PNTV: The Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu (#73)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosophers Notes tv. Today we've got the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. We've got Stephen Mitchell's translation, which is pretty cool. Stephen Mitchell is actually married to Byron Katie, who wrote Loving what Is and a bunch of other books. We've got Loving what Is in the collection. But the Tao Te Ching, obviously one of the classics of spiritual literature, the basis and foundation of Taoism. Incredibly powerful book. And if you haven't read it yet, check it out. Really simple, lyrical prose. And Mitchell's translation makes it super accessible for our 21st century lives today. We're going to look at a few of my favorite big ideas. Where do we want to start? We'll go ahead and start with the first one here. The first one is Making Use of Solitude. Silao Tzu tells us that the average person, the ordinary men and women, hate solitude, just don't like it, uncomfortable with it, whereas the master makes use of it. They use solitude as an opportunity to go within and to realize they're connected to everything. It's the place of our deepest inspiration. And in the note, I talk about the fact that Deepak Chopra, in his seven Spiritual Laws of Success, his first law is, is essentially infinite potential, that we are infinite potential. And the way to tap into that infinite potential is through stillness. It's only through stillness that we can kind of leave the world and all of its movement and noise and find that place within that's connected to, in this case, the dao, the divine, the God within, where our inspiration can come and flow through us. Joseph Campbell talks about something similar in his great books. He says that we need to make use of solitude. We've got to have the space where we go every day and spend our hour there, or whatever it is, where we don't know who we are, we don't know who owes us money and who we owe money to, as he says, and all the other things we have, all the responsibilities we have in our lives, we're just there and we're connecting from a place of silence and stillness and in allowing what comes through to come through. And he says you might not find anything originally in the first few times you try it, but if you keep on doing it, you're going to find some deep inspiration come through, really powerful stuff. And he basically says, he says it's an absolute necessity. Joseph Campbell does for anybody today. So Lao Tzu would agree. The master takes advantage of solitude, uses it to his or her benefit. So turn off the tv, turn off the Internet. Find some quiet time where you can really allow yourself just to kind of sink in to the peace and quiet. It also helps us medically. We know this. Who was it? Benson wrote a book called the Relaxation Response. Herbert Benson Harvard doctor and basically discovered that those who tap into stillness essentially and find ways to quiet their minds. He teaches a very simple meditation technique. He doesn't call it meditation, he calls it the relaxation response, which is essentially a response to kind of not go against, but to kind of work against the fight or flight response that we're into all the time. We're bombarded with stimuli, most of which is artificial, that didn't exist 100 years ago. That kind of leads us in a really kind of fight or flight response. And the relaxation response of simply finding our center, closing our eyes and. And repeating a simple mantra or a number to ourselves or whatever it is, allows us to just really deepen our connection to the divine. So powerful stuff. We're going to talk about meditation a lot more with the optimal living 101 stuff I'm working on. Excited about that. So money or happiness? Lao Tzu says fame or integrity, which is more important, money or happiness, which is more valuable? And he goes on to say that money isn't going to create happiness, among other things. In this little passage that I pull out in the note and in the note I talk about the fact that we've got a really weird sense of what leads to happiness. So many people believe throughout time, and it's certainly been exacerbated by the modern self development movement believe that having things is what's going to make us happy or even doing things, that bucket list type of stuff. And the fact is that you look at the amount of money you have in the bank, the type of house you live in, all those things, what percentage of your happiness do you think that would account for? Well, scientists tell us a number that is probably smaller than what you would have guessed. It's 10%, according to positive psychologists. They say about 50% of our happiness set point is influenced and determined by our genetics. And then 10% comes from the things like money, size of house, speed of car, whatever, right? Kind of the little variables, the luxury items that we spend a lot of our energy on trying to accumulate when they don't really give us that much happiness. Soni Liebormirsky, in her great book the how of Happiness, says that the other 40%, which is our thoughts and our behaviors, dictate the bulk of our happiness. So our thoughts and behaviors account for 40% of our overall level of happiness. Yet we tend to spend most of our time chasing things that only give us 10%. So in this case, the money isn't really going to give us a whole heck of a lot of happiness. Now we need a certain amount sustenance level, but beyond that, there's not a huge correlation between money and happiness. So pay attention to that and then realize that as we kind of seek happiness, we get on what psychologists call a hedonic treadmill. A treadmill that's hedonic in the sense that we're always running, we're never quite there. You never get anywhere on a treadmill when all you're doing is chasing the next thing that you're going to get. There's always going to be one more thing you want and you're going to find yourself on that hedonic treadmill, never really experiencing the levels of happiness you want. But when we focus on things like we talk about here consistently and shaping our minds through optimism, having a vision that really inspires us, our highest goal being to embody the ideals we're so passionate about, taking action, consistently optimizing our health. These things give us a level of happiness that we want to have. Really powerful stuff that is fun. What else do we want to look at? Well, we've got some shadow stuff we can talk about. We're going to go jump to this idea you've probably heard. The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. Steven Mitchell translates that as the journey of a thousand miles starts beneath your feet. And the sentence before that is, the giant pine tree grows from a tiny sprout. The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet. Anything we want to do in our lives of a thousand mile journey, which was huge, obviously in the time this was written, takes the first step. It begins right where we're at now. Oftentimes I've been talking about this a lot lately. We can get caught up in this vision of where we're going to get and we forget that the next step is the most important part of the process. And then we get overwhelmed because we're like not sure we're ever going to be able to make that thousand mile journey. And then we don't even take a step or we take steps backwards and feel like crap because we're not taking proactive steps in the direction of, of our ideals. So in the note, I talk about a great book called One Small Step. Fantastic book. Introduced to me by a friend of mine named Shawn Stevenson. 3 foot tall dude who's just amazing. Google him. Anyway, great dude turned me onto this book. He uses it in his work One Small Step the whole idea here is that oftentimes we get overwhelmed and what happens is when we set huge goals and we tell ourselves we're going to do huge things like New Year's resolutions or whatever and just change everything, we literally have our amygdala, which is our kind of fear response mechanism, triggered. We get a little freaked out and our amygdala wants to protect us from huge changes. And then we kind of have ambivalence and we don't do what we wanted to do. One Small step He says. Just take a small step. You'd be surprised what happens when you take one small step followed by another, followed by another. You build momentum that you otherwise might not get if you try to do it all in one big leap. So the idea here he shares is awesome. If you want to start a huge workout program but you haven't had success in the past, why not just say I'm going to step in place to one commercial while I watch TV for 30 days? Or start your workout program with one pushup a day. What you'll find is you're probably going to do a little more, but that one step is totally doable. You can do that and then once you get started, things start to kind of take a life of their own. I found that and I talk about in the note with these notes. Sometimes I wasn't feeling it, but I just start and write one big idea and pretty soon the note would be finished. Really cool stuff. He tells a story too. I'm not going to have time to get into here, but awesome story of a study of people who were asked to take one step and then they were willing to take this huge step beyond it. Really cool stuff. He also talks about the power of creating, not competing. Really fun stuff we talked about in the note. You can check that out. And basically aligning with the dao. I talk about it a lot in Theos. We want to let the universe work through us. That's where our power is. So that's a really quick look at the Dao de Jing and a few of my favorite big ideas from it. Hope you dug it. Share more with you soon. See you.