No Ego No Stress

NO EGO NO STRESS  

"NO EGO NO STRESS" is a 134-page book by Stephen Lau on ancient human wisdom for stress relief. Specifically, it is about Tao wisdom, which originates from the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu, the author of “Tao Te Ching”—one of the most translated works in world literature. “Tao Te Ching” is popular due to its profound and unconventional wisdom, which is both intriguing and controversial. Learn how to let go of the ego-self to remove all the stressors in modern living due to finance, careers, relationships, etc. and live as if everything is a miracle.

NO EGO NO STRESS  is made up of 4 parts.

PART ONE: An Introduction to STRESS:

It explains how and where stress comes from; the damage and devastation of stress to human health.

PART TWO: Conventional Wisdom:

The major life stressors come from careers, money, relationships, adversity, and time. Conventional wisdom offers many strategies for stress relief, such as exercise, herbs, medications, meditation, and psychotherapies, among many others. Conventional wisdom may reduce stress levels, but it does not eradicate stress completely. Conventional wisdom only complements the ancient Tao wisdom for ultimate stress relief.

PART THREE:Tao Wisdom:

This part not only explains what Tao wisdom is all about, but also contains the complete translation in simple English of all the 81 short chapters of “Tao Te Ching” which is one of the most translated works in world literature. Going through the whole script, interpreted and translated by the author, will enable you to understand the essentials of Tao wisdom for stress-free contemporary living.

PART FOUR: No Ego No Stress:

Stress originates from the human mind: how it perceives and processes life experiences. What is stress to one individual may not be stress to another. This part explains in detail how having no ego can eradicate all stress related to career, relationship, money, adversity, and time.

Get your copy of NO EGO NOSTRESS

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Letting Go

Embracing is accepting the good and the bad with grace and gratitude. Embracing everyone and everything is beneficial because it holds the key to awakening, which is the ultimate understanding of the TAO.

“We act without over-doing.

We manage without interference.

We enjoy without attachment. . . .

Therefore, we focus on the present moment,

doing what needs to be done,

without straining and stressing.

To end our suffering,

we focus on the present moment,

instead of our expected result.

So, we follow the natural laws of things.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 63)

Before you could embrace, you need to let go of anger, desire, disappointment, expectation, frustration, and grudge, among many other negative emotions. But you will be rewarded with spiritual instructions and inspirations.

 

“Everything that happens to us is beneficial.

Everything that we experience is instructional.

Everyone that we meet, good or bad, becomes our teacher or student.

We learn from both the good and the bad.

So, stop picking and choosing.

Everything is a manifestation of the mysteries of creation.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 27)

Letting go is the natural surrender of the human mind to any involuntary reactivity aimed at removing anything that might threaten or undermine the ego-self. Letting go should be a natural instinct, and not a technique that one has to learn and master; it is simply a spontaneous human ability to give up all human attachments that create the unreal ego-self.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Wisdom Is Inside You

Always look inside yourself: that is self-introspection.

Ancient wisdom makes us look inside ourselves, while contemporary wisdom often makes us look outside. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, once said: "who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." It is important to look inside in order to discover the ultimate truth of all things, which is the essence of true human wisdom.

Looking inside is self-awakening. As we look inside ourselves, we begin to ask questions that demand answers that in turn lead to asking more questions. Self-intuition makes you think; without thinking, there is no wisdom, just as Albert Einstein once said: "Thinking is hard; that's why so few people do it." Therefore, put on your thinking cap and get wisdom!

Looking inside may help us understand the wisdom of "all-one" and "not-two." This ancient Chinese wisdom came from Lao Tzu, the ancient sage from China more than two thousand years ago, who was the author of the immortal classic Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way), which has been translated into multiple languages worldwide due to its profound wisdom in living.

What does it mean by "all-one" and "not-two"?

This is similar to what the famous poet John Donne said "no man is an island." That is, we are all inter-connected with one another somehow and somewhat. The capability to see this subtle connection further enhances the awareness to perceive the inter-relationship of all things, which holds the key to understanding the ultimate truth of all things. 

