Tao Te Ching 70

My teachings are easy to understand … yet your intellect will never grasp them. My teachings are older than the world. How can you grasp them?

If you want to know me, look inside your heart.
______________________________________________________

Why are we told to look inside our heart? Because that is the one place in us that is “older than the world”. It is a place outside and beyond the intellect. The intellect is the place of thoughts, concepts, judgments; the place where labels are applied and prejudices and assumptions are born.

At the heart of each of us is an essence that is perfect, peaceful and in harmony with everything else that shares that essence, which is everything else. At that place we connect with the way of life as it is, which is the way of life as it always has been and always will be.

Here, at the center, we can grasp the teachings that life offers us. Here, at the center, we put our feet on the only path that leads us to reality. All other paths lead us to a place of our own creation; a place where we grasp nothing other than our own thoughts, concepts, judgments, prejudices and assumptions; a place that is usually anything but perfect, peaceful and harmonious.