the Dao of Atheism :jeffers' petroglyph, pre-dakota, minnesota : the Shaman Atheist 12/81

12

All together
colors blind the eyes
sounds deafen the ears
tastes deaden the palate.
Seeking and pursuing and looking for and chasing
make for
insanity.
Expensive tastes
make one a slave.

Wise people
attend to the intuition
of stomach and feelings
rather than the desires of eye, ear and hand.

Let go of that
take this.

When we are children we like to think in opposites because opposing concepts are the most immediate, facile and static, easy to grasp. It was easy for us as children to understand hot and cold, black and white, yes and no, good and bad, because morality in youth is experienced so sensually. As we grow older these simple dualisms generate alternatives to themselves, creating new syntheses that do not fit in the old value systems. As we mature and learn to distinguish more things from more other things, the distance between opposites can seem to increase -- if we use a linear scale. But on a circle, opposing values always seem to arrive back at the same point.
It is more difficult for children -- and even adults -- to understand the possibilities of withholding judgment in an environment of moral neutrality, arbitrary rules, and traditional laws. These are subtle variations, incorporating opposite ends of the spectrum to create a dynamic range of possibilities.

Allowing only theism and anti-theism to exist as our religious paradigms, seeing only the perpetual antagonism between theists and anti-theists, is to remain trapped. Encouraging the dynamic between theism and anti-theism,
creating their synthesis in atheism, is to be released.
The Dao is one such atheism.




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©1992 tpkunesh@atheisms.info