Reflections on The Tao Te Ching Essay -- Ancient World Culture

Reflections on The Tao Te ChingWhen the archeozoic Christians had to keep their faith against the persecutions of the Roman Empire, they had -- obviously -- a visible enemy. once their religion was legalized and established, however, they had new questions to ask concerning who they were, what could hurt their souls and their way of life. Some of them, at least, concluded that the materialism of the dominant Roman way of life was a non-agressive, provided equally corrosive force that would destroy them -- not physically, but spiritually. These Fourth Century Christians, men and women, then remaining their societies and withdrew into the desert to be able to find true paradise, not in a safe, pander niche in society, but in their relationship with God. That is, they had to escape the value that so comprehensively enveloped them that they could not think or feel distinctly about deeper matters. Thus freed in the desert, they could know what a full kind-hearted life was in practi ce. These spiritual discoveries of a way to live, to be, could then be used to challange the complex and tempting materialism that seemed to dominate the culture of the time.In a much briefer, easier, and less focused way, Henry David Thoreau, someone get in around known to our own time, tried his experiment by living for two years in the woods by Waldon Pond in night club to drive life into a corner and find out entirely what it really was worth and what it essentially meant. According to Thoreau, people too promptly accepted one already established set of ideas or another, favorable or bad assessments of life, and didnt seek answers for themselves. He too in his family of events wanted to make known what he learned, wanted to publish, as he said, the essential goodness or meanne... ...ind hits it. Those who by the age of eighteen arouse a bun in the oven thick calendars organizing their too-complicated lives, those who have learned that a branch does not have real meani ng, those whose religion tries to teach simplicity but does not get heard (consider the lilies of the field, they do not spin nor toil, yet Solomon in his glory was not so brightly arrayed) -- can we reckon the vision of the writings of one of us who lived 2500 years ago and left the city of confusion to find wisdom? Can we find in the tensions of his writings -- as they are the shapes of the tensions of living in a upturned world -- the way of life that is most natural? Can we be at home in the universe that produces us and mirrors so promptly what we are when we stop and look, wary as those crossing the ice, listening for cracks that capacity freeze them before they drowned, we see and hear the signs?