Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 22a: Tao Te Ching Verses 18-19

The wisdom of the Tao often seems to contradict the “common sense” of consensus reality. But as always, we must look deeper. Verses 18 and 19 complement each other in that they point us toward the Logos, an inner understanding of Truth that can guide us more successfully than the definitions of “justice” and “morality” often established by our human systems. In this 2-part episode we consider patriotism, greed, loyalty to groups, and other dynamics relevant to this moment in history.

Transcript

In this episode,

We're continuing our conversation exploring the Tao Te Ching.

And in this one,

We get into some pretty wild topics like patriotism,

Government,

Loyalty to groups,

And some of these matters that are pressing in our time.

You'll also find in this episode that Rishika and I try on our comedic hat.

Have a listen and enjoy.

What was your first impression of assume you skimmed over 18 and 19 before we met?

What was your first impression?

I had to look up the word piety to make sure I understood exactly what was being said here.

Because it tends to mean,

I mean,

I tend to equate it in my mind with piousness,

Which it sort of means,

But it's more like devotion.

Should we read this first and then we'll?

Have we started?

We've started.

We're in.

We're going.

This is a live conversation.

Have we started yet?

No,

We haven't.

Am I on the path?

Is this what it's like?

Okay,

Okay.

Let's get our yayas out.

Yayas are fun.

Yeah,

They are.

We need more of those in the world.

We're too serious,

Don't you think?

I mean,

The world in general,

We take everything way too seriously.

I would say that we are too serious in the wrong ways and not serious enough in the right ways.

There you go.

Bingo.

I like that.

So the Tao is here to correct us and set us right.

I'll go ahead and read 18 and then when we get to it,

You can do 19.

Sounds good.

For those listening,

We're doing verses 18 and 19 of the Tao Te Ching today.

Eighteen is as follows.

When the great Tao is forgotten,

Goodness and piety appear.

When the body's intelligence declines,

Cleverness and knowledge step forth.

When there is no peace in the family,

Filial piety begins.

When the country falls into chaos,

Patriotism is born.

I hadn't thought of this until just this moment,

But one of the things that made the philosopher Nietzsche famous was that he argued that when Christianity had devolved into its more current forms and all people had to do was accept the idea that Jesus died for your sin and that was enough.

We didn't have to live any kind of truly spiritual or virtuous life.

With that would come this degradation of values and what would have to happen is that we would have to essentially make up our own values to replace that.

I'm reminded of that here in the way that when we really lose the essence of things,

When we really lose what's important,

We have to find something to substitute it.

Maybe one of the more obvious implications of this passage,

But how does it strike you?

I think that sums it up pretty nicely.

We have,

I think as humans,

And we don't really talk about this amongst ourselves very much and we don't necessarily even admit it to ourselves individually,

But we do have a need for devotion to something.

I think that we have this craving in us.

What commonly here it referred to as something higher than ourselves or giving back or contributing to a cause.

So we have those kind of common expressions,

But there's something in our heart that wants to be directed at something holy and sacred.

The way our culture has evolved into such a materialistic endeavor,

Especially here in the West,

We don't have a lot of obvious opportunities for that.

Maybe in our houses of worship,

Of course,

But just in everyday life.

How many people are getting up and doing a puja once a day?

I suppose some people still say prayers before bed and stuff,

But just in these very tiny ways we've lost an acknowledgement of the sacredness of reality.

So there's something in us that's yearning and crying out for that.

When we don't recognize it in the place where it actually exists,

Then we go looking for a substitute.

So we look for it in a lover,

We look for it in a demagogue who's charismatic or a religious leader of some sort.

Depending on what we're devoting our devotion to,

We can get led astray pretty easily.

I agree.

I think you're right here that everybody worships something and even the atheist has a value system by which they decide what's important to them and what's not.

That is the essence of worship because what worship is,

It's understanding what has ultimate value,

What has ultimate meaning and praising it or turning your attention toward it.

Let's put it that way.

When you have lost a sense of the truly good,

The truly holy,

The truly sacred,

The truly meaningful,

Then you have to turn your attention towards something.

I heard it once pointed out,

I can't remember who said it,

But it was a joke about you call yourself an atheist,

But you'll stand in line overnight to get tickets to the new Star Wars movie.

The idea being that these things have this kind of primal quality about them,

Even if we think we can bypass them.

Or even just something as simple as social media,

Which as we know is not exactly a hot bed of spirituality,

But well,

Maybe in some circles.

