“I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.”
-Ross Macdonald
“In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.”
-John Milton
“Go out, go out I beg of you
And taste the beauty of the wild.
Behold the miracle of the earth
With all the wonder of a child.”
The master, Loa Tzu’s, visionary guide to an inspired and peaceful life…
(from the website “Uplift”, Sept. 2016)
“How to Live an Inspired and Peaceful Life
Many centuries ago, Lao Tzu, spoke of the four cardinal virtues, teaching that when we practice them as a way of life, we come to know the truth of the universe. The ancient Chinese master said that living and practicing these teachings can open you to higher wisdom and greater happiness, as they realign you to the source and enable you to access all the powers that source energy has to offer.
Lao Tzu means ‘Old Master,’ and he was believed by some to be a God-realised being. The Four Cardinal Virtues are found in the Tao Te Ching, a collection of sayings expounding the principal Taoist teachings. It has 81 short poetic verses packed full of universal wisdom for politics, society, and personal life, and aims to support personal harmony through the right view and understanding of existence. The Tao (also known as the Way or the Dao) has baffled its readers for centuries with its cryptic and deliberate contradictions, yet it offers a profound contemplation to seekers, lending itself to varied interpretations and inner questioning.
The four cardinal virtues, or rules for living life, can provide a framework for a life filled with inner peace and purpose.
1. Reverence for all Life
This virtue manifests as having unconditional love and positive regard for all creatures in the universe, starting with ourselves, then this will naturally flow out to all others. This reverence is for all life, not just some forms. It is honoring all forms of life, and at its core has an innate spiritual understanding of how the universe truly works – that we are all sparks of the one fire. When we live with reverence for all life, we surrender our need to control and to dominate. We naturally come into heartfelt appreciation and gratitude for all of life. This first virtue is the key to diminishing the ego.
2. Natural Sincerity
This virtue encompasses kindness and authenticity. It has a feeling of compassion and an all-encompassing love for all beings. When we are sincere and act with integrity, we move towards peace and inner tranquility. Our conscience clear, we don’t have the inner niggles over our dishonest actions that can erode a peaceful mind. Much of these four pillars relate to karma, the law of cause and effect, and maintaining equilibrium and impeccability.
3. Gentleness
Gentleness is a deeply powerful trait. Often interpreted as weakness, gentleness is sensitivity, respect, and reverence for all life. Perhaps this virtue can be summed up by the Dalai Lama who often says; “my religion is very simple, my religion is kindness.” In life, it is far more important to be kind than to be right, and to be kind rather than important. Gentleness is an umbrella for forgiveness, acceptance and love. It is much like the yogic term ahimsa, or non-violence. When we give up being right and being superior, we start accepting ourselves and others, and so much conflict in our lives drops away.
4. Supportiveness
When we are supportive of ourselves, with kind words, loving actions and self-care, we are naturally supportive of others. This virtue is the basic tenet of humanity. We are naturally social beings and, at our core, we want to be with others and to help others. Many experiments show how humans are motivated by connection and will move towards this rather than other things. When we give to others, share and support others, we become happy. Our lives become meaningful and our hearts full. Supportiveness is about service. Open hearted service for the sake of helping others and benefiting others, with no thought to our own gain. Supportiveness is also about holding space for another, listening to another, and being there for others. It is radical loving kindness in action. This quote by the poet, Hafiz, sums it up: “Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth ‘you owe me.’”
Quotes:
“The greatest joy comes from giving and serving, so replace your habit of focusing exclusively on yourself and what’s in it for you. When you make the shift to supporting others in your life, without expecting anything in return, you’ll think less about what you want and find comfort and joy in the act of giving and serving.”
-Dr. Wayne Dyer
“The four cardinal virtues are a road map to the simple truth of the universe. To revere all of life, to live with natural sincerity, to practice gentleness, and to be in service to others is to replicate the energy field from which you originated.”
-Dr Wayne Dyer
“To realize the constancy and steadiness in your life is to realize the deep nature of the universe. This realization is not dependent on any transitory internal or external condition, rather it is an expression of one’s own immutable spiritual nature. The only way to attain the Universal Way is to maintain the integral virtues of the constancy, steadiness and simplicity in one’s daily life.” – Lao Tzu
“Gentleness generally implies that you no longer have a strong ego-inspired desire to dominate or control others, which allows you to move into a rhythm with the universe. You cooperate with it, much like a surfer who rides with the waves instead of trying to overpower them. Gentleness means accepting life and people as they are, rather than insisting that they be as you are. As you practice living this way, blame disappears and you enjoy a peaceful world.” – Wayne Dyer
“Affirm this as often as you can, for when you see yourself in a loving way, you have nothing but love to extend outward. And the more you love others, the less you need old excuse patterns, particularly those relating to blame.”
-Dr. Wayne Dyer
“When you succeed in connecting your energy with the divine realm through high awareness and the practice of undiscriminating virtue, the transmission of the ultimate subtle truths will follow.”
“Knowing her grandchildren
would inherit the world she left behind,
she did not work for flourishing
In her time only.
It was through her actions of reciprocity,
the give and take with the land,
that the original immigrant
became indigenous.
For all of us,
becoming indigenous to
a place means living as
if your children’s future mattered,
to take care of the land as if our lives,
both material and spiritual,
depended on it.”
“Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.” -Ellis Peters
“Can words describe the fragrance of the very breath of Spring?” – Neltje Blanchan
“Come with me into the woods where Spring is advancing, as it does, not matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the forever gifts and certainly visible.” – Mary Oliver
Click into any image to see a full scale version and to start a slideshow…
“You may be the most cynical, born and bred, citified lefty like me — instinctively skeptical of big concepts like “patriotism,” relatively foreign to hunting culture, unused to wide open spaces.
But spend any length of time traveling around Montana, and you will understand what all that “purple mountain majesties” is all about.
You’ll soon be wrapping yourself in the flag and yelling, “America, **** yeah!” with an absolute and nonironic sincerity that will take you by surprise.
You will understand why and what people fought and died for — or at least perceived themselves to be fighting and dying for — either defending Native American hunting grounds against Custer or “defending America” against foreign aggressors. And you will be stunned, stunned and silenced by the breathtaking, magnificent beauty of Montana’s wide open spaces.”
– Anthony Bourdain…
I already deeply miss his unique, intimate, raw, and endearing look at the world.
“And when you look up at the night sky over Montana, it’s hard not to think that we can’t be alone on this rock, that there isn’t something else out there or up there in charge of this crazy-ass enterprise.”
-Anthony Bourdain
Here’s some big Montana night sky for you Anthony, wish you could have come our way again..
“Everyone needs a practice which polishes them, to wear away at the obscuring mindstuff which settles like debris on one’s way of seeing. In our hearts, we know there is meaning to it all, an ordering nature to the chaos, but like a dream that slips away into forgetting, we have to practice at coming into its coherency. Without such a practice, we fall prey to the belief that the toxic fog of consensus culture is the real reality. When in fact, it is only the ‘not-beauty’ behind which beauty is hiding.”
“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…. what business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
