introduced not just the idea but the reality of international law and trade and travel, and helped lay the foundations for the modern world.”
“I'd open my mouth wide, my ears wide, my heart, and I'd let everything inside... for a while, I wouldn't want anything more but what I had.”
“people who long ago decided it wasn't sophisticated to be sincere, that sincerity was for fools, that sincere people were put on earth to be manipulated and exploited by people like them—for the greater good of course.”
“Existential flexibility is the capacity to initiate an extreme disruption to a business model or strategic course in order to more effectively advance a Just Cause.”
“The essence of meditation practice is to let go of all your expectations about meditation…”
“If you feel overwhelmed and confused by the global predicament, you are on the right track.”
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