It poses as one.

When you,

I don't know about most people,

But I find myself oohing and aahing over natural phenomena and people's babies and cute pets and things.

That seems just really sort of innocent and common,

But there's a way in which that is actually a demonstration of what is so sacred about this world.

Underneath the,

Ah,

That's so cute,

What that puppy is doing with the kitty.

There's this understanding that's not spoken or articulated to ourselves that that's God at play.

That's God displaying himself across the sky as the sun goes down.

Does that make sense?

It does.

I'm entertaining that against a contrary perspective.

Maybe we can hash this out.

It'll be an interesting thing for us to mingle with because I can also see a point of view where what people post is what they think has ultimate value.

You know what I mean?

Well it does,

But the question is why?

What are we sensing there that we like?

What is it that we feel is good about these things?

If you ask somebody,

They'll tell you something that comes out of the intellect.

Well,

I like the sunset because I like the way the colors play against the thing or whatever,

But I think there's a deeper layer where we can't necessarily articulate it easily,

But we're feeling the magnificence of what catches our attention in reality.

There's a spiritual component.

We don't talk about it.

We don't recognize it most of the time.

It's just kind of underneath all the other stuff,

All the likes.

That's an interesting thing.

I have to,

It's not like the concept is new.

I'm just trying to figure out how that plays into what we're talking about here as far as how the Tao is,

When the Tao is forgotten.

Well let me talk then from the perspective of the Atheist that I used to be.

So when I was,

And this was maybe two or three years in my very early adulthood,

But when I considered myself an Atheist,

Of course I worshipped intellect and science and those sorts of things,

But I was also awed by the natural world in such a way that I would say things like,

Backcountry skiing on a Sunday morning,

That's my church.

Or I would have my breath taken away at the sight of a beautiful vista or the feeling I would get from someone singing in an angelic voice.

So it's not like I had released or rejected a notion of some higher value.

I just didn't call it God.

So I was appreciating things that now that I see them from a different perspective,

I can absolutely say,

Oh,

Look at,

You know,

Look what God's doing over there.

Look what the divine has created in this instance.

But in those days I simply used a different language for it and I thought it was the ability of my brain to appreciate it that was the holy part or the valuable part.

I don't know if that makes sense.

That's kind of a … Well,

Let me ask you a question based on what you said there,

Because I think this could be … I'm wondering if people listening might benefit from an explanation of this.

When you say worshipping the intellect and what else did you say?

Science?

Science and logic.

What do you mean exactly?

Can you lay that out as like what you mean by worshipping intellect and science and such?

Maybe worshipping was the wrong word,

But I had chosen to … Well,

I liked your use of that word,

But I'm just curious.

I didn't think of it as worship at the time,

Although yeah,

I certainly agree with you that it was a form of worship.

My orientation in those days was that I so mistrusted the religion that I had been brought up with and what I had seen people do in the name of other religions as well.

I was so disappointed by that and disillusioned that I felt the rationality of intellect and science could make sense of the world in a way that I could trust and that I could feel certain about and that felt safer than devoting myself to something that could not be proven to the intellectual mind.

Got it.

Well,

I think you were involved in that thread on social media a few weeks ago about when I posted talking about the belief in science piece,

Weren't you?

You were involved in that.

I kind of remember.

I don't remember what I said.

Maybe you weren't.

Maybe you weren't.

Someone was,

But maybe it wasn't you.

I see these signs all over in people's yards where they say,

We believe in science and that statement just strikes me.

It's like that's a religious statement and I think people who have those signs in their yards would be appalled to hear that.

But when you say,

I believe in anything,

It's a religious statement.

In order to understand that,

A person has to understand what religion actually is.

It doesn't mean that you're a specific practicing Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or whatever,

But that is religious thinking.

I just find it so contrary because those who say they believe in science tend to – they want to reject religious thinking and yet there's this religious thinking.

I don't know who said this,

But somebody once quipped that in science you get one free miracle which is the fact that anything exists at all.

Nobody has to explain that.

I mean,

They talk about the Big Bang Fifth Theory,

But there's no context in which that really stands.

It's simply,

Oh,

A thing happened and here we are.

So everything else is scientific.

So it is a form of belief.

I mean,

You have to put your trust in the idea that big banks would have happened or not regardless of a higher power.

We're probably going to stray if we keep going down this road.

When real wisdom is lost,

Intellectual banter arises.

