XPost: alt.philosophy.taoism, alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, alt.philosophy.zen   
   From: wudao@wuji.net   
      
   noname commented:   
   > Ummmmmmm wrote:   
   >   
   >> I've read at least 6 different English translations. Most   
   >> completely different from each other.   
   >> For those who haven't had actual experience of the state of mind in   
   >> which the Tao becomes a luminously self-evident presence, it can be a   
   >> source of optimism.   
   >   
   >Your "luminously self-evident presence" sounds like swamp-gas.   
      
   The ways in which some of the people   
   some of the time articulate their cogitos often don't smell pretty.   
      
   What appears to me to be self-evident at present,   
   that Ummmmmmm was speaking of his own experiences,   
   how, while perhaps being a source of optimism, he was unable   
   to get to his secret happy-place of joy-as-a-child without help,   
   that reading books didn't do it for him, took me quite a while.   
      
   I'm too fast of a reader   
   and too slow of a comprehender   
   all too often, sewing what isn't there in   
   to the fabric of m'eye percept ions.   
      
   And/or, not as well as knot making   
   various connections there are to be made.   
      
   Aside from spreading his joy in these groups, just in case,   
   there might be anyone else akin to him, he harped   
   how a living Master might be the only way,   
   for others, who are akin to him.   
      
   Getting him to admit   
   that having a living Master is not the only way   
   for all of the people all of the time was akin to pulling teeth   
   out of the future and in to the present, which he did,   
   perhaps only as a gift, to me.   
      
   He saw me as desperately needing to hear that.   
   I found no desperation in myself yet was tenacious.   
      
   Perhaps he was simply condescending   
   in granting me the point.   
      
   Next year, should he return once again, we may explore   
   how he Knows there is a secret-happy-place in everyone.   
      
   As an explorer of consciousness, many worlds exist to be   
   and not to be, and which could be put in   
   to question form.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)