Tao Wisdom – Vision

Words worth pausing with today.

The person who uses only the vision of his eyes is conditioned purely by what he sees. But it’s the intuition of the spirit that perceives reality. The wise have known for a long time that what we know through our eyes isn’t equal to the intuition of our spirit. Yet most people rely only on what they see, and lose themselves in external things only. Isn’t that sad?*

~ Chuang Tzu

*Forstater, Mark. The Tao: The Living Wisdom Series (Kindle Locations 494-497). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Mark Forstater, in his exploration of the Chuang Tzu’s writings continues:

“Our culture isn’t comfortable with deep subjective experience, in which artistic, religious and mystical feelings are found. We’re often wary of exploring this interior life, because we’re afraid of what may be lurking there: fears and insecurities, repressed feelings of sexuality or anger. This is because the subjective life is home to the unconscious, that powerful, dark and hidden side of our mind, which is also the source of our creativity.

Often scientists and others who are more comfortable with objective knowledge forget that creativity not only generates artistic and mystical feelings but also includes their own scientific creativity, as the career of Albert Einstein makes very clear. Einstein’s important discoveries were all made first in his mind, through subjective unconscious reflection. Only later did he go to the trouble of testing them ‘objectively’. We have lived in a materialistic, scientific culture for so long that objective knowledge is king, and the subjective is denigrated and considered suspect and unreliable.” *

* Forstater, Mark. The Tao: The Living Wisdom Series (Kindle Locations 477-485). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.