“A beggar has been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. ‘Spare some change?’ mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. ‘I have nothing to give you,’ said the stranger. Then he asked: ‘What’s that you are sitting on?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied the beggar. ‘Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.’ ‘Ever looked inside?’ asked the stranger. ‘No,’ said the beggar. ‘What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.’ ‘Have a look inside,’ insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to prey open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold.”

The story above is taken from the beginning of the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

Look inside! The wisdom is inside you, but you have to look!

Yes, looking inside is the key to understanding and embracing the ancient wisdom in living. When you look within, you begin to see the reality of all things; and this is the beginning of your understanding of Tao (道), the ancient Chinese wisdom in living.

Yes, like the beggar, you have to look inside yourself to find the riches of life, or to attain your individual enlightenment, which is the ultimate true human wisdom.

“From knowing to not knowing,

This is superior.

From not knowing to knowing,

This is sickness.

It is by being sick of sickness

That one is not sick.

The sage is not sick.

Because he is sick of sickness,

Therefore he is not sick.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 71)

So, look inside yourself, be sick of sickness, and you will not be sick!

Visit my site: Wisdom in Living.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Thinking Out of the Box to Live Longer

Tao wisdom begins with having an empty mind. What is an empty mind? An empty mind is more than just "thinking out of the box": it is reverse thinking to create your own box of thinking. An empty mindset originated from Lao Tzu:

"An empty mind with no craving and no expectation helps us letting go.

Being in the world and not of the world, we attain heavenly grace.

With heavenly grace, we become pure and selfless.

And everything settles into its own perfect place."

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 3) 

“Letting go is emptying the mundane,

to be filled with heavenly grace.

Blessed is he who has an empty mind.

He will be filled with knowledge and wisdom from the Creator.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 9)

There was the story of a professor visiting a Zen master to find out more about Zen, which is an Eastern philosophy originating from Tao wisdom. In the beginning of the visit, the professor kept on talking while the Zen master was serving him tea. The Zen master kept pouring tea into the teacup held by the professor even though it was already brimming over the teacup.

The moral of the story is that one must, first and foremost, have an empty mind before one can accept new and unconventional ideas. Likewise, to intuit true wisdom, one must have an empty mind capable of reverse thinking.

An empty mindset not only provides clarity of thinking, but also frees us from the many shackles of life that enslave us, keeping us in bondage without our knowing it. Are you the master or just a slave of your own life? Often times, we think we are masters of our lives and we are in total control, but in fact we are no more than slaves. You are the master only when you have complete control over your life, or rather your way of thinking. Remember, your mind controls you, especially your subconscious mind—what you do, or how you act and react in different circumstances and situations in life.

How do you gain or re-gain control over your life in terms of your career, human relationships, time management, and daily stress, among others? It is not easy because most of us have a pre-conditioned mindset that we must do this and do that in order to succeed in life. To illustrate, in our subconscious minds, we want to do well, and, to do well, we must set life goals; to reach our life goals, we must exert efforts; after accomplishing one life goal, we need to set another higher one, and yet another one higher than the previous ones. In the end, our lives get more complicated and even out of control; as a result, we are no longer masters but only slaves to what we have accomplished for ourselves. As a further illustration, Lance Armstrong, the once-famous-and-now-disgraced cyclist, used performance-enhancing drugs to win his races in order to sustain his ego to win, which is compounded of his winnings, that ultimately brought about his own downfall. 

The bottom line: do not let your life careen out of control, and do not live your life with a life of its own; get your own life back in order! An empty mind is the opposite of a compulsive mind that tells you to do this and that, making you a slave of your own life, instead of its master.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

The Bright and the Dark Side of Living Longer

Look at Both the Bright and the Dark 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. This wisdom may let you see the bright side of life. Without this profound understanding, you will forever be haunted by the awareness of only 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, which is seeing also the light at the end of the dark tunnel. Remember, darkness and brightness co-exist, just like day and night.

The bottom line: look for your own imperfections, instead of denying them; be the imperfect you, instead of striving to be someone else that you are not. Being your true self is the art of living well, which is looking at both the bright and the dark side of life.

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

The Different Theories of Aging

THE DIFFERENT THEORIES OF AGING

Scientists have come up with different theories explaining why and how you age.

The free radical theory of aging

This theory is based on the damage of cells due to cumulative free radicals, leading to disease and, ultimately, death.

