The TAO of the Art of Living Well

Life is short, so make the best of it now! To live the best of your life, you must know who you are and what life is all about. Most importantly, you must have the wisdom to live your life to the fullest.

Living your life is a learning process. Real learning, however, is not just the acquisition of knowledge. True wisdom is the ability to penetrate deeply into the meaning behind superficial knowledge, to integrate related thoughts, facts, and experiences into a structural framework that reveals a deeper, more synthesized meaning than what an ordinary person perceives. Wisdom is internal; it comes from the inner self.

Focusing on so-called goals in life, many of us lose our true selves in the pursuit of our dreams. If you are one of them, you must re-direct your life. If you wish to re-discover your "new" self, or never want to go back to your "old" life, THE BOOK OF LIFE AND LIVING is right for you.

Now is as good a time as any to live your life on your own terms, instead of someone else's terms. Now is the time not just to think out of the box, but to create your own box. THE BOOK OF LIFE AND LIVING was written just for that specific purpose to inspire you with the wisdom in living, based on conventional wisdom, ancient wisdom, and spiritual wisdom.

Albert Einstein once said: "A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts, and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison . . . . "

One of the objectives of THE BOOK OF LIFE AND LIVING is to free yourself from the self-imprisonment of self-delusions created by your self-consciousness, as pointed out by Albert Einstein. This book not only explains in simple terms and plain language how you may unconsciously create your self-limiting thoughts that prevent you from truly understanding who you are and what you really want from life, but also shows you how to create a substantially new manner of thinking through the integration of both conventional and ancient wisdom.

In particular, this book is about the art of living well through understanding and embracing the wisdom of Tao—the wisdom of Lao Tzu succinctly expressed in TAO TE CHING, one of the most translated works in world literature. However, Tao wisdom is simple but difficult to understand. THE BOOK OF LIFE AND LIVING explains in simple language with common everyday examples to illustrate the essence of Tao wisdom and how it may integrate with conventional wisdom to live a life of your choice.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

The Darker Side of Life

Life is always imperfect, and living is forever a bed of roses with some thorns. We are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. As such, the art of living involves the wisdom of knowing who you really are, and how things happen and work in your life. Without this profound understanding, you will forever be haunted by the awareness of the darker side of life.

The Bible calls the darker side of human nature “sin.” None of us is exempt from sin. Life is always an inner struggle between what is perceived in an individual’s moral system as “right” and the dark opposing force inside to do just the opposite. To make matters worse, most of us are really quite good at self-deception. Either we deceive ourselves into thinking that the dark opposing force does not exist in ourselves, or we simply inflate our own personal virtues to overshadow the dark force within us.

Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous Scottish novelist, calls this darker side of human nature the duality of man. In his famous story of “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he presents Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both having a dark side within them, where evil is lurking to surface anytime. Both of them hide their evil away, pretending it never exists. In the end, it turns out that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are actually one and the same person.

If the darker of life is deemed as something “evil” as depicted by Robert Louis Stevenson, it may immediately lead to self-denial and downright rejection. The darker side is ideally described as a “not-so-good” quality, or just human flaws and weaknesses that we see in others as well as in ourselves. Whatever the definition may be, the darker of life, ironically enough, makes life wholesome, without which life is incomplete and unreal—at best, a self-delusion. Human darkness is part and parcel of human existence. Denying its existence only leads to more pain, regret, and resignation. But understanding the dualistic human nature offers a way to return to wholeness, which is an important ingredient in the art of living well.

Read my book: The Book of Life and Living.

Also, find out more about the essentials of Tao wisdom.

Tao wisdom is the essence in the art of living well. It is the profound wisdom of the ancient Chinese sage, Lao Tzu, the author of the immortal classic Tao Te Ching, one of the most translated works in world literature. The book has been popular for thousands of years due to its wisdom, which is simple but controversial, profound and yet intriguing. To fully understand it, you need to get all the essentials of Tao wisdom.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

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