Lao-tse

• Lao-tse

94:6.3Lao-tse built di­rectly upon the con­cepts of the Salem tra­di­tions when he de­clared Tao to be the One First Cause of all cre­ation. Lao was a man of great spir­i­tual vi­sion. He taught that man’s eter­nal des­tiny was “ev­er­last­ing union with Tao, Su­preme God and Uni­ver­sal King.” His com­pre­hen­sion of ul­ti­mate cau­sa­tion was most dis­cern­ing, for he wrote: “Unity arises out of the Ab­so­lute Tao, and from Unity there ap­pears cos­mic Du­al­ity, and from such Du­al­ity, Trin­ity springs forth into ex­is­tence, and Trin­ity is the pri­mal source of all re­al­ity.” “All re­al­ity is ever in bal­ance be­tween the po­ten­tials and the ac­tu­als of the cos­mos, and these are eter­nally har­mo­nized by the spirit of di­vin­ity.”

94:6.4Lao-tse also made one of the ear­li­est pre­sen­ta­tions of the doc­trine of re­turn­ing good for evil: “Good­ness begets good­ness, but to the one who is truly good, evil also begets good­ness.”

94:6.5He taught the re­turn of the crea­ture to the Cre­ator and pic­tured life as the emer­gence of a per­son­al­ity from the cos­mic po­ten­tials, while death was like the re­turn­ing home of this crea­ture per­son­al­ity. His con­cept of true faith was un­usual, and he too likened it to the “at­ti­tude of a lit­tle child.”

94:6.6His un­der­stand­ing of the eter­nal pur­pose of God was clear, for he said: “The Ab­so­lute De­ity does not strive but is al­ways vic­to­ri­ous; he does not co­erce man­kind but al­ways stands ready to re­spond to their true de­sires; the will of God is eter­nal in pa­tience and eter­nal in the in­evitabil­ity of its ex­pres­sion.” And of the true re­li­gion­ist he said, in ex­press­ing the truth that it is more blessed to give than to re­ceive: “The good man seeks not to re­tain truth for him­self but rather at­tempts to be­stow these riches upon his fel­lows, for that is the re­al­iza­tion of truth. The will of the Ab­so­lute God al­ways ben­e­fits, never de­stroys; the pur­pose of the true be­liever is al­ways to act but never to co­erce.”

94:6.7Lao’s teach­ing of non­re­sis­tance and the dis­tinc­tion which he made be­tween ac­tion and co­er­cion be­came later per­verted into the be­liefs of “see­ing, do­ing, and think­ing noth­ing.” But Lao never taught such er­ror, al­beit his pre­sen­ta­tion of non­re­sis­tance has been a fac­tor in the fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of the pa­cific predilec­tions of the Chi­nese peo­ples.

94:6.8But the pop­u­lar Tao­ism of twen­ti­eth-cen­tury Uran­tia has very lit­tle in com­mon with the lofty sen­ti­ments and the cos­mic con­cepts of the old philoso­pher who taught the truth as he per­ceived it, which was: That faith in the Ab­so­lute God is the source of that di­vine en­ergy which will re­make the world, and by which man as­cends to spir­i­tual union with Tao, the Eter­nal De­ity and Cre­ator Ab­so­lute of the uni­verses.

92:5.124. The sixth cen­tury be­fore Christ. Many men arose to pro­claim truth in this, one of the great­est cen­turies of re­li­gious awak­en­ing ever wit­nessed on Uran­tia. Among these should be re­corded Gau­tama, Con­fu­cius, Lao-tse, Zoroaster, and the Jain­ist teach­ers. The teach­ings of Gau­tama have be­come wide­spread in Asia, and he is revered as the Bud­dha by mil­lions. Con­fu­cius was to Chi­nese moral­ity what Plato was to Greek phi­los­o­phy, and while there were re­li­gious reper­cus­sions to the teach­ings of both, strictly speak­ing, nei­ther was a re­li­gious teacher; Lao-tse en­vi­sioned more of God in Tao than did Con­fu­cius in hu­man­ity or Plato in ide­al­ism. Zoroaster, while much af­fected by the preva­lent con­cept of dual spiritism, the good and the bad, at the same time def­i­nitely ex­alted the idea of one eter­nal De­ity and of the ul­ti­mate vic­tory of light over dark­ness.

94:6.12Like many other spir­i­tual and moral teach­ers, both Con­fu­cius and Lao-tse were even­tu­ally de­i­fied by their fol­low­ers in those spir­i­tu­ally dark ages of China which in­ter­vened be­tween the de­cline and per­ver­sion of the Taoist faith and the com­ing of the Bud­dhist mis­sion­ar­ies from In­dia. Dur­ing these spir­i­tu­ally deca­dent cen­turies the re­li­gion of the yel­low race de­gen­er­ated into a piti­ful the­ol­ogy wherein swarmed dev­ils, drag­ons, and evil spir­its, all be­to­ken­ing the re­turn­ing fears of the un­en­light­ened mor­tal mind. And China, once at the head of hu­man so­ci­ety be­cause of an ad­vanced re­li­gion, then fell be­hind be­cause of tem­po­rary fail­ure to pro­gress in the true path of the de­vel­op­ment of that God-con­scious­ness which is in­dis­pens­able to the true prog­ress, not only of the in­di­vid­ual mor­tal, but also of the in­tri­cate and com­plex civ­i­liza­tions which char­ac­ter­ize the ad­vance of cul­ture and so­ci­ety on an evo­lu­tion­ary planet of time and space.

121:6.4Philo was a great teacher; not since Moses had there lived a man who ex­erted such a pro­found in­flu­ence on the eth­i­cal and re­li­gious thought of the Oc­ci­den­tal world. In the mat­ter of the com­bi­na­tion of the bet­ter el­e­ments in con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous sys­tems of eth­i­cal and re­li­gious teach­ings, there have been seven out­stand­ing hu­man teach­ers: Sethard, Moses, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, Bud­dha, Philo, and Paul.