It's fun though.

It's a good diversion.

It is.

All right.

So let's start at the top here.

When the great Tao is forgotten,

Goodness and piety appear.

And what I hear there is simply ego.

If you lose sight of the fact that you are part of something greater than yourself,

You begin to elevate yourself in its place or the ego begins to elevate itself in its place.

Oh,

That's a very interesting take on this.

I see it a little bit differently here.

What I see is that the Tao describes a natural goodness that lives in us.

When we lose contact with that,

We generate our own version of goodness and piety as a way to try to recapture that original goodness.

But that goodness and piety are in themselves just one step removed from that real original goodness.

I see this.

This is a very … one of the reasons I chose this passage is because I think it speaks so much to our times where,

Well as you know,

I'm against the governmental control regarding the coronavirus.

And one of the reasons I'm against it is because when the government instigates a gesture to control people's behavior,

What it overlooks is that people naturally act good when they're allowed to do so.

And when people are not trusted,

They become untrustworthy.

I think the Tao says that very specifically,

Doesn't it?

Yes,

Exactly.

It does.

Right?

And so I think that one of the things that I find very problematic about our current times is that we're trying to implement goodness,

But often that goodness that we're trying to implement is a replacement of something that's actually much more natural and much more intrinsic that we don't have to impose upon ourselves or each other.

Right,

Right.

Well,

And also whenever you try to impose goodness,

You try to create some sort of an ideal circumstance or behavior,

You implicitly are rejecting what's already there.

You know,

There's an implicit criticism of whoever the audience is,

Whoever this is directed toward,

And that will get,

Of course,

A pushback.

People sense when they're being put down or criticized or condescended to,

And whether they articulate it or not,

They will act it out in some ways.

Right,

Right.

Exactly.

And when that's done in the name of goodness and piety,

Everything goes wrong.

And we see that everywhere.

We see it in our governments,

We see it in our societies,

Our churches,

We see it everywhere.

Our schools,

We see it everywhere.

You know,

I just had the funniest thought,

And I don't know if this is relevant or not,

But Disneyland,

The happiest place on earth.

Right,

Yes.

Go to Disneyland,

It's the happiest place on earth.

It'll cost you,

You know,

Your life savings,

But that's okay.

I hope my daughter doesn't hear this because she adores Disneyland,

And I'm not criticizing her for that.

But it is an artificial world,

You know,

Where the characters are literally cartoons of,

I guess there's some villains in the mix here and there,

But you know,

Our heroes are cartoonish.

Anyway,

That's another story.

It's kind of funny here because in some sense,

You know,

If you look at the old Disney movies,

They brought forward some really powerfully truthful films.

And yet that institution of Disneyland,

The happiest place on earth,

It's a complete farce.

Yeah.

What are the tickets now,

150 bucks or something?

Oh,

That's probably for an hour pass.

All right,

Moving right along.

Yeah,

I think that's the thing.

And we see,

I mean,

Even since this is such a political time right now,

You know,

This requirement that people running for office seem to have to demonstrate their piety or their alleged goodness and,

You know,

Well,

So-and-so goes to church,

So-and-so doesn't go to church,

You know,

Who cares?

It's government.

Well,

And I think,

You know,

To temporarily reach out to those people who are so baffled by why Trump gained support,

It was for that reason because people are tired of posturing.

People are tired of posing.

I'm not saying that Trump was the solution to that,

But… Well,

You know,

When he stood there with the Bible.

Oh yeah.

Well,

I thought,

Well,

When that happened,

I thought,

Oh God,

Christianity is done for now.

Yeah,

For sure.

I think that's the thing that I think that.

When the body's intelligence declines,

Cleverness and knowledge step forth.

I like that one.

It's good.

I like that a lot because I think we really misunderstand our bodies and what they're for aside from just carrying our brain around.

They communicate with us constantly.

I think they both receive and send information and because we're so distracted by outward things,

Media and other people and whatever,

You know,

Steals our attention,

We're not paying attention to where the wisdom lives,

Which is inside in the body in so many ways.

Yeah.

Well,

The body,

It houses this natural wisdom and intelligence that we inherit from the natural world.

When we've lost contact with that,

It's like we turn to book learning.

We turn to ideas.

I just as much love books and learning as much as anybody else,

Maybe more than anyone else,

But that wisdom of the body generates something that is,

Well,

It's just that it's embodied.

It's real.

