Tao Te Ching
Longevity
Our ideas and understandings about longevity and by extension immortality need to fall apart. The use of Lao Tzu’s teachings to support a “Taoist” tradition focused on immortality attested to how seductively easy these concepts become distorted. Shelley depicts a more aware view in his poem, Triumph of Life. After lamenting the fall of Rome and the deterioration of youth to age, he notices our transforming, immortal presence in nature:
That what I thought was an old root which grew
Was indeed one of that deluded crew,
And that the grass which methought hung so wide
And white, was but his thin discolored hair,
And that the holes it vainly sought to hide
Were or had been eyes
The egocentric understanding of immortality is based on illusion and of course could only conclude in disappointment. To the extent we can stretch our awareness beyond the deluded view of a separate self, we—like Shelley—begin to see our true longevity.
Quotes (76)
“Speaking waters touched me from your fountain, the source of life. I swallowed them and was drunk with the water that never dies.”
“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
“Genuineness is the path of immortality, thoughtlessness the path of death.”
“You should eat to live; not live to eat. (Those who don’t work to live, live long – Yen Tsun, 53-24 BCE.)”
“After a long period of disuse, the spark of life dries up and vision collapses—a person can only feel their way around like a blind person using a staff.”
“Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.”
“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
“Getting distracted by trifles is the easiest thing in the world... If you are old, do not go far from the ship, or you might fail to appear when you are called.”
“In this immensity of past and future time, what is the difference between living three days or three generations?”
“the life of every man is short and yours is almost finished while you do not respect yourself but allow your happiness to depend upon others”
“Remember the clear light, the pure bright shining white light of your own nature, it is deathless.”
“Hold fast to the primal and guard the One—it guards true power and can prolong the span of life.”
“I shall not die, these seeds I've sown will save
My name and reputation from the grave,
And men of sense and wisdom will proclaim,
When I have gone, my praises and my fame.”
“The Wine of Life keeps dripping drop by drop;
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.”
“Since life is short and the time of death unknown, devote yourselves wholly to meditation. Even at the cost of your life, act wisely and courageously according to your innate insight.”
“The beauty of my garden is invisible... I use no magic to extend my life; Now, before me, the dead trees become alive.”
“Those who possess the Way are like children. They come of age without growing old.”
“If you pour water into a large vessel and then make a tiny hole in it, though it drips but a little, yet if it goes on steadily leaking, soon there is none left... Therefore the dealers in coffins can never make enough to keep a stock.”
“You will say that I am old and mad, but I answer that there is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than being mad.”
“As long as art lives, never shall I accept that men are truly dead.”
“I will never be an old man. To me old age is always 15 years older than I am.”
“The secret of a long life is to lead a good one. The two things that shorten life the most quickly are immorality and folly.”
“Live and let live. Peacemakers rule life, sleep without bad dreams, and live a long happy life without dispute.”
“Though the years may creep ahead, mind itself can never age. This mind that's always just the same—Wonderful! Marvelous! When you've searched and found at last the one who never will grow old”
“Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
“Good artisans concentrating on one specialty, refuse to dissipate their mental energy. This gives strength to their bodies and they often live to be 70 or 80, healthy and skillful as in their youth”
“Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.”
“To desire immortality is to desire the perpetuation of a great mistake.”
“I feared, loved, suffered did, and died…
If I have been extinguished, yet there arise
A thousand beacons from the spark I bore
The great, the unforgotten: they who wore
Signs of thought’s empire over thought; their lore”
“To rise at six, to sleep at ten,
To sup at ten, to dine at six,
Make a man live for ten times ten.”
“Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, what ample borrowers of eternity they are!”
“The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”
“If you want to realize immortality you must realize the deathless nature of your mind.”
“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”
“No matter what I did, I don't regret it... I did this, that, and the other thing in my life, yet I did very little, Men like me should live a thousand years. Good night!”
“The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years while I—like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out—am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions. I was but the sum of my emotions, and the Other in me was the timeless, imperishable stone.”
“I stop drinking and take cod liver oil to lengthen my life... principally because of those who are my enemies—so that some regret may remain in their too perfect world... to make the so-called gentlemen uncomfortable for a few more days.”
“Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her… somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived”
“Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face... eternity gazing at itself in a mirror... you are eternity and you are the mirror.”
“My soul suddenly longed to transcend its destiny, breathe free air, and become a bird—for a flash only, as long as it could endure. But that was enough; this flash was eternity. That is the meaning of eternity.”
“What is old age? It is a hardening of the arteries and categories, an arresting of thought and blood; a man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas.”
“Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageble, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.”
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
“not based on the overcoming of time, but on the identification with the creative power of every moment… through participation in consciousness, the individual may become an organic part of a greater whole, and thus achieve immortality within that whole”
“The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round... For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less... as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.”
“We are mortal as long as we fear death, but we become immortal as soon as we do not identify ourselves with the confines of our present personality and yield to the eternal rhythm of the universe in which we live.”
“It is our higher aspirations that make us immortal—not the permanence of an immutable separate soul, whose very sameness would exclude us from life and growth and from the infinite adventure of the spirit and condemn us forever to the prison of our own limitations.”
“every man's mind ought to keep working all his life long; every man's imagination should be touched as often as possible by great works of imagination... education ought to end only with life itself.”
“Life is fragile, like the dew hanging delicately on the grass, crystal drops that will be carried away on the first morning breeze.”
“Youth passes – so does spring. Old age comes – so do winter’s lovely snowscapes… I’m bursting with energy, so I’ll jog or climb Mount Hua. I’m too ill to move, so I’ll enjoy my warm bed and meditate”
“The most important thing in your life is your health… you can have all the education and you can have millions of dollars in the bank, but if you've got headaches every day, if you're fat and you are out of shape - what good is your money?”
“Lao Tzu is not saying that immortality or even longevity is desirable. The religion called Taoism has spent much imagination on ways to prolong life interminably or gain immortality… but the Lao Tzu who wrote this had no truck with such notions.”
“What is eternal is forever young, never grows old…The Way never fails. We are waves. It is the sea.”
“It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.”
“We have to liberate ourselves from the stereotypes of aging, they’re obsolete.”
“May you always know the truth and see the lights surrounding you…Forever young, forever young, May you stay forever young.”
“To worry about length of life and fear of death creates tension that tends to shorten life”
“In spite of your fears, no matter what happens to your physical body, your true nature is essentially indestructible.”
“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”
“In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.”
Comments (1)
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Shan Dao
6 years ago
Years don’t make us old, only loss of inspiration, meaningfulness, and creative activity.
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