Know Your Foot and Be Content

Carl

[cite] Topher:[/cite]...I have considered that humans are simply sexual creatures deciding what to hump. Biology has a lot to do with that but there is a lot more to it than just hormones.

For me, the law of opposites is that everything has an opposite and they never occur independently. The latter is the piece that many people neglect. Therefore, every straight man is also gay and every gay man is also straight. What determines which one is expressed?

Isn’t [chref=56]mysterious sameness[/chref] wonderfully mysterious! And as you say, it applies to everything - the ‘inside’ is the opposite (mirrors) the ‘outside’ (and visa versa) of reality. It is without limited. The curious thing about the ‘sameness’ I notice is that the closer I try to get to it to examine, all the details I am looking at evaporate. I found that correlations, more than anything else, brings me closer to maintaining a rational view of this phenomenon, but in the end, it always slips through my mind’s fingers [chref=14]and returns to that which is without substance[/chref]. Of course, this is why, in the long run, religion and science must merge as our mean to ‘know what is’. Together these encompass what is ‘knowable’. One without the other is folly.

Carl

In a recent post, Rich is Nothing More Than Knowing Contentment, I examined the Chinese characters for content (知足 zhizu) as a way of feeling more deeply what being [chref=46]content[/chref] means. These two characters were:

知 zhi = know; realize; be aware of
足 zu = foot; leg; sufficient; enough; full

If we take the primary meaning of each character we have ‘know foot’ as the literal translation of ‘content’. That seems a little silly at first. We would all agree that (知) ‘know, realize, be aware of’ is essential for life. But, ‘know foot’? How does 'realise one's foot' have anything to do with being content?

Tai Chi exemplifies the connection well. You can feel perfect contentment when you ‘are aware of your feet’. This is hard to describe, but anyone having done Tai Chi for decades will know what I mean. The loss of contentment originates when our ‘head’ gets ahead of our ‘feet’. Thought allows us to live much of life in an imaginary world of [chref=23]words[/chref] and [chref=32]names[/chref], pasts and futures, [chref=19]desires[/chref] and [chref=19]worries[/chref] outside the present moment. Little wonder that being present – uterly present – is the holy grail of many a spiritual [chref=43]teaching[/chref].

What happens when we get ahead of ourselves and forget our feet? We loose balance and trip over stuff. ‘To be grounded’ is a contemporary term that points to this. ‘Having both feet on the ground’ is another. We lose this balance (physically and emotionally) when [chref=64]desires[/chref] – all those imagined needs we conjur up – sweep us off our feet. We lose awareness of our feet, we lose [chref=33]contentment[/chref]. Oh, how important those lowly feet are!