Free radicals are molecules within the human cells. Due to regular oxidation (e.g. breathing), and other environmental factors (e.g. tobacco smoke), these molecules become damaged and unstable, and begin to affect other healthy cells close by, creating many more similar unstable free radicals, and thus initiating a chain reaction of cell damage by free radicals.

Damaged cells lead to disease and ultimate death.

This theory implies that antioxidants, such as vitamins A, C, and E, which reduce the formation of free radicals, not only slow down the aging process, but also prevent disease.

The genetic theory of aging

This theory is based on the pre-programming of human genes to induce aging and death—your Creator ensures that you will not be immortal. Therefore, aging is not the consequence of wear and tear over the years. The fact of the matter is that you are not meant to live forever.

Other than disease and other environmental factors, there is no great variation in the lifespan of humans, and this may partially explain the role of genes in aging.

The hormone theory of aging

This theory is based on the gradual changes in the human body due to the decline and degeneration of the endocrine system, which is responsible for producing hormones to regulate many body functions and processes. Changes in the human hormone production, such as menopause, account for the changes responsible for aging.

There is no scientific evidence that hormone replacement will in fact increase human lifespan. So, think twice before you decide on a hormone replacement therapy.

The immunity theory of aging

This theory is based on the failure of the immune system to give adequate protection against contaminants, viruses, and stress, among other agents contributing to a weakened or compromised immune system.

This theory attests to the important role of the immune system in longevity health and overall wellness.

The rate of living theory of aging

This theory is based on the rate of breathing: faster oxygen metabolism leads to a shorter lifespan. In the animal kingdom, rodents, with the fastest heartbeats have the shortest lifespan, while tortoises with the slowest breaths live the longest.

This theory vindicates that breathing right is one of the key factors in longevity in humans. Learning to breathe right is critical to remaining younger and healthier for longer.

To sum up, the human aging process is best explained not by one single theory but by a combination of these theories.

The truth of the matter is that you age, just like everyone else. The point in question is how you can delay that aging process, making you younger and healthier for longer—or, at least, not making you age more quickly than you are supposed to.

                   

Unfortunately, many of us have fallen victims to the so-called Accelerated Aging Syndrome.

Potentials for accelerated aging

According to Steven Masley, M.D., the former medical director of the Pritikin Longevity Center in St. Petersburg, Florida, you may have the potentials for accelerated aging, if you have just any three of the following:

• A fast blood sugar level of more than 100 mg/dl

• A blood pressure higher than 130/85

• A waist larger than 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men

• Good cholesterol level (HDL) less than 40 mg/dl for men, and 50mg/dl for women

• Triglyceride (a certain type of fat in your blood) levels greater than 150 mg/dl.

Factors contributing to accelerated aging

There are several factors that increase the predisposition to accelerated aging:

·        Your diet: you are what you eat, and you become what you eat.

• Your lifestyle: life on the fast lane often leads to faster aging.

• Your physical inactivity: or immobility brings about stagnation and degeneration.

• Your stress: stress kills your brain cells, predisposing you to accelerated aging.

“The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.” Lucille Ball

THE TAO OF LIVING LONGER

YOUNGER AND HEALTHIERFOR LONGER

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Asking Questions and Seeking Answers to Love Longer

ASKING QUESTIONS AND SEEKING ANSWERS TO LIVE LONGER

If you wish to live longer or to a ripe old age, you must ask yourself many questions about life; after all, living is about asking questions and seeking answers to the questions asked. Livingfor life in this contemporary world may never be easy because it requires wisdom, which is essentially finding answers to the questions asked about life and living, and then applying those answers to everyday living in the material world.

Have you ever wondered: there has to be much more to life than this—the kind of life that you are living right now?

If you have, then maybe you should, first and foremost, ask yourself questions about why you want to live longer. Your reasons could be some of the following:

You desire to live a better life than the one that you are currently living.

You want to see your children or grandchildren grow up and mature into adults.

You have your life passions, some of which are already accomplished, while others are being pursued but remaining unfulfilled.

You are experiencing some core values, which are not just your life goals but rather your beliefs in humanity that have to be lived in order to fully experience the meaning of existence as well as the innate happiness in humanity.

You still like to enjoy some of the mundane pleasures of life and living that have satisfied your five senses.

