. . . the mind is desperate to fix the river {of events} in place: Possessed by ideas of the past, preoccupied with images of the future, it overlooks the plain truth of the moment.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the tendency of the mind to become fixated on the past and future, causing it to miss the present moment.
Laozi highlights the common human condition where our thoughts are dominated by regrets of the past and anxieties about the future, leading us to neglect the present. This state of mind can prevent us from appreciating and fully experiencing the reality of now, which is the only moment we truly have.
In practice
During a mindfulness seminar, the speaker could use this quote to emphasize living in the present.
If you understand others you are smart._x000D_ If you understand yourself you are illuminated._x000D_ If you overcome others you are powerful._x000D_ If you overcome yourself you have strength._x000D_ If you know how to be satisfied you are rich._x000D_ If you can act with vigor, you have a will._x000D_ If you don't lose your objectives you can be long-lasting._x000D_ If you die without loss, you are eternal.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment.
In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.
Rule your mind with serenity rather than with force and manipulation.
All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil.
Christianity is in its nature revolutionary
It is a debt we owe to the purity of our religion to show that it is at variance with that law which warrants slavery.
I feel very strongly that Iβm surrounded by other realities.
Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.
It is one of the sternest judgments confronting a human being after death that insofar as he is himself evil, he can see only what resembles himself because he can reproduce in his own being only the physiognomy of other evil people.
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