The Road Book
Author's name: Saeed Ghassan Maher
Lao Tzu delved deeply into the facts of life through his experiences and discovered that contradiction exists only on the surface, and that the more united we become, the more content and loving we become. The less attached we are to what we love, the more love is present in our hearts. The more our insight yearns for what transcends good and evil, the more good is embodied in us.
Lao Tzu's wisdom is based on the philosophy of "doing not-doing," which has been mistakenly understood as a negative, defeatist philosophy that does not aspire to seriousness and hope. However, this belief is far from truth and reason.
How many professional athletes have entered a state of awareness of their bodies, recognizing that performing the appropriate movement or landing the winning shot comes automatically, effortlessly, without any deliberate conscious intervention of thought? This is a living example of the theory of non-action, where the highest levels of action occur, where the game itself plays out, where the poem organizes its rhymes, where you cannot separate the dancer from her dances, and where “when you do nothing, nothing remains incomplete, but then the action is completed.”
Do nothing because the doer is completely absorbed in the action, just as fuel turns into a blazing flame. This “nothing” is in fact everything. It happens when we trust the Universal Mind of the Great Universe, in the same way that an athlete or dancer trusts the higher consciousness of their healthy body. This explains Lao Tzu’s emphasis on softness. Anyone who has seen a professional in “Aikido” or “T’ai Chi” do non-action will realize how powerful this gentle ability is.
The teachings of this book are moral teachings in every sense of the word, free from the idea of sin, whether great or small. Lao Tzu does not see evil as a force to be resisted, but rather as simply ambiguity and a state of selfishness that is inconsistent with the natural course of the world. This is the same with dusty glass, which does not allow sunlight or moonlight to enter. This freedom from the confines of morality allows him a great deal of compassion and sympathy for sinners and evildoers.