silent thunder

What about white light manifesting when no one's body passes on? Extreme white light manifestations with multiple witnesses?

Mu

this is a very strong message and lesson. I'm a hearty plus one to Earl's lesson here. I forge my own chains. When they are woven of desires for food, sexual release, cars, clothes, admiration of others... they are said to be chains of lead. These chains are coarse, ugly and unpleasant. When instead chains are woven of desires for siddhis, healing abilities, astral travel, psychic insight, third eye visions and the consort and admiration of higher dimensional beings... they are pretty, smooth and pleasant chains of gold. But a chain is a chain... whomever places it upon our mind and heart space... they are limitations to potential. Cutting off vast swathes of our innate power. In short, your very act of seeking, of adoration of a mental object, be it a pretty one, or a mundane one, is the very act, forging your chains of whatever type and keeping you from experiencing the great freedom of life, now, in this moment as a flowing aspect of the unity of all life. Chains of lead, or chains of gold. You are binding your potential self through your addictive and obsessive mental process. It doesn't really matter what you worship, it will occupy your time until your time is up. To answer your question @Heartbreak in my opinion there's nothing wrong with choosing siddhis over materialism. Nothing at all. Either one, will fill up your lifetime with pursuits, achievements, results (of some kind), and ramifications (of some kind). Will they lead you to what you are holding in your mind in this moment as your goal? who can know? For many years, I worshipped my judgement of things. Things I considered to be wrong were met with fierce anger and rage... justified because it was 'wrong'... I allowed myself to be utterly possessed by this obsessive notion. The more I fed it, the more I found myself noticing similar aspects of life, which created more avenues for me to express my rage at the wrongness I was finding... everywhere. Eventually, through shear exhaustion, I saw that I was not solving the worlds problems, or mine, through my justified worship of being upset at what I found ugly, wrong and ill in the world. All I was doing was filling my mind and heart, with anger, which then caused me to become the very aspect of life that I was seeking to lash out against. My friends would ask "why are you so pissed?" Instead of hanging out and enjoying the present moment with loved ones, I was obsessing over what wasn't right, what needed fixing and how I would go about fixing it, or even worse, lecturing and mentally obsessing over what I thought others should be doing to fix it. Eventually exhaustion won out and my inertia for this died a loving whimpering death. I realized that the words of buddha whether he was real or not, rang true for me. "be careful what you allow yourself to think (worship). This becomes your reality." I have only so much energy in any one given day. I can use it to focus on any aspect of reality. But whatever I focus on... that will be my experience of reality that day. I can spend it all on rage and what is wrong, I can spend it on loving and nurturing... I can spend it on going within and isolating from the world, I can spend it on reaching out and expanding my sense of self through connection. Which is best? pfft. who can tell you? It's for you to discover your authentic path and what fulfills you. What you want to focus on... totally up to you. Nothing wrong with seeking siddhis, or sex, or a great career, or cars. But in my experience... seeking a thing, was not the path to it. Seeking in my experience was the final obstacle in my way of manifesting and experiencing the reality... which is... it's all here already. My process has become one of release acknowledgement and effortless embodiment of awareness. but that's just me. I hear the pain in your words friend, and in your name @Heartbreak. For whatever you want to find in life, I would recommend you start a practice daily that calms you and relaxes you. For without these, whatever you seek, opportunities to follow it will be harder to notice and engage, when your mind and reality are full of seeking thoughts, instead of awareness of where and how you are being right now. I wish you peace and healing mate. I've been in the long dark several times in this life and share much empathy for the pain of it. It is utterly hell.

holding space for you regularly friend. much much love!

That iconic pic, taken by Voyager 1 will be 30 years old tomorrow. ha... timing.

it's nothing without the sound...

I wouldn't mind a conversation about the history and any pertinent experiences folks may have had with humans influencing weather. We seed clouds for rain, using science, which is based in alchemy. Druids were notorious weather influencers, as were the Nordic Wind Talkers, coveted on open ocean voyages. Indigenous cultures have been mentally and spiritually tuning into natural rhythms for eons. How much we influence it? No idea, but it's certainly not a threat to talk about it... is it? Why all the vitriol for this guy wanting to talk about weather magick? Perhaps we let folks have a conversation?

in a world of uncertainty... the certainty of human's ability to influence weather is pretty safe, at least with me.

Any longer, there is no meaningful distinguishing to me, between the path and the pathmaker. It is all 'of a thing'... and that thing, is no thing. There are no nouns... only flowing verbs, unfolding in each other's influence. We are all of us... of a thing... which is not a thing, but a process. Fluid, unfoldingness of co-arising resonances. Emptiness Dancing.

Hey Bud! I can't conceive of words that would be capable of conveying even a smidgen of global awareness... That lies beyond the ken of language and mind both, in my experience. Sorta like Dao can't be spoken of... but the path of it may be experiencable.

wow... just wow! Incredible how the inertia of water, tends to dwarf all other phenomenon! It's always hard to watch the torrential rains come in after fires. Whole sale purging of topsoil... What reminder of how small we are compared to the forces of our planet. And our planet, which itself, is such tiny insignificant speck... A moist speck, orbiting a point of light, in a sea of lights. Stay safe out there speck... you are a loved speck and we want you to keep specking for a good long while brother!

