Episodes
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The Taoist Sage is calm, even in the toughest – or the best – situations life offers. That sage models resilient peace in every situation, not resorting to thought- and conversation-killing cliches or ego maneuvers. That’s why they can join ANYone, ANYwhere, and bring peace, needed help? Why?Their egos are parked!
Thank you Kimberly Mason for your calm presence and help on today’s podcast. I think you will love her wisdom and questions about our verse.
Marc.
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The personal becomes public in this Verse 57. You who attempt to practice Wu-Wei in your life, or family … what if the government and rulers practiced Wu-Wei as well asyou practice? What might happen and not happen in a Wu-Wei-informed government? Whoa!
Stuart Lamkin joins me to discuss this verse. His insights are wise and timely, and the reason why this episode is longer.
May your days begin rooted in spontaneous Peace, so you may know and practice a politics of hope, of which our world is in great need.
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This verse starts off with one of the two most famous proverbs in the Tao te Ching: Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know. Talking-up Tao ain’t walking the Tao Path. In the silence, the word-free spaces, are where we then develop the wisdom on how to live wisely, peaceably, and in service to others. Listening more than talking actually gives one credamong people, and the other than human world.
Thanks to my quote reader Johnny Richardson, to whom I ask the question this time!
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A theologian I read, Paul Tillich wrote: We must abandon the external high and mighty images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is. I invite us to see the entire universe as God’s body. That is, thereis nowhere, and no time, where we are not encountering the holy, the divine, that Which IS. Be careful how we interpret the world, for it will become exactly like that.
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Verse 55 speaks about the qualities of a person so rooted in Tao they are spontaneously joyful, artless and not contrived, because conforming with the Changeless Tao is the only enlightened way to live. Teased out in this verse is how we exchange this birthright in Tao with a mess of something we have no business messing in. We have seven voices today, and I hope this is a feast in your ears.
May your days begin rooted in spontaneous joy and Peace, so you may know and practice moment-by-moment hope, of which our world is in great need.
Marc Mullinax - [email protected]
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Verse 54 teaches that Tao and its practice are a single events, moment by moment, but we may see them as twophases: (i) Knowing our roots in Tao, and (ii) regarding all through this eternal rootage. This has wonderful implications for the Golden Rule, which I attempt to upgrade as “always do first, as you would be done by.”
May your days begin rooted in Peace, so you may know moment-by-moment how to regard hope in everysituation.
Marc Mullinax – [email protected]
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This verse 53’s episode, on “Lowered Ceilings,” is a callfor the inner self not to compromise on the single, or the very few important things in life … like following the level and straight path of the Great Tao, and not becoming side-tracked by the many sideways of fruitless action and thinking over and over again those thoughts that take us nowhere but round and round in circles.
Melvis Madrigal is my second voice on the podcast thisweek. Thank you, Melvis!
May your days begin in peace, and become laboratories for radical hope.
Marc Mullinax – [email protected]
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Verse 52 takes us on a wild but life-affirming ride that Taois our Grand and Prolific Mother, who invites all her creations – all her children – to a family reunion that never stops. Chandler Schroeder is my accompanying voice this time.
In the episode, I make a new call for listeners to contact me for two reasons: (i) to be a reader and question-asker on a future podcast, and (ii) to join me in a new edition of this podcast after we finish all 81 verses, in a podcast we’ll entitle, “My Favorite Verse of Tao te Ching.”
The email to contact me for either is: [email protected].
May your days begin in peace, to become labs and wombs for radical hope.
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Tao is the Original Blueprints of the Universe. Te is the architect that makes these Blueprints visible. Tao is theDream. Te coaxes the Dream to become deeds. This spontaneous mutual relationship got us here; Verse 51 explores how.
Joe Bennett is our voice and questioner today. Pink Floyd provides some awesome lyrics.
May your days begin in radical, lettin’-it-be peace, to become wombs and laboratories for the change-up our world so desperately requires.
Did I get Joe's Question right? Let us know: [email protected]
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This verse gets to the heart of what we are made of, and made for. Origins and Destiny. Often, however, we get trapped by the shiny blings of life and lower our ceilings, and have these vulnerable places I call targets for our temptations. But we are more than enslaved slabs of meat susceptible only to reactive thoughts, acquired tastesand cultivated addictions. Listen for more! Who knows? It’s perhaps my most important episode.
Kenny Meade is our voice and question-raiser. Find out more about him at https://www.kennethmeade.com/.I make reference to a teaching from J.R.R. Tolkien that parallels today’s episode. You can find that teaching here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtHfY06sP1s
May your days begin in original peace, and become laboratories for radical hope!
