Do you possess the tao?

There is a story in Taoism of a man in a Taoist temple being picked on constantly be the monks there. Until one day, he fell off of a two-story building or something along those lines, the point is he was not hurt and the monks said to him " I did not know you possessed the tao?"

After all, you cannot learn all about religion from a book and you cannot tell someone by what you have heard. Modern-day seems to be more about how much you can remember then how much you can figure out for yourself.

The fact is, to be alive or dead you are one with the tao, to be a rock or the sun you or one with the tao. The best terminology of an afterlife I ever heard came from a thirteen-year-old boy in an interview in the basement of the united nations building. when asked about an afterlife he replied energy cannot be created or destroyed it can only change forms.

So you `do not possess the tao as though it is a charm bracelet you wear. A matter a fact, the less you want it the more you will find yourself understanding it

There is a man now who read the Tao te Ching for only one year and now claims he understands it while enough to teach. Meanwhile, I have read the tao for twenty-four years now and I still have no clue. But then he also has lots of pieces of paper on his walls showing how smart he is and I have none. But then, that man in life was given every chance to fail and he succeeded, where I had many chances to succeed and all I kept doing was failing. In the end, though there is no right way to walk, only the way you have chosen.

After all, I am slow and dull, while others are sharp and quick. They get together and laugh, while I seem to find the wrong things to say. Wherever I go I never seem to fit in, I am but a storyteller by the campfire in a time of movies and television.