How funny that I should find this Lao-tzu teaching a few days after writing theSacred Field post….. :)
Humanity grows more and more intelligent, yet there is clearly more trouble and less happiness daily.
How can this be so?
It is because intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom.
When a society misuses partial intelligence and ignores holistic wisdom, its people forget the benefits of a plain and natural life.
Seduced by their desires, emotions, and egos, they become slaves to bodily demands, to luxuries, to power and unbalanced religion and psychological excuses.
Then the reign of calamity and confusion begins.
Nonetheless, superior people can awaken during times of turmoil to lead others out of the mire.
But how can the one liberate the many?
By first liberating her own being.
She does this not by elevating herself, but by lowering herself.
She lowers herself to that which is simple, modest, true; integrating it into herself, she becomes a master of simplicity, modesty, truth.
Completely emancipated from her former false life, she discovers her original pure nature, which is the pure nature of the universe.
Freely and spontaneously releasing her divine energy, she constantly transcends complicated situations and draws everything around her back into an integral oneness.
Because she is a living divinity, when she acts, the universe acts.
–Excerpt from Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu by Brian Walker (teaching no. seventy-seven)
Photo source: Seventy Seven by Marcello Paoli