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Today’s verse 49 teaches how to live with natural grace and peace in what seem like pivotal and violent times. We dissect in this episode how the servant leader, or Taoist, holds to their original vision of peace without compromise. It’s a difficult path, but to become adjusted to society’s neuroses and fragmentation into violent factions and self-righteous means to live in knee-jerk reactivity, not in mindful response or engagement with life.
Trent Moore is our valued voice and question-raiser.
May your days begin in peace, to become laboratories for radical hope in this pivotal year.
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We are taught to add to self to be a self, but where is the wisdom that to increase is really decreasing, and to decrease is actually a positive? It’s here in Taoism, but also in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Orthodox Christianity, to start a list.
I reference a pretty crazy podcast from OnBeing by Krista Tippett: https://onbeing.org/programs/colette-pichon-battle-on-knowing-what-were-called-to/
Thanks so much to Naomi Joy Gill for lending her energy, voice, and – for me – a devastating question (in the good sense!).
May your days begin in emptiness, to become wombs to birth radical hope!
Marc Mullinax
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The Beatles put this verse into a song, which you can listen to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swT6YTPYwgM.
Verse 47 has a mystical teaching, one claiming that we can sense the entire universe from our tiny rooms or spaces in which we live. How does one even begin to explain this unitary, unified, worldview where all creation intermixes,interpenetrates, and intermingles in one unified vision or field? So, we talk about developing spiritual literacy.
Thanks to Chris Haynes for his voice and timely question, that links this verse with climate change.
May your days begin in peace and become wombs for radical hope! Marc
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Knowing when enough is enough is a choice, of quality over quantity, a free determination and conclusion of the wise mind, a free choice made by free persons; “enough” is not an amount or quantity, it is a learned attitude that helps us merge more quickly and easily into the way of the universe.
Eric Cain (https://www.christschool.org/node/290008)is our reader and question-asker.
May your days begin in the awareness of what is Enough, to become wombs for radical sufficiency and gratitude.
Marc Mullinax
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Much of Tao te Ching teaches us how to hear and experience Tao. To this end, we need to remove our mental interferences and filters that act to weaken or neutralize the experiencing of Tao.
This Verse 45 teaches such removal, by helping us to embrace the Paradoxical and the Ambiguous. We start with the Rolling Stones and end with guest Mattie Miller-Decker's beautifully phrased question on how Taoist paradox and Buddhist Original Mind are complements.
Mattie is at https://www.hidasta.com/.
May your days begin in peace, and become wombs for radical hope!
Marc Mullinax - [email protected]
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Taoism joins most faith traditions that cast doubt on the ability of "things" and other items we can hoard (but not use) ... to satisfy our deepest selves.
Rangsey Chang is our voice for quotations and two great questions on the hope and spirituality of the "things" in our lives.
I mentioned a book in the podcast: The Ego Tunnel: the Science of the Mind and the Myth of Self. He gave a TedTalk on his ideas: https://youtu.be/5ZsDDseI5QI.
May your days begin in peace, and become thirstlessfields in which we sow the seeds of radical hope.
Marc Mullinax
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We cannot make the entire world into a gardenfree of hard things. However, we can make our corner of the world a joyful place. There is then, an art to living softly, as soft beings, living patiently. The wisdom of Verse 43's “the soft overcomes the hard” invites us to pause, andreevaluate our cultural notions of strength and power.
May your days begin in peace, to become wombs for radical hope!
Marc Mullinax
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Verse 42 is the one and only place where Yin and Yang (阴 and 阳) show up in the ENTIRE Tao te Ching. They show up to help us understand the larger creation process (or story, or mythic representation) of how the Universe got here and is sustained, even to this day.
My guest, Rebecca Askew, asks a question about Minimalism, and we discover just how widespread Minimalism is spread across the world's spiritual traditions.
May your days arise (YANG) in peace, and your nights fall (YIN) into radical hope.
Marc Mullinax
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Verse 41: Lao Tzu’s Smile. Today’s verse 41 is to be taken as a whole; it is an attitude to embrace, to further deepen into Tao. Tao, as we have seen recently, is mysterious, seems to go in reverse, and remain hidden. Verse 41 reminds one how an attitude of expecting the unexpected is one way for Tao to find you. Receptive, open, becoming strange to one’s normal world, to re-engage with Tao’s norms.
There is a picture referenced: The Vinegar Tasters, which can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters.
May your days begin with peace, and our lives become poetic places for the strange and the true safely to land.
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The key Chinese word I refer to often in this episode is "Fan" or 反. "Fan" is the word for "return" or "retire". "Fan" is everywhere in the world's spiritualities, and we explore, through "Fan," how things emerge and grow, and then return or retire to their being No-thing. Being and Non-Being.
While I do not have a reader, I have some singers! Hope you enjoy.
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