The time has come. The time to fashion a new breed of man has arrived.
We are currently embroiled in a culture that fosters a shameless opportunism. This kind of world inspires profit, convenience, and self-promotion. The urge to succeed and grab money, status and power has numbed our minds and blunted our sensibilities. Our friends and family find themselves pitted against colleagues and clients for bits of our precious schedule.
Families are torn apart by cell phones, laptops, conference calls, and business trips. Televisions become babysitters, gifts replace affection, and success excuses shortcomings, while failure negates virtues.
These symptoms of social decay appear whenever the value of a human being is determined by whether he is useful or detrimental to our own agenda.
With this approach, we have dismantled the essential framework of cooperation and understanding that is humanity’s only hope of survival.
Sadly, even the material prosperity that results from this approach has its roots in great human suffering.
This indifference and the problems that result from it would need an almost Herculean counter-effort on our part to restore dignity to humanity, and through it; true meaning to the term ‘humane’.
This need to attain and preserve such an existence requires a new breed of man.
This man would be of heroic stature; one who truly understands the value of balance, equanimity, austerity and devotion. The type of social reformer I speak of would be willing to charge fearlessly through the wilderness of human complacency.
He or she would have to be extraordinary in many ways to be up to the challenge of what amounts to a global revolution.
Also, our hero would need to demonstrate one particular form of heroism that is not only greatly neglected, it is most often not considered heroic at all-the social doctrine of heroic charity.
The common view is that the things that apply in the workings of charity; such as self-sacrifice, loving the unlovable, aiding the needy, and fighting for those who cannot fend for themselves is unprofitable, and unappreciated. However, this is the view of a culture that is rapidly destroying itself and, therefore, a view that is well worth questioning.
The Taraman master walks this path of heroic charity; which is best described as the active and unwavering mercy toward those who seek no harm, coupled with a relentless resistance to those whose hearts are filled with malice and who are quick to leap into mischief. His joy is found in doing the greatest good, while his peace he obtains by doing no harm.
In this book, I will demonstrate the sources and background for this social philosophy by presenting a unique rendering of the Tao Te Ching, the book upon which Taoist philosophy is founded. Then I will compare it to of the Manual of Epictetus, a gem of Stoic literature.
In this way I hope to show that the teachings of both the Oriental East and the Occidental west; while differing vastly in their methods of presentation, are strikingly similar in their content as well as in their visions of the future of humanity.
That future, from where I stand, lies best in the hands of the hero-type described in this book, a type of hero that all of us could conceivably become!
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