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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“If you
cannot trust your own nature, how can you trust your own mistrusting of it? How do you know that your mistrust is not wrong as well?” If you do not trust your own nature, you become as tangled up as anyone can be.
You can’t get outside of nature to be the master of nature. Remember that your heart beats “self-so” — and, if you give it a chance, your mind can function “self-so,” although most of us are afraid to give it a chance.
when the naturalness is regained it is not just the simple, we could say embryonic, naturalness of the child, completely uncultivated and untutored. Instead it is a new kind of naturalness that takes into itself and carries with itself years and years of technique, know-how, and experience.
And so, the secret in Taoism is to get out of one’s own way, and to learn that this pushing ourselves, instead of making us more efficient, actually interferes with everything we set about to do.
If he can allow himself to be weak, he can allow himself to experience what is really his greatest strength. This is so not only of human beings, but of all living things.
The same attitude of relaxed gentleness is most beautifully seen when you watch cats climbing trees. When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground. But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly made up its mind that it didn’t want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing.