It's grounded in reality.

Yeah.

This idea that when that is not available to us or we're not paying attention to it or we don't know how,

Cleverness and knowledge step forth.

There's something so true there.

I'm trying to articulate it.

I guess if I don't trust my own body,

Then I have to rely on the learning.

I have to rely on the information I've stored in my head and the cleverness is required or might be something that I would cultivate as a way of strategizing my way through life rather than trusting that I already know.

I already know how to move.

I already know what I want.

I already know what's right in any given situation.

I have to use the brain and as we know,

The brain is tremendously flawed in terms of the way it perceives things.

It doesn't see reality clearly for most people and all kinds of mistakes come up.

You know what I'm thinking about as you read this?

Doritos.

Here's why.

Here's why.

Here's why because deep down,

Everyone knows that eating Doritos is not good for you.

It's not healthy food.

It's not food that sustains the health and well-being of your body,

Right?

I'm going to make this like grossly material for a moment.

Now I came across something a while back about how Doritos are marketed from the scientific work they do on developing flavors to appeal to specific parts of your tongue and brain to how the actual bag feels when you touch it and when you open it.

Yes.

All the way down to how the bag feels,

Right?

All to condition a response in you that makes it so that you want those things,

Right?

When I heard the bag thing really got me,

I was like,

The bag,

Huh?

It made me think if that's the cleverness,

That's the deceit and the cleverness that go into this thing.

When we give permission for our natural intelligence to be co-opted by cleverness,

We fall prey to eating Doritos.

Yes.

Oh,

They do that with everything.

You know what that reminds me of too is if you listen to people tell their stories,

If they've been addicted to something like crack,

They have to avoid even the paraphernalia and they will dream about whatever's involved,

The cutting up the rocks or whatever and boiling it in the equipment.

I don't know how that works,

But yeah.

Because all those things get connected up in the brain into a little constellation of an experience and you trigger one part of that.

It's like pulling on a spider web and all the other stuff gets triggered.

There's a good book called,

Since we're talking about drug food,

Salt,

Sugar,

Fat,

That goes,

Maybe you've read it,

About how they do all those things,

How they make the flavors more appealing,

Et cetera.

Okay,

So now we're wandering off the path again.

Well,

But there's something very important that we're talking about,

Which is the underlying idea that we have this natural intelligence and to some degree,

We have a natural knowledge about what is healthy and what sustains us and what's right for our body,

What's right for our mind.

But when we've lost that natural intelligence,

We replace it with something and that's where our cleverness and our knowledge step forth.

It's like we replace it with something that our egoic mind or our animal instincts are now in charge of.

Yeah,

And I'm kind of angry about that,

Quite frankly.

We get manipulated from all angles.

Not just product manufacturers,

But anybody who wants to sell us anything.

I was going to write on my blog the other day and the interface had been updated and they were like,

Want to hire a writer for your blog?

No one would want to hire someone to write my blog,

But apparently people do that to pretend,

You know,

There's the cleverness,

To pretend that they're actually sharing something genuine when in fact it's just canned by another writer.

And that's so much the world we live in now.

It's a world of deceit and I don't mean that pessimistically.

I just mean it through observation,

Is that deceit is rampant.

Yeah,

So we don't trust each other and then we start relying on people to tell us what the world really means and how things really are and now we've spiraled down.

Well,

Like our joke of an organization,

The FDA,

Which puts Doritos and cancer-causing gum on the shelf and says,

This is safe for you.

Okay.

We're ranting today.

This is a rant.

Can we get away with that?

Can we do one episode where we just rant a lot?

We can rant.

Let's rant.

Okay.

Let's do one overall.

All right.

When there is no peace in the family,

Filial piety begins.

That one puzzled me a little bit.

Coming from a family that was not peaceful and still is not peaceful in some ways.

Filial piety.

I mean,

I kind of envisioned siblings clinging to each other in the face of an impressive or tyrannical parent.

You know what it brings to mind to me is it brings to mind the Godfather.

It brings to mind the mentality of when things aren't truly functional,

Then we start treating our family as what?

Blood is thicker than water.

Yeah,

That.

Yeah.

Exactly that.

I mean,

Family here could mean not just the nuclear family or your immediate close family,

But any kind of group that you pledge allegiance to.

Right.

I've never really understood people's loyalty to groups,

Whether it was their school or their country or their state or their family.

But I think that's partially what's being pointed to here is that there's an inherent lack of peace that leads to that kind of compensation.

