Tao Te Ching

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And one of them was the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Dow day Jing.

And I remember I was a little skeptical of it I was like what's this corny self help or shit. He was like just give it a read man might dig it and I read it and I couldn't quite believe it existed.

You know the the the Dow translated depending on how you want to translate it means the Dow day Jing either means the way or the art of the way.

And it's a really simple beautiful guide for living that that teaches a lot of things but the core tenants of it are We as human beings should think about patients compassion and simplicity as guiding principles of our life patients with ourselves and others. Passion with ourselves and others and simple in our thoughts and actions.

And the book just spoke to me and it made sense to me in a way that nothing ever had before no religion, no philosophy, no, no guide to life.

The way I often try to explain it to people is you know the force and Star Wars is based on the Dow right. Lucas is very open about it and Jedi's are essentially Taoist ancient Taoist monks, but it's just the idea that there is something that life is a force, a universal life force that we call the Dow and it is simple and compassionate and patient.

One of the things the Dow says is that everything it teaches is obvious. That we know everything it teaches us before we read it because it is the obvious truths of life.

You know if you are patient with other people and patient with yourself your life will be more peaceful that's fucking obvious right.

The Dow basically says the same thing. The Dow says speak when you have something to say and when you don't. Don't. Right. It says those who those who those who who speak no and those who are those who don't speak no and those who speak don't know meaning that the more you talk about all that you know and it's odd that we're on a podcast talking about all that we know but of course and you know that you don't really have to talk that most of our words are wasted and it's two guys essentially saying the same thing and there's a ton of of Stoic philosophical sayings that are very remarkably similar and I think probably these I guess you could call them elite academics Marcus Aurelius was certainly as elite a member of his society is any that has ever existed but I think they probably had access to some of these other materials that that sort of wound their way around the world.