You love to maintain good relationships and true friendships with those who are close and dear to you.

You may be fighting some life challenges or health issues—just like Alex Trebek, the 77-year-old TV celebrity famous for hosting NBC's “Jeopardy”, who openly declared in 2019 that he had to live longer in order to fight his pancreatic cancer because of his still-standing three-year contract with NBC. 

Asking the question “Why you want to live longer?” may initiate many other why questions specifically related to you, to others close to you, and to the world around you. Living is all about asking the many why and how questions in your everyday life and living.

In the Bible, Jesus said: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find . . .” (Matthew 7:7) In real life, we must always ask ourselves many thought-provoking questions at all times. Asking questions is self-introspection, which is a process of self-intuition and self-reflection, without which there is no self-awareness and therefore no personal growth and development. A static life is never a life well lived and worth living. Therefore, asking questions is self-empowering wisdom—a tool necessary for living longer.

The truth is that the kind of questions you ask determines the kind of life you are going to live. Your questions often trigger a set of mental answers, which may lead to actions or inactions, based on the choices you make from the answers you have obtained. Remember, your life is always the sum of all the choices you have made in the process. No matter what, life is a journey of self-discovery, a continuous process of asking questions and seeking self-enlightening answers from them. It should be noted that the answer to every question you ask may change over time, because life is forever changing, and changes are often transformative. The more questions you ask, the clearer your mind will become, and the more ready you will be to receive the answers.

Although asking questions is a self-learning process, do not seek absolute answers from the questions asked; more importantly, do not seek answers that might not be given to you. The most important thing in questions-and-answers is to experience everything, not just to pursue the knowledge. As a matter of fact, knowledge can help, but it can also hinder. When you only follow what you know, and forget what you feel, you can easily be led down the wrong path. Extensive knowledge and logical reasoning may not necessarily compound true wisdom.

The bottom line: live every question you are going to ask yourself, and live in its presence. Be patient toward all those questions that you cannot find answers immediately. True enlightenment may dawn on you one day when you find yourself asking no more questions because you already have all the answers; that is the ultimate awakening.

Enjoy the process of self-reflecting all the questions you are going to ask yourself; without this self-reflection, you may exist for other people, and not for yourself. Now is the time to start asking questions, and putting yourself on the right path to intuiting the TAO of living longer.      

THE TAO OF LIVING LONGER

YOU JUST DON’T DIE!

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Avoid Dangerous Drugs

Avoiding Drugs During and After Pregnancy

If possible avoid taking any drug during or after your pregnancy. Optimum health is always drug-free.

Millions of people are suffering needlessly as a direct consequence of the unconscionable zeal of the pharmaceutical industry to rake up billions of dollars of profit aided and abetted by scientists and researchers who have been paid handsomely, even to the extent of falsifying test and research results in some cases.

To illustrate, three of the top executives of Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to criminal charges of misleading the public on the risk of addiction and abuse associated with the painkiller drug OxyContin. That was yet another scandal of pharmaceutical companies doctoring research findings of the safety of drugs and masking their undesirable side effects.

For decades, unreliable drug tests have abounded in the medical and pharmaceutical research community.

It is not uncommon for pharmaceutical companies to "influence" researchers through coercion, incentive, and even threat, to produce the desired results in clinical trials. Fabricating data, such as in the case of OxyContin, is no surprise to the pharmaceutical industry.

Clinical trials, usually involving a small number of people, may not truly reflect the outcome of those who will ultimately be using those drugs after their approval.

In addition, drugs tested on animal models may be biased and even irrelevant. An artificially induced disease in non-human animal models may yield results incompatible to a spontaneous, naturally occurring human disease. In short, there is no absolute safety or reliability of pharmaceutical drugs.

The pharmaceutical companies and the FDA have convinced not only the medical establishment but also the gullible public that costly drugs are the answer to all their health problems, despite their dubious track records and often-deadly side effects.

The use, misuse, and abuse of drugs account for 250,000 to 500,000 deaths each year in the United States. And do you still believe that pharmaceutical drugs provide all the answers to your health problems?  

Dr. O. W. Holmes, Professor of Medicine, Harvard University, had this to say regarding pharmaceuticals putting you in harm’s way: “If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity.” Dr. Holmes’ statement speaks volumes of the potential harm of pharmaceuticals.