What are you doing there?

Are you looking for ghosts?

No,

I'm looking for the dog that I'm fostering because she's disappeared and I hope she's not.

Oh,

There she is.

We absolutely have to keep this in the recording.

As you wander around your house,

While I'm making the most brilliant point I've ever made,

You're wandering around the house,

Looking at the windows.

Okay,

I have to go collect her.

So I'm going to wander outside now,

But I can still hear you and I'm still listening.

I promise.

She's eating bugs.

And she's getting into,

Okay,

So I have this terrible ant problem and I've put out ant baits and she keeps finding them and trying to lick it because I think it's sweet.

Come on.

Oh,

That's not good.

Yeah,

So I got to get her back in the house.

Here we go.

Come on.

No,

You're not in trouble.

It's all right.

I'm sorry.

Okay,

So what were you saying after all that?

Well,

I was on to some brilliant points and then you started walking around looking out the windows and I thought.

Oh,

I'm sorry,

I didn't mean to interrupt you.

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

We were talking about the family and getting connected to groups.

I would have liked something like the idea of loyalty here instead of the word piety.

Although the word piety does sort of evoke the sense of righteousness that people get when they're in groups.

Whether it's a sports club or your political party or whatever social cause that you're aligning yourself with,

There is a piety aspect to that that is equal to the loyalty and actually amplifies the loyalty.

Yeah,

That's a great point.

That's right.

There's this blind spot we have that if a few of us come together and we feel the same way,

We must be right about what we're going to say.

People don't act and I think this is one of the problems with the way we communicate now through social media,

Through texting,

Through emails.

People don't act typically self-righteous when they talk face to face,

But they do so when they can hide in the anonymity of a group or behind a screen.

I think what that points back to here is that lack of peace in the family.

Something's not right at home.

So it's being extended out as this falseness.

Yeah,

And in this technological world that's so confusing because especially now where we've got so much information,

Our population has grown so large and we're still so afraid of ever admitting that we don't know something.

That if you encounter another group of people who kind of think the way you do and they seem to have the bigger picture or they seem to have the answer to the question,

It's kind of a shortcut around doing our own seeking of understanding of certain issues.

And so I can just align with this group because,

You know,

Hey,

I thought I vibe with these guys and that connection becomes more important and more vital than the actual discovery of what it is that we're addressing.

And not only that,

But once you begin to identify with that,

To turn around and question whether you'd made a mistake about that choice or that alignment with that group is really threatening to the ego.

It'll bring up a lot of cognitive dissonance.

Like I've put all this energy into this group and now I'm starting to rethink this thing.

And you can just see in certain political parties when people try to back away from whatever their particular orthodoxy is,

There's individual resistance and there's resistance from the group.

So now we're getting into sort of like now it's not a group anymore.

It's a gang and you can't leave.

Well,

Here we go.

Like this first line just keeps ringing true.

When the great Tao is forgotten.

I think in some sense what we're saying is when the great Tao is forgotten,

We resort to ideologies to replace true sense and true wisdom and true thought even.

I think the trust factor is huge.

It's so hard to trust,

To know what to trust that if we don't trust the Tao or our inner wisdom and instead turn outward,

Then we're inevitably going to be making mistakes.

So we're getting the exact opposite of what we're looking for.

That would be a really good episode for us to record as one on the true nature of trust or the true nature of faith,

What that really is.

Because I think what you said points to it here is that we're often looking for something or someone to trust rather than understanding the state of trust itself.

When we inquire into the state of trust,

We start to recognize it doesn't have anything to do with something or someone.

It's a state.

It's a way of being.

When the country falls into chaos,

Patriotism is born.

Oh boy!

First time I read the Tao Te Ching must have been right around the time of 9-11.

I remember when I read that line,

I thought,

Yep,

That's what's happening.

When that happened 9-11,

I worked at a newspaper at the time,

I was standing in the newsroom next to my immediate supervisor.

Some of us were in tears and we were all just aghast watching what was going on on the monitors and she turned to me and she goes,

Our lives just changed in ways we can't possibly imagine.

Sure enough,

Within a week or two,

We were starting to talk about what rights we were willing to give up in order to combat this global terror threat.

And of course,

We all know what's happened since then.

And patriotism,

We remember the magnets on the cars and the flag pins and it came in certain circles,

Not in journalism because we weren't really allowed to take sides,

But in some people's worlds,

It was kind of a requirement.

