This week, after sitting and walking meditation, we'll use VOICE (Voice Of Innate Clarity Exercise) to work with the Tao Te Ching. This classic text, something like 2500 years old, has been a perennial source of wisdom and curiousity. The writer and lifelong fan Ursula Le Guin wrote:

It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.

We read Chapter 1 from Le Guin's version of the Tao Te Ching:

The way you can go
isn’t the real way.
The name you can say
isn’t the real name.

Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name’s the mother
of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul
sees what’s hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.

The voices we used to worked with this text were:

• Wanting
• Unwanting (Wanting Nothing, or Free of Wanting)
• The Way