How do we recognize error in our thinking? How can we enjoy the spiritual benefits of practicing our religion while not condemning the religion of others? These questions are addressed in the eighty-one commentaries included in this book. These commentaries refer to, but are independent of, the illuminating and compelling essay collection about Lao-tzus Tao Te Ching, as voiced in Change Your Thoughts Change Your Life by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer.
Living right, according to the Tao, anticipates that we have both the understanding needed to make right choices and the knowledge to recognize the types of behavior that are important for us to change. However, of equal or greater significance to these skills are the feelings that drive our internal motivation at our center. Many of us need to learn the life lessons that keep popping up as issues in our lives. They keep resurfacing until we finally recognize the lessons and actually learn them. We know we have really been learning our lessons when we notice that our intentions are genuinely beginning to change.
We have absolutely no concept of how the connections we feel and know to be real actually come about, between ourselves and others, between us and the happenings of life, or between us and God. We often describe these feelings or experiences as resulting from some type of energy, but what might that really mean? Reflecting this unexplainable, invisible, but vital connection on the written page through symbolism provides our minds with a crutch to assist understanding and recall. Although the illustrations as drawn may have little or no basis in the facts, the understanding of the concepts that develop through their use helps us apply the gems that Lao-tzu speaks of in the Tao, to our lives.
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With a modest upbringing and supportive parents, Daniel Frank completed his teacher training at the age of eighteen and started his nonstop forty-two-year teaching career the following year. He acquired his BA and BEd while working full time. In January of 1978, his interests led him to a course offered at the local secondary school based on the book How Should We Then Live? by Francis A. Schaeffer, a “theologian and philosopher … [with] forty years of intensive study of humanism and Christian truths.” It stirred something within him to search for more answers to the question asked by the title of Schaeffer’s book. Although many of the authors he has read to date have contributed to the view of God he holds today, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer tops the list.