I studied the Dao in a Chinese History course only briefly and one of the statements that I particularly like is wrapped up nicely here: http://www.myrkothum.co

I studied the Dao in a Chinese History course only briefly and one of the statements that I particularly like is wrapped up nicely here: http://www.myrkothum.com/the-meaning-of-the-finger-pointing-to-the-moon/ http://www.myrkothum.com/the-meaning-of-the-finger-pointing-... It's almost obvious when you think about it that abstraction necessitates containers like memory pointers and that referencing the abstractions is more efficient, but in the magic of our minds, the underlying truth is not guaranteed to still be there. Another quality of what I read in Daodejing is that it basically proclaims itself to only be such a pointer, and that the truth can't be contained and still have a word to call it by. How many other philosophies and religions do you know that try to explain all and -do- claim to have all the answers or have proponents who claim that every truth can be found within their corpus? I did come away believing that Laozi had captured the fact that any all-inclusive truth is ineffable, something that can be logically reinforced by studying paradoxes such as Russel's paradox and self-reference. To sum up the paradox. Define a set of all sets. The set itself is a set, so in order to be the set of all sets, it has to contain itself. Writing a program to create this set will obviously never terminate because any result must be put inside the result, so there can be no final result. Cool resolutions to many problems of natural thought that would otherwise spiral off into infinity. Teaches you to recognize them and terminate the process, freeing memory and mental cycles for other things.