RELG-145 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Taoism
18 Aug 2018
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The sense of the daoist: spontaneous with the natural world, retreated from the anxieties and dangers of social life in order to live a healthy and peaceful life. Going beyond the familiar social roles, expectations, and values. It is by freeing our imaginations to reconceive ourselves, our world, and the things with which we interact can we understand the deeper tendencies of the natural world we are affected by. The inability to sense uselessness is a kind of blindness of the spirit. It has a use in the cultivation and nurturing of the shen" (spirit) Summary: when we wander beyond, we leave behind everything we find familiar, and explore the world in all its unfamiliarity. We drop the tools that we have been taught to use to tame the environment, and we allow it to teach us without words. We imitate its spontaneous behavior and we learn to respond immediately without fixed articulations.
