The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    cmaukonen's picture

    Cocoons

    By cmaukonen on Wed, 01/19/2011 - 9:48am |

    A good traveler has no fixed plans
    and is not intent upon arriving.
    A good artist lets his intuition
    lead him wherever it wants.
    A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
    and keeps his mind open to what is.

    Thus the Master is available to all people
    and doesn't reject anyone.
    He is ready to use all situations
    and doesn't waste anything.
    This is called embodying the light.

    What is a good man but a bad man's teacher?
    What is a bad man but a good man's job?
    If you don't understand this, you will get lost,
    however intelligent you are.
    It is the great secret. - Tao Te Ching  Chapter 27


    We all love our little cocoons.  So nice and comfy. They keep us safe from the rest of the world. Where we can sit oblivious to those in other cocoons, yet constantly judging them and feeling oh so superior.  Be they to the left of us, or right or above or below. And we take them with us when we travel. Only interacting with those who have similar cocoons. Some cocoons are highly educated, some are not. Some are very high up the tree while others are pretty low. It matters little.

    And those of us who managed to leave out cocoons, even for a short while - will judge those who do not. "How can these people stay in those cocoons ?" we lament. "How silly and ignorant they are of the wide world." We feel frustrated that these other people refuse to leave their cocoons and see the world as it is. So we get angry and want to shake their tree. But his only makes them retreat further into their cocoons and get resentful and yell out  "How dare you disturb MY cocoon ? Who do you think you are ?" Then we retreat back into our own little cocoons, just like everyone elses.

    When we do finally leave out cocoons and spread our wings, it is then we see the world as it is and maybe begin to have some compassion for those who will live and die in their cocoons. Knowing little of the world and people outside.

    Comments

    Nice translation of Tao.  Do you have a link to it?

    A cocoon sounds pleasant....warm....sheltered...dreamtime....

    I wish I could remember how it felt.  Wordsworth must have been right that 'our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting'. 

     


    by EmmaZahn on Wed, 01/19/2011 - 5:36pm

    This is the one I got it from, though it is not my favorite. http://www.edepot.com/tao4.html


    by cmaukonen on Wed, 01/19/2011 - 7:10pm

    Thanks, cmaukonen, for sharing. 

    (1 John 1:7) 7 However, if we are walking in the light as he himself is in the light, we do have a sharing with one another. . . 

    A Short Testament

    Whatever harm I may have done
    in all my life
    in all your wide creation
    if I cannot repair it
    I beg you to repair it

    And then there are all the wounded
    the poor the deaf the lonely and the old
    Whom I have roughly dismissed
    As if I were not one of them.
    Where I have wronged them by it
    And cannot make amends
    I ask you
    To comfort them to overflowing,

    And where there are lives
    I may have withered around me
    Or lives of strangers far or near
    That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
    And if I cannot find them
    Or have no way to serve them,

    Remember them.
    I beg you to remember them
    When winter is over
    And all your unimaginable promises
    Burst into song
    on death's bare branches
    -- Anne Porter     

    "The obstacles in our path are the path. – Rolf Gates

     


    by Resistance on Wed, 01/19/2011 - 6:28pm

    Just another thought on this fine post, it is so hard to break one's cultural bonds.

    It took me years and years to get out of the Roman Catholic Church, for chrissakes!

    The same goes with breaking other cultural bonds like political parties and schools of thought!!


    by Richard Day on Wed, 01/19/2011 - 6:35pm