Local awareness far prefers living in questions unanswerable, than to steeping any longer in certainties. and yes... in this at least... I'm quite certain

one more and I'll stop spamming... even though not from a 'taoist'... it resonates harmonically and deeply for me “If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind's clothing with more sooty knowledge. No, I have something else in mind. Today I hold a flame in my left hand and a sword in my right. There will be no damage control today. For God is in a mood to plunder your riches and fling you nakedly into such breathtaking poverty that all that will be left of you will be a tendency to shine. So don't just sit around this flame choking on your mind. For this is no campfire song to mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with. Jump now into the space between thoughts and exit this dream before I burn the damn place down.” ~ Adyashanti

I deeply appreciate his authenticity and his utter disregard for softening his take on truths as he experiences them.

I'm also re-minded of this quote, shared by John Blofeld, regarding his take on what was revealed to him in his meeting with revered Taoist Sage Tseng Lao-weng. I recall the first time i read Sage Tseng's words, @rene shared it here on the Bums. It struck me like a bolt of lightning on a clear day... The sense of the words settling in awareness was akin to stumbling upon a previously unknown meadow in the valley of my innermost self and finding, that although I'd never been there before, it was my original home... utterly familiar and reflective of the most core aspects of my path and its subsequent affect on process, sense of self, reality... all of it.

Re-minded of something Adyashanti said that utterly describes the intensity of my own awakening. “Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.” ― Adyashanti

Great timely reminder for me, this thread. Of the abiding potency of release and the undeniable generative force of cultivated doubt. The center is indeed no where and everywhere... what needs to be worshipped above any other? This has perhaps most strikingly and unexpectedly manifested in my mind, with the startling dissolution of vast swathes of moral conceptual thinking that I long held concrete and unshakable landscapes of 'what is, must be and should be', into.. vaporous projectionism.

Grateful for the discussion. In life all about me, I find a similar dynamic playing out to the one Alchemystical is describing as his experience of the current atmosphere of the Bums. As Earl Grey describes, the intensity here and now is directly related to the recent figurative tearing the scab off and revealing of a wound that has remained rather hidden and unhealed for some time. Infected even. This reaction is natural and will subside. I was, though aware of some deeply disturbing energetics over the last three years in particular, unaware of what was occuring, so much of this while unsurprising, has personally been very startling. though I'm grateful... for when we don't know we're sick, we don't know to cultivate healing. This dynamic has arisen before and will settle itself, in spite of the rancor, immaturity and rash reflexivism, there is underlying it, deep love, abiding admiration and remarkable hope. The very vehemence is fueled by the surge of relief that in fact there may come resolution and balance is beginning to shift. From my perspective, what Alchemystical describes does not seem to be a manifestation of The Dao Bums in particular, so much as it seems that Dao Bums is symptomatic of what is running through culture as a whole. The Old Model is breaking down. The new generations are rejecting it utterly and the shift is as deep as i've experienced in 50 years... the inertia is seemingly insurmountable at this time... which is good I say... shift arises from Dao... like a bellows. Some things can't be parried, or defended... but like the tide shifting, we may pilot along the currents. This whole event here at the Bums, timed with sean's hands off approach with no modding at all, allows energies to no longer be stifled and directed, but to play out to their natural balance. I experience it as a call to police my own self. Watch with more care, what I choose to read, ruminate and digest in mind. As there is much about that is toxic, this is not wrong or bad, it's just how it is... and it's on me to wade into the bog, or skirt it. Taoism has always resonated for me due to its reliance upon individual interacting with all that arises in nature. It is, I find, as always... up to each of us, how and to what extent we participate in the co-arising conditions. Listening with the intent, not to accept, or reject whatever arises... but listening spherically, with full presence... without often any need to respond (in spite of this rather verbose expulsion lol)... But listening with presence, from an intent to connect and share space. But gosh, it's intense... The cognitive dissonance. Increased reflexivity. Intensifying and entrenching of held perspectives. Decreased spherical awareness, particularly in listening. Projection of individual agendas onto group dynamics. Taking the universe personally. Inability to read words, or engage a concept without instantly needing to either accept/promote, or disagree/reject it. It's been a potent reminder that my experience of awareness is clearly not what reality is... it is my small facet of the gem... and time and again, the most direct method I've experienced for being able to have a healing effect on the world about me, is to work on that within my own process... and heal that.

I appreciate the current wei wu wei and hands off approach. It seems a natural, medicinal response to former energetic inertia. Seeing it as a "Handle a large nation as you would cook a small fish... don't overdo it." kind of thing sean will return and admit new members and settle energetics as he is compelled to, eventually... or not. Until he returns, or doesn't, we're walking a path in the forest that will remain a path by our presence. The Path and the Pathmaker are one process. We make the Path in our passing and presence.

same here...

Hadn't even considered that aspect of it. Nice one.

omg... you've killed me. lmao!@thankyou!