Taoism regards the entire natural world as the operation of the Tao, a process that defies intellectual comprehension.

Taoists understand the practice of wu wei, the attribute of not forcing or grasping.

Jen – a human being will always be greater than anything they can say about themselves, and anything they can think about themselves.

Tao is a sort of nonsense syllable, indicating the mystery that we can never understand — the unity that underlies the opposites. […] Tao is a reality that we apprehend deeply without being able to define it. […] Anything that is expressed about the Tao is not the Tao.

We have been trying to fit the order of the universe to the order of words. And it simply does not work. The real basis of Buddhism is not a set of ideas but an experience.

When we say that we are trying to make sense out of life, that means that we are trying to treat the real world as if it were a collection of words. (Words are just symbols)

We are taught to figure things out, and our first task is to learn the different names for everything. In this way we learn to treat all of the things of the world as separate objects.

Humans get in their own way because they are always observing and questioning themselves. They are always trying to fit the order of the world into the order of sense, the order of thought and words.

Every stream, every road, if followed persistently and meticulously to its end, leads nowhere at all. […] Any place where we are may be considered the center of the universe. Anywhere that we stand an be considered the destination of our journey.

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”