I sometimes get a feeling of ennui from a sense of being hemmed in by the restrictions of western religious ideas theist and atheist that seem almost all pervasive in these forums.
Aside from myself I scarcely ever hear mention of the Tao here, or of the Buddha nature, the Godhead, or non dual conceptions of the universe.
I find the religions of the near east to be so primitive, simplistic, and naively literal compared to the expansive views from the east. The Old Master, Lao Tzu (which is what Lao Tzu means) was so semantically modern in his understanding when he said the truth is nameless but in order to speak of it he had to call it something so he called it the Way, but the way that can be named is not the true way. He compared this not to a father giving commands but to a mother giving birth. The Way (The Tao) is the mother of the universe, of the ten thousand things.
Speech and thought emerge from silence. It is in the silence, the void that birth occurs. One myth from India has the universe to be but the dream of a single breath of the supreme god. The god exhales the universe and then inhaling brings it to an end only to begin it again in the next exhalation.
Perhaps it was language that birthed the human ego and it projected itself back onto the cosmos in the image of language using deities?
Jiddhu Krishnamurti speaks of the self as being thought, being something known, impermanent, ephemeral. For him truth lay beyond thought.
Thought is a tool. The ego seeks its security in building systems with this tool that it believes will protect and continue it. But the ego has only a conditional existence and eventually it subsides and disappears. Into what does it subside? What are we to make of this? Ramana Maharshi believed the highest speech was silence and was his preferred method of teaching. Even the Judeo Christian tradition has intimations of this in the "be still and know that I am god."
Thought gives rise to the ego and both have their functions, but that which was prior to the ego is prior to thought.
lfen
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