Tao Te Ching
Yan Zabolotnyi
Transmutation
Internal transformation, perceptual and systemic reshaping; transmutation represents change on a grand but still personal scale. We shape so much of our experience with biological imperatives, cultural and family mind-sets, distorted memories and opinions. Instead of always being careful to stay within these predefined concepts, we can venture a little outside the conventional, play with the boundaries, and take careful risks. Small but clear shifts in openness can bring about dramatic results.
When most of us hear "transmutation", we think changing from who and what we are into some better version of ourselves, some conceptual ideal. In this case, however, we transform our attitude. Instead of fighting against our experience and trying to make it into something else, we open, accept, appreciate.
Quotes (55)
“As the smith melts fragments of metal, fusing the into a single ingot, dissolve the fragments of your knowledge in the vast expanse of your mind's nature.”
“My heart was split and a flower appeared; and grace sprang up; and it bore fruit”
“Water and fire compensate each other,
Thunder and Wind do not disturb each other,
Mountain and Lake are dependent on each other
Thus change and transformation become possible,
And all things become completed.
”
“Like the lotus flower that grows out of muddy water but stays untouched by mud, engage in life without cherishing envy or hatred; live in the world not a life of self but a life of truth.”
“Transform the lust for power and riches into the desire to relate to all beings, destroy every demon that enters your mind.”
“When the conscious spirit transforms into the primordial spirit, it attains an unending capacity for transformation and brings the six-fold present, the golden spirit.”
“The flame of pure awareness burns away all delusion.”
“The interaction of the yin and yang through different combinations of the five agents generates all things in a process of endless transformation.”
“When heat and moisture unite on the square plain, whatever you do helps the green grass to grow. When life flourishes like the rising patterns within a skullcup, whatever harm is inflicted will become beneficial.”
“The Grape that can with Logic absolute
Life’s leaden Metal into Gold transmute.”
“Change base lust into refined love and it is worth more than a mountain of gold.”
“I slip off my days clothes and enter the ancient courts of men of old; and for two hours I forget all my cares, I know no more trouble, death loses its terrors: I am utterly translated in their company.”
“The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.”
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is—infinite.”
“Though thou loved her as thyself, as a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day, stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know, when half-god go, the gods arrive.”
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”
“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world… as in being able to remake ourselves.”
“It was beautiful to see commonplace facts grow phosphorescent in the heat of true feeling.”
“Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.”
“The supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail.”
“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.”
“I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.”
“ancient Greek civilization was not a supernatural flower suspended in mid-air; it was a tree that rooted itself deeply in the earth, consumed mud, and turned this mud into flowers. And the more mud it consumed, the more richly elaborate did this flowering become.”
“God makes us grubs, and we, by our own efforts, must become butterflies... He sent us the silkworm to point out our way... the grub's yearning to become butterfly always stood at its—and man's—most imperative and at the same time most legitimate duty.”
“Education is the perfecting of life—the enrichment of the individual by the heritage of the race... In proportion as he absorbs this legacy he is transformed from an animal into a man, from a savage into a citizen.”
“Only in Christianity and in Buddhism can we find again so heroic an effort to transmute into decency the natural brutality of men.”
“Machiavelli was able to return to the world on a more etherial plane, on which his effect on the world has been vastly greater... he succeeded in transmuting his practical energies into a series of mighty intellectual works which have been the seeds of our modern, Western political philosophy.”
“The most amazing conversion, it seems to me, is that of the English philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham, whose lifework was the result of reading not one great book or even one page of a great book, but of a single phase. ['The greatest happiness for the greatest number.'-Priestly]”
“The butterfly was just a lowly worm in its beginning. The worm didn't live with the moment-to-moment expectation of sprouting wings and taking flight. He lived a useful and productive life, the life of a worm. And he had to die a worm in order to be born as an angel! The spinning of the cocoon is, in and of itself, remarkable. It is as wondrous as the emergence and first flight of the butterfly.”
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”
“If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”
“The faculty of continual transformation... is a profound expression of the dynamic character of the mind.”
“not based on abstract ideas or fixed concepts, but on visual reality as revealed in pictures and diagrams... their [the trigrams and hexagrams] main function... is a means of helping us to see into nature's ways with a view to bending ourselves to suit those ways instead of trying to conquer nature and win power over it... it emphasizes individual destiny and the importance of time in human life... compassion and self-reliance, agelessness and enlightenment, service for the good of all, deeds without selfish profit, non-violence and tranquility, and the recognition of eternal change, or transformation”
“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
“Pasternak was a poet of genius in all that he did and was... I visited him almost weekly, and came to know him well. I cannot hope to describe the transforming effect of his presence, his voice and gestures.”
“If you want your life to truly transform, you do this by just staying with the mess. You stay in it. A lot of practice is just sheer persistence and patience with the confusion.”
“I am not free to the degree that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my illness; I am healed with my illness.”
“The caterpillar does all the work, and the butterfly gets all the glory.”
“The ultimate idea of rebirth is not purely the idea of physical birth and death. Physical birth and death are very crude examples of it, actually. It's a changing, evolutionary process: there's nothing you can grasp onto; everything is changing. But there is some continuity, of course—the change is the continuity.”
“There’s a point in everyone’s life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes, you have to grab it by the tail, grab it hard and never let go… They obliterate the stye they’ve worked in, and out of the ruins they rise up again.”
“Everything in the whole world system exists in between something else... between the death of the old me and the birth of whatever comes next. Becoming and becoming always in the bardo of the unknown, the uncertain, the transient.”
“Without the capacity to die continuously, we end up living in a place where only fungus grows... Unless you wake up, tomorrow will feel like today.”
“I am part of this universe. This air is part of this universe. With each breath, the universe changes. With each exhale, the old me dies. With each inhale, a new me is born.”
“Without personal transformation, and without some sense of humility... greed and anger are pushing us over the cliff.”
“small changes nobody notices accumulate over time and become big changes... That's how you grow up, that's how a small land animal became a huge whale, and that's how hunting a few mammoths every year caused the mammoths to die out.”
“Don't let your sadness turn into anger, or your loneliness into hate. Channel what you feel into something good. Find ways to help people.”
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