Introduction to the Tao Te Ching

With Elizabeth Clare Prophet

From the Mystical Paths of the World's Religions series.

 
Elizabeth Clare Prophet pursues the theme of the sage, the holy man, which runs through a number of chapters from the Taoist text Tao Te Ching. As is seen in the Mystical Paths of the World's Religions series, every religion has its portrait of the holy man. In Taoism, he is called “the perfect man.” Taoism's perfect man is our universal mystic.

Taoist texts describe him as the man who could ascend the loftiest heights without fear, could enter the water and not get wet, could enter the fire and not get burned. Perfected people, they say, lean on a pillar that is never shaken, travel a road that is never blocked, are endowed from a resource that is never exhausted, and learn from a teacher that never dies.

They are successful in whatever they undertake and arrive wherever they go. Whatever they do they embrace destiny and go along without confusion. Calamity, fortune, profit, and harm cannot trouble their minds. They govern the inside not the outside. Their attention is focused internally. They keep to the simplicity of wholeness and stand in the center of the quintessential.

I invite you to probe with me now the perfect man and the questions he has answered on the mysteries of the Tao. How you can lean on a pillar that is never shaken and travel a road that is never blocked. How can you tap a resource that is never exhausted and learn from a teacher that never dies?

How can you be successful in whatever you undertake and embrace your destiny? How can you govern the inside and go along without confusion? And how can you focus your attention internally and stand in the center on the quintessential?

Well we thought that the answers to these questions have come out of the current self-help books and lo and behold they are thousands upon thousands of years old!