Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao

by Wayne W. Dyer

“Tao is both named and nameless.” This sounds paradoxical to our Western intellect—and it is! Paradoxical thinking is embedded in Eastern concepts such as yin and yang or the feminine and the masculine, and where things are comfortably described as both this and that. We in the West, by contrast, tend to view opposites as incompatible concepts that contradict each other.

The Tao is an unknowable, unseeable realm where everything originates; while at the same time, the Tao is invisibly within everything.

This is God, the space where all things arise. We belong and are one with it. It is the highest mystery of all. We don’t understand neither can we ever. That which is our essence abs the essence of life is invisible and unknowable. This is “the visible came out of the invisible”. The creative principle of the universe is invisible (nameless): yet, when made visible (named), it is the mother of all manifestations, the 10,000 things. When we grasp the eternal, we make manifest the ephemeral. When we touch the eternal, we encounter the ephemeral. When beholding God, we can’t help helps but witnessing the manifestation of the 10,000 things.

to practice more paradoxical thinking by recognizing that desiring (wanting) and desireless (allowing) are different and the same . . . rather like the mysterious ends of a continuum.

Desiring, one sees the manifestations; desireless, one can see the mystery itself.

world produces abundant examples of this paradoxical process.

The 10,000 things that Lao-tzu refers to represent the categorized, classified, and scientifically named objects of the earth, which help us communicate and identify what we’re talking and thinking about.