dao sieve

sieve A course sieve catches little, A fine mesh catches more. If you want the subtle, be refined, But prepare to deal with the coarse. The irony of spiritual living is that you become more sensitive and more subtle. Therefore, you become intolerant of the discourse. There is not much choice in this. If you want to catch the subtle things in life, then you must become refined yourself. But the coarser things will then accumulate all the more quickly. A coarse sieve in a rushing stream will hold back only debris and large rocks. A fine mesh will catch smaller things, but it will also retain the large. Some people attempt to cope with this by becoming multilayered. They set up a series of screens to their personalities, from the coarse to the subtle, so that they can deal with all that life has to offer. This is quite laudable from an ordinary point of view, but from the point of view of Tao, it is a great deal of bother. What do we do? If we remain coarse, then only the coarse comes to us. If we become subtle, then we gain the refined but are plagued with the coarse as well. If we become multilayered, then we create a complexity that isolates us from Tao. The solution lies in floating on the current of Tao, uniting with it. That way we no longer seek to hold or to reject. sieve 365 Tao daily meditations Deng Ming-Dao (author) ISBN 0-06-250223-9 duckdaotsu.org duckdaotsu blog tao hub support sustain recommended reading** FU BAO SHI Courtyard of My Home 1960 see FU BAO SHI for a complete biography of this artist and his work http://www.chinafinearts.com> **Suggested reading of daoist texts ancient poetry and contemporary Chinese literature is available at the site. receive a full HTML copy of the daily meditation sent directly to your inbox, please send a note with the words "subscribe tao" in the subject line to duckdaotsu