Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Guest Post -- Tao Te Ching: The Master Appears

This is a guest post written by Richard Shelmerdine.

Tao Te Ching: The Master Appears

They say that the teacher appears when the student is ready and that always really confused me. But after going through a period of intense suffering after leaving home to live alone and falling into the wrong crowd, I found myself bored, browsing the Amazon bookstore one day and came across this book. It just jumped out at me and after reading some reviews I bought it immediately and greedily awaited its arrival. The book arrived and I started studying it. It was like nothing I'd read before. I knew there was truth in the teachings but did not know if I was ready for them yet. So I kept on studying.

Like all good spiritual teachings, they teach you something that cannot be expressed in words. It is more like a taking away of everything you think you know until you just understand. This is why the spiritual path must be walked alone and reading about it will only get you so far. You have to look inside. I think that the world is ready for spiritual teachings more than ever. After advancing so much in the world of form it is time we learnt about our true nature. I'm getting off topic here.

The concepts in the book were amazing and fresh to me but I knew that I already knew them deep down somewhere and they were just being bought out. Immediately I started to think how I could help others around me start on the path of the Tao so they could benefit from what I had. You can't read a spiritual book like you read a novel, it has to be breathed in and contemplated and not merely acknowledged by the mind. So I had a great idea.

What I would do is spend a month meditating and contemplating the Tao Te Ching and I could find people who were ready for the shift too and they could follow me. It would stay there forever as an inspiration for others too who wanted to see how it can change their lives. So I wrote an email to the author of the blog (Trey) that you are now reading as they are reaching my audience and we decided to collaborate.

You can follow me here.

(If you'd like to submit a Guest Post to The Rambling Taoist, send me an email.)

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