dudley thoth said:
Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of the universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen - perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not - the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows - or perhaps he does not know? Rig-Veda 10:129.6-7(c.1000 B.C)
Is ignorance the apex of philosophy concerning the nature of 'God'?
Obviously no offence intended by this, but when your looking at ancient foriegn civilisations religions or philosophies you have to becareful not to translate it into your own crudities. I dont think that statement implies that it would be 'arrogant' for us to assume to understand, but rather its saying that theres no ultimate answer or Catagorical Imperative to existance, or for that matter its not even a question, and is a mistake for us to think it is.
And with that it mind as regards Taoism, although i agree with what you guys said for the most part, properly speaking, the visible world or existance is more real than the Tao, the nothingness out of which all things emerge. To quote the Tao Te Ching
"The name that can be named is not the constant name. . .
It was from the Nameless that sprang Heaven and Earth"
A.C Graham says something about this, this is also a bit long but is interesting, "This conception of mystical contemplation as a withdrawral into the ground underlaying the multiple and changing world is ofcourse common to many mystical schools Western and Eastern. But Taoists think of this experience in terms perculiar to China. A Westerner tends to fit the mysticism of other civilisations into a Neo-Platonist frame, thinking of a primarily congnitive experience in which the seer rends of the veil of illusion and discovers his oness with the underlaying Absolute, Reality, Being.
For Chinese thinkers however the basic questoin is not 'What is the truth' but 'Where is the Way?' They concieve the ground to which they return in meditation, not as ultimate Reality, but as the Way for which they are searching. this expains an apparent contradiction in the concept of the Tao. As long as they are concerned with action, Taoists, like Confucians, concieve it as a metaphorical path to be followed. But when they eulogise the Tao revealed in contemplation, they use such metaphors as 'root', 'ancestor', 'mother', the 'Unborn' from which all things are born. They present it as the source from which the myraid things emerge and even contradict the metaphor of a highway by calling it the 'gate' from which the highway starts.
It is therefore a mistake for the Western reader to connect the Way with his own concepts of Being and Reality. Indeed, in terms of the Chinese words (yu/wu, shih/hsu) which are closest to these words in funtion, it is material things which exist and are solid (real), the Tao which is Nothing and tenuous or viod (unreal). 'Nothing' is concieved (as Hegal and other Westerners have concieved it) as a positive complement of Something, not its mere absence. The Tao is like the hole in the wheel which takes the axle, the inside of the vessel, the doorsand windows of a house; they are Nothing, but we draw advantage from the wheel, vessel or house only by using its empty spaces.
One concequence of this difference of view point is that for Taoists the absolute stilling of the mind in contemplation is only a means for discovering the Way to live; it connot be (as it may be for those who concieve it as a revelation of absolute Truth, in comparison with which all normal experience seems trivial) a state supremely valuable in itself. Just as Nothing has no significance except as the complement of Something, so the withdrawral into Nothing has no significance except in relation to the ordinary life to which the mystic returns. Pure trances states in fact have a very modest place in the liehttzu(philosophical taoism) We read of a certain Nun-kuo-tzu who sat like a clay image:
"Nunkuotzu's face is full but his mind viod; his ears hear nothing, his eyes see nothing, his mouth says nothing, his mind knows nothing, his body never alters."
But theidea in the Lieh-tzu is a state, not of withdrawal, but of hightened perceptiveness and responsiveness in an undifferentiated world. . ."
And heres a quote from the book of Lieh tzu to excenuate this
"Only then, when i had come to the end of everything inside and outside me, my eyes became like my ears, my ears like my nose, my nose like my mouth; everything was the same. My mind concentrated and my body relaxed, bones and flesh fused completly, I did not notice what my body leaned against or my feet trod, I drifted with the wind East or West, like a leaf from a tree or a dry husk, and never knew wether it was the wind that rode me or I that rode the wind."
If nothing within you stays ridiged,
outward things will disclose themselves.
Moving, be like water.
Still, be like a mirror.
Respond like an echo."
