5 or 6 hundred pages leading up to this and he's like "nah I'm not even gonna write it"

I cannot lead you down the path I can only point my gnarled finger in its general direction. This too is the tao.

I'm sorry that's just how it is you have to have the temperament of a riddle issuing bog wizard it may be that I was uniquely built for this my brain just corkscrews the correct way for it

I am constantly like "get a load of this idiot they have clearly never studied the tao" but I GUESS studying the tao is not really a normal thing to do

It's so simple it's stupid. it's the hardest thing in the world to grasp. it is not reducable.

I memorized my favorite verse of it (50) without understanding it AT ALL while just thinking it sounded cool as hell and it hit me what it meant over a decade later and even now there's one facet of it I don't really understand that's just how the tao is.

what I mean is: don't get married to anyone else's interpretation or assume they know better than you. if laotze had wanted to be extremely clear and specific he would have done that. interpretation is half the journey. getting it wrong is half the journey.

I almost said "don't let anyone else interpret it for you" but that would mean I need to learn classical Chinese real quick

was googling for a particular translation and one of the auto fill options was "tao te Ching summary" lol. lmfao. you fool. you complete and utter imbecile.

a beginner should read through it and some verses will make perfect sense, they will feel almost like cliche, and some will be perfect nonsense. use the bits you understand to approach the bits you don't. maybe peek at other translations of the same verses.

or I guess it is. Honestly, my reaction to some people's I DON'T GET IT reactions is.....
......
.....
are you fucking stupid?

*slides a copy of the Tao te Ching across the table*

*except for in horror games, where I understand this is the norm

also similar to Nomura's recurring boss/monster design of "beneath the evil woman is a different, bigger and eviler woman" He did it twice in FFX! I have no means of interpreting all this.

I guess because I'm here with my red string like "Sephiroth's weird bangs are like labia, right?" and no one wants to hang out with me

like I didn't really think about it in the OG but realizing its name was supposed to be rebirth from the beginning..... like this is what is symbolically going on here, right? I guess no one wants to talk about it and really what else is there to say.