It was kind of mandatory that you wave the flag.

It was a bizarre time.

I was stopped crossing the Hoover Dam.

I had a beard and I can look a little bit Middle Eastern and I was stopped on the Hoover Dam and asked,

Grilled.

And the cop there was suggesting that he would unpack,

We were in the process of moving,

Suggested he would unpack my car and had a very intimidating presence.

And it was strange,

The kind of patriotic element that was present in it and how inhuman it became.

As an aside,

Have you heard of the book,

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire?

I think that's what it's called.

No.

It's disturbing though.

Well,

It's disturbing.

Is it about 9-11?

9-11 is a significant part of it.

Just about everything that people chalk up to conspiracy theories is put in there in factual form.

One of the things that it explores,

Interestingly enough,

Is the origin of the notion of climate,

Not climate change,

Global warming and what happened in that movement and all the way through to the coronavirus.

It's a fascinating,

It just came out last year.

Oh,

Wow.

It's a fascinating,

Disturbing,

I mean there are so many facts presented in there,

I couldn't verify even a small portion of them.

It's just one fact after another.

Well,

You won't get a lot of argument from me.

Just the premise I already agree with is that there's been something going on since Reagan,

If you ask me.

Yeah,

This guy takes it back further,

But yep.

Anyway,

Yeah,

Let's check it out.

It's a very disturbing book.

So patriotism,

When the country falls into chaos,

Patriotism is born.

And I think again,

Because it feels like a refuge,

Like we're scared,

We don't know what's happening,

We don't know if we're safe.

My mom and I had planned a trip to France and we were supposed to leave the week after 9-11 and we could have still gone after the flights were flying again,

But we chose not to.

We didn't know if we'd be targets in Europe or whatever.

Everybody was so scared.

We ended up going to Canada,

Which is a whole other story,

But yeah,

You're looking for a parent figure,

You're looking for something to put your trust in because we are such fear-driven creatures.

The amygdala,

When that gets activated or targeted by an act of terrorism or something,

We lose all rationality.

Yeah.

Here,

Take my freedom,

Just keep me safe.

Exactly,

And we can see that this narrative of patriotism and,

Well,

Much of the military industrial complexes thrived on creating the dual messages of patriotism and fear to support itself.

Yeah,

Fear keeps it in business.

And this is also another example of,

We were just talking about trust.

If we don't know where to put our trust,

Then just like any other group,

We can cling to our national identity and rah-rah for this team.

The thing that really stands out to me about it is it's all made up.

It's all made up.

It's all made up.

You know what I mean?

It's all languages and ideas that people have adopted and said,

This is what I am,

This is what I'm not.

When we don't belong to the Tao anymore,

Then we choose to belong to something and we'll belong to a nation,

A race,

A gender.

We'll belong to something and therein lies the chaos because with that comes division and separation and fear and war.

I was born on this side of an invisible line in the dirt and you were born on the other and therefore we can't travel to each other's places easily.

Because I'm an expat right now living in Mexico,

We run up against this all the time.

How do you live in Mexico freely and still deal with your mail?

It's just all these little things.

I can't move freely sometimes and it frustrates me without the right paperwork or without spending certain amounts of time on certain sides of these international borders and it's just silly.

Yeah,

I mean how far away we have gotten from the Tao in that way and that's why I don't hold a lot of hope for our governments and our systems.

There's this kind of idea that if we change the system,

Change the government,

Things will get better.

But until that includes the presence of the Tao and the truth and living our lives according to what's truly real within us,

I don't see a lot of hope.

Do you think there are any societies on the planet right now that are living in that way?

I mean they may not call it the Tao but that are devoted to sort of a natural orientation?

Well I don't suspect this will be very popular with people listening but religious communities.

I think probably the clearest example we had of a sane culture was the Tibetan culture prior to the Chinese invasion where the whole society was structured around their Buddhist principles and there was kind of a natural adherence to those teachings and the beauty of them.

Yeah,

That movie Seven Years in Tibet is such a lovely example of that.

Yeah,

It's a wonderful movie.

I mean I do see this in,

I've seen a few churches and I've seen some communities where when the Tao,

When the truth is at the center of it,

Things function rightly.

But that doesn't happen in a fractured society where people aren't willing to gather and truth together.

Reviews

Thank you so much for these beautiful enriching pearls of wisdom that you spread during this engaging dialogue