Here is something I really liked from "Daoist texts with commentary by Thomas Cleary" (with my own comments in [ ] brackets).
“Ordinary expressions and common sayings accord with the path of sages; you should turn to them for careful research. If you use everyday activities to search in reverse, everything in the world turns to jewels.” [This reminds me of how I felt about the Book of Proverbs when I was 21-22.]
“The Tao is not far from people; what people consider the Tao is far from people. [This was true in Catholicism too. People thought the mystics were so extraordinary that there was no way on earth we could have any of their experiences. We grew up with that bias and discouragement.] The Tao is essence and life is the eternal Tao, the eternal Tao is the Tao of daily life; it’s just that while people use it daily they do not know it.
“If you carefully investigate the principles, you do not need to read a thousand classics and ten thousand texts; there are great revelations of the celestial mechanism right in ordinary expressions and common sayings. For example, good people are called really genuine, truthful, conscientious, reasonable, respectable, aware of proper proportion, aware of when to go forward and when to withdraw, circumspect, perceptive, having their feet on the ground; bad people are said to be inhuman, lacking conscience, and unreasonable – they hurt others to benefit themselves, are self-deceived, violate nature and reason, take suffering for pleasure, take the false for the real, pick up one thing and forget another, without knowing death and life, without knowing good and bad, only knowing one and not two, only aware of the existence of themselves and not that of others.” (p. 156, The Taoist Classics, Volume Two, from ‘Understanding Reality.’)
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