When you give your body a drug that replaces a substance your body is capable of making itself, you body then becomes weaker, not stronger, and begins not only to manufacture less of that substance, but also to become more dependent on the outside source, which is usually the drug.

Unfortunately, no drug can give you insight into the circumstance that created your problems. At best, it can only temporarily reduce the physical pain created by your situation. A drug "cures" your symptoms at the expense of creating more potential symptoms down the road. For a while, you may be symptom-free, but soon enough new symptoms may emerge, requiring yet a more potent drug to deal with them.

According to Dr. John Tilden, author of Toxemia, the first and only cause of disease is toxemia, which is the accumulation of toxic wastes over a long period of time. In other words, toxicity retained and stored in our bodies is the common denominator for the causes of all human diseases. 

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

The Happiness Smoothie

Self-healing begins when you are wise and happy. Mental happiness and body wellness are interrelated. If you are happy, your body will heal faster. It’s just that simple.

But happiness is not easy to come by, especially when your mind is not prepared to receive it. The mind needs wisdom to create happiness thoughts to stimulate the brain cells to produce chemicals that make one happy. Genuine human happiness comes from human thoughts that are the components of human personality. Therefore,  understanding personality development may throw some light on why you are happy or unhappy.

According to the famous psychologist Erik Erikson, your personality has evolved through several decades of changes and experiences, resulting in who and what you have now become. Therefore, profound wisdom is to understand how those changes in your life have occurred and shaped your personality, and how adapting yourself to those changes now may still benefit you in the long run. In other words, human wisdom plays a pivotal role in human happiness, without which self-healing of the body and the mind is difficult, if not impossible. 

The Happiness Smoothie

This is a powerful Green Smoothie recipe for happiness, that naturally boosts your feelings of energy and happiness to a level that many people never get to experience. Is this for real? Each ingredient in this smoothie targets various areas of your brain to positively effect your mood, energy levels and overall well being. Imagine waking up tomorrow with a joyful, abundant, potent energy flowing through you.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Control and Over-Doing

CONTROL AND OVER-DOING

Controlling external events is futility because control is but an illusion based on expected results projected by the thinking mind into the future. Concentration on controlling makes it difficult to concentrate on doing the right things to make you live longer.

The TAO, which is the wisdom of Lao Tzu, the ancient sage from China, looks upon the world as something to be accepted, and that involves invoking the profound but paradoxical wisdom of “action through inaction”—which is action based on acceptance of nature or the natural turn of events in life.

“Whenever we try to control,

we separate ourselves from our true nature.

Man proposes; the Creator disposes.

Life is sacred: it flows exactly as it should.

Trusting in the Creator, we return to our breathing,

natural and spontaneous, without conscious control.

In the same manner:

sometimes we have more,

sometimes we have less;

sometimes we exert ourselves,

sometimes we pull back;

sometimes we succeed,

sometimes we fail.

Trusting in the Creator, we see the comings and goings of things,

but without straining and striving to control them.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 29)

According to the TAO, everything in life must follow a natural cycle, whether we like it or not, and that we must be patient because nothing is within our control, especially our destinies.

”That which shrinks
must first expand.
That which fails,
must first be strong.
That which is cast down
must first be raised.
Before receiving, there must be giving.
This is called perception of the nature of things.
Soft and weak overcome hard and strong.”
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 36)

Spontaneity is the essence of the natural cycle. What goes up must eventually come down; life begets death; day is followed by night—just like the cycle of the four seasons.

"Allowing things to come and go,

following their natural laws,

we gain everything.

Straining and striving,

we lose everything."

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 48)

Intuition of spontaneity is an understanding of the impermanence of all things: nothing lasts no matter how we strive to keep the impermanent permanent, and everything remains only with that very present moment.

"Strong winds come and go.

So do torrential rains.

Even heaven and earth cannot make them last forever."

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te  Ching, chapter 23)

The bottom line: do what needs to be done, but without over-doing, which causes stress in everyday life and living.

THE TAO OF LIVING LONGER

THE COMPLETE TAO TE CHING IN PLAIN ENGLISH

Stephen Lau                             

Copyright© by Stephen Lau