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pass with small talk, jokes, games, and minor quarrels....
That's what your life is: one is engaged meanwhile with small things. The great thing is going to happen tomorrow. Godot will come tomorrow. Today one is quarrelling -- the wife with the husband, the husband with the wife. Small things, 'small talk, jokes, games... tedium and emptiness'. Today, that's what everybody is feeling: tedium, emptiness....'Nothing to be done' is the refrain that rings again and again.... They say again and again 'Nothing to be done', but then they console themselves, 'but tomorrow he is coming.' And in fact he has never promised them, they have never met him -- it is an invention. One has to invent; out of misery one has to invent the tomorrow and something to cling to. Your gods, your heavens, your paradises, your MOKSHAS, are all inventions. Tao does not talk about them.
This play of Samuel Beckett, WAITING FOR GODOT, IS very essentially Taoist.
... In the midst of the first act, two strangers -- Pozzo and Luckystorm onto the stage. Pozzo seems to be a man of affluence; Lucky, the servant, is being driven to a nearby market to be sold. Pozzo tells the tramps about Lucky's virtues the most remarkable of which is that he can THINK. To show them, Pozzo snaps his whip and commands 'Think!' and there follows a long, hysterically incoherent monologue in which fragments of theology, science, sports, and assorted learning jostle in confusion until the three others hurl themselves on him and silence him.
What is your thinking? What are you saying when you say 'I am thinking'? It is a 'hysterically incoherent monologue in which fragments of theology, science, sports, and assorted learning jostle in confusion'... until death comes and silences you. What is your whole thinking? What can you think? What is there to think? And through thinking how can one arrive at truth? Thinking cannot deliver truth. Truth is an experience, and the experience happens only when thinking is no longer there.
So Tao says that theology is not going to help, philosophy is not going to help, logic is not going to help, reason is not going to help. You can go on thinking and thinking,
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