Tao and Religion........

Listening to a program about the Jehovah's Witnesses was interesting and showed up how religion is very different from philosophy. To compare the Tao with religion is a bit unfair, because the Tao is a philosophy, but not western philosophy.

The religions have a banner to which to flock, rules to obey. These are often rigid, and can be right or wrong, depending from which position a person is viewing them. The Tao is not like that, it has a centre, and the centre is the self, each individuals self. Knowing the self by investigation is so important in the philosophy of the Tao. If you know yourself it is with love for all other things that you can move out from that position and embrace the world and all it contains.

The hub of life is the self, the being that uses the body as transport. Moving out from that centre, all the being touches and imagines is done with love, and an acceptance of all things right to also be the centre of life. When a Taoist mentions god, it is the god of the whole, everything that is and could be and is imagined. Everything from the centre, self, to the outer reaches of the universe, life in its entirety, which is also death, destruction and disease.

Not worship........ simply respect

There are some who find themselves seeing a gradual change in people, and the religions pulling together, because they have noted differences are not the answer, and only do as they have always done, tear our species apart. In fact there is no need for worship at all, just respect.

I am not certain that worship is a good word because it places ourselves below something else and therefore gives us the feeling of both powerlessness as well as thinking something else will come along and fix the problems we make. I think respect is better. Respect for self, because that is what we know, respect for others of our species because they can be mostly presumed to be like ourselves, respect at the same level for all other things; even though we have a lesser knowledge of same. Assuming that any mother, a mother rat or a mother emu, even though the latter leaves her eggs and when they hatch, her chicks to be tended by their father, feels the things of motherhood. That is why the latter picked the male with whom she would mate; her responsibility and care was no less, though she made it for the very moment and hoped it would move into the future as she saw it. A bit different in humans probably, where women pick the male they admire/love, and know they will themselves look after their children as best they can. Then all the different scenarios that orbit round those feelings and habits.

The same can be said for sating hunger, feeding our children, making the most of opportunity and so on. All species have this in some degree, but humans have the power to change things in a huge way in our quest for these natural drives because of our numbers and our technology. Humans are not more clever, because if we were that, we could have all our species living well, and interfere hardly at all with other species on the planet for which we should show the same respect we do to ourselves and our own.

Maybe not in our lifetime, but eventually it will all come back to simple centre, because that is the last refuge for our race and the world while we live in it. Because the world, the universe will continue after our species has ceased to survive. We either respect all things, even those we don't understand or our species will perish, be exterminated the same way we have exterminated other species, without aforethought or consideration. Nothing is more certain. We have lived by the destruction of the environment sword which satisfies our greed and wield it still, and with that knowledge our end can be foretold.

The Woodpile Hen

The woodpile hen is a black Pekin bantam. She has learned and adapted to the area to which she and her partner Spike have been exiled. Spike is her partner for the times being and gets underfoot sometimes, causing the lady of this cottage to say, ``lookout Spike'', to move him on and ensure he is not where he might get hurt. This pair live where the wood for the fire is stacked rather haphazardly and handy for splitting, and appears that insects are attracted to places where a lot of wood is kept, and of course there are the insects that are already under the bark which help to lift it from the sap wood. This woodpile is the hunting ground and foraging area of the woodpile hen. This is an area she discovered when bullied by others if she was where they could see her and here she is out of sight and out of mind of those who would otherwise have caused her some grief if not bodily harm don't go.


Spike, a birchen Pekin bantam rooster was the same, all the roosters and the guinea fowl would chase him about without allowing him any rest, and he hid behind the rainwater tank and amongst the wood pile, where he couldn't be seen and where he met the woodpile hen and they teamed up. Two souls whose circumstances and possibly preferences were similar and they made this their home and each other their companion. The splash rooster and his gentle hen live in the ark closest to the woodpile and already had some of this area marked out as their territory, but they were happy enough to share, and were never as interested in the food source which was the woodpile as much as they loved the shade house grotto where they spend most of their time. The grotto is where they spent most of their day during the warmer months, in the cool moist shade on the ground beneath the shelves of trays and pots high enough above them to be of no real concern or interest.

But the little black woodpile hen is a worry when she forages to get the first insects as the wood is split, because pieces of wood flying through the air are of little concern to her single minded intent upon capturing and eating any insect that are found in the separation of the bark. An insect exposed by the violence of the action of splitting is certainly lost. On several occasions the split wood, flying through the air has landed near her and given her a fright, but nothing deters her quest for the tasty morsels that lay exposed to her careful scrutiny and quick beak as the wood is prepared for the fire.

No thanks.....

Google warns me that my browser doesn't support web presentations. It seems to think that this might be a drawback, but it is an advantage in fact. I don't really want to watch web presentations, especially if they just are when I go somewhere, and don't offer me the opportunity to refuse to see them.

I am well pleased not being assaulted by video, and if I want to have that experience, I will be able to enable it.

Thanks Google, but no thanks.