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Echoes of Emptiness 虚 之 響
Echoes of Emptiness ( 虚 之 響 ) – Unknowing
© Jacob Newell (Daoshi Gu Shen Yu)
When we are born, nature gives us the wonderful gift of unknowing. But human beings tend to overlook the value of
this gift and treat it as an affliction. And so we try every which way to avoid it or transform it. Yet no matter how
much knowledge we accumulate, our basic unknowing always remains.
The fact that we don’t know everything is something that I suppose we all need to come to terms with somehow.
We’ve got options. Let’s take the question of life and death.
Ever since I was four years old I was intrigued by the fact that we don’t know where we come from before we were
born and where we go when we die. It seems to me that we are all dealing with this reality in one way or another.
Perhaps many people accept that we cannot know the answer to this question, and so they set aside their curiosity and
move on with life. These people often self-identify as ―agnostic‖, meaning without knowledge.
But others of us are driven by a curiosity to find an answer to this question – seeking ―gnosis‖. I have always been
one of these ―seeker‖ types, and since I was a child I have approached this quest in a variety of ways. I can sum them
up as: faith, philosophy, and enlightenment…and then there’s Laozi.
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36 Yang-Sheng (Nurturing Life) Volume 1, Issue No. 7