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Posted by Nina
on 11/13/2008, 7:47 pm, in reply to "the metaphysical brat pack"
71.106.26.X
--Previous Message--
: i believe that it was Dean Martin who once
: said that he had never read a goddam book in
: his life and it had never done him any harm.
:
: Maybe not, but then again few of us here
: have had the pleasure of being close friends
: with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davies Jnr. ,
: and so the rest of us have to make do with
: the printed page.
:
: As Taoists, you have Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu
: to keep you company, and maybe some other
: classics over at the weekend, and as a poor
: Buddhist i merely have innumerable sutra's,
: commentaries and records of Dharma-teachers
: to keep me on the straight and narrow.
: However do you think that you would have
: arrived, for the want of a better word, to
: where you are today, if you had never read a
: goddam book in your life?
:
I think I arrived at where I am today when I was about 8 years old. Plop!
The thing that pissed me off most was when teachers told me I had to find "their" message in the books I read. Not nice. Fortunately, I didn't listen to them, and still listen to my own heart most of the time.
The thing that maybe helped me the most when I found Laozi and Zhuangzi was....... they suggested it was okay to not put much stock in the concepts of others. Did that make me who I am? Nope. But it's nice to find someone in this screwed up world who isn't trying to make me see things the way they do.
Is that what you get out of the sutras, LianDao?
-Nina
105
"The Tao is basically utterly open. Utter openeness has no substance. It ends in endlessness, begins in beginninglessnes".
-Li Daoqun
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