silent thunder

while my body is part of something unimaginably vast it is comprised entirely of the indescribably tiny

The Druids had a definition of what a human being is that's always resonated. A man or woman is always three things simultaneously. They are who they think they are. They are who others think they are. And they are who they actually are... apart from the other two. edit to add: I don't know about any isms, or ists. But lately, the one truly impossible thing for me, is to ever be separate from source by even a hair's width, for any fraction of time. You have the anchor of life in the core of your fluid living beingness. Explore with abandon. Or sit in contentment.

I'd recommend Bagua Circle Walking or Aikido. But you'll find what resonates with you. I find Martial Arts to be a top notch pursuit that will bring confindence, health, flexibility, resilience and vitality Potent wisdom. Thanks for sharing.

If only I could stop my ears as readily as I can close my eyes, sound is responsible for so many of my extraneous thoughts, even when not meditating. I use headphones while listening to white noise, forest rain, or waterfalls to counteract and drown out all the 'psychological sounds' that are so unavoidable in city settings, or with family in the house. I find it an elegant and simple solution to prevent awareness of the kind of sounds that tend to start the storyteller telling stories for me, 'oh the neighbor's dog is telling us there is a buttefly invasion... the mailman has a cough, we should make healing broth...' Very effective. I use these three tracks extensively and have the forest rain with singing bowls track on a loop in the background of our home much of the time. Very soothing. It's on right now in fact. Cheers! May your sitting bring contentment and clarity and may you be released from suffering!

rational knowledge: "The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of atoms... But we cannot speak about the nature of atom using ordinary language." Werner Heisenberg regarding the inability of language to explain sub atomic observations. intuitional knowledge: "The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience which in its very nature transcends linguistics." D.T. Suzuki regarding the inability of language to explain direct experience. Language is modeling. Words are symbols representing conceptual intellectualizations of perceptions arising from senses. All models comprised of language and conceptual thinking, be they scientific, or metaphysic, are personally generated abstractions... models influenced in their structure by our associations made through the behavioral conditioning of social and familial influences. Words are pure mental conceptual notions that represent and try to convey a sense of our experiences of absolute reality. They are not reality, but like maps of a terrain, they are an aproximation for localized awareness, but possess not the ken to convey the actuality of reality, due to their inability to transcend and convey direct experience. The word water, though it conveys the concept of wetness, will never quench thirst, nor give rise to the experience of swimming. The menu is not the meal. What knowledge remains sound, when the perception that knowledge arises from, is a personally generated and interpreted aproximation of the partial information of absolute reality, arising in each individual through sensory input?

Not as i experience it lately. Story arises as soon as stimulus triggers the senses. Stimulus arises in senses. Story is interpreted from senses. Story is my personal experience of the stimulus. We see something. We intellectualize it. Our experience of what is seen is no longer what is seen, but our interpretation of it. Our intellectualization of it. The story we tell ourselves about what we just sensed. We don't perceive reality as it is, we interpret reality from the few partial signals that arise from our perceptual sensations. We get only a fraction of what is around us in absolute reality in sensations, and from this fractional input, we generate an interpretation of absolute reality. It is but a slice of what actually is, yet to us, it seems whole. When I look around me, though I see only a fractional percentage of what is there, there are no gaps in my vision. The picture seems whole, but is a fabrication, a projection of partial information into a wider picture, utterly populated with my own unconscious biases, expectations. Stimulus arises in senses. It is only a small part of absolute reality. Yet it is all of absolute reality I can interact with, so for me, it convincingly seems like all of reality. Sort of like how it was, I imagine when folks learned the earth encircles the Sun felt, when going outside and not feeling any sense of motion of the earth. It's counter intuitive to realize we project our version of reality from our Storyteller who interprets all stimuli and creates a story that I associate with absolute reality. Naive Realism: the mistaken notion that we perceive reality as it is. We interpret signals according to our behavioral/social and familial conditioning. This is why we find our breakfast foods normal and those of other cultures seem crazy. Same with hair styles, wardrobe, jewelry, language, songs, passtimes... Unless stripping away awareness to the core... we engage the storyteller, who tells us what the world is. No sharing needed. It's an entirely internal process.

that is pure awesome! get em mate!

Repeated, daily actions become unconscious habitual behaviors. These behaviors, sustained long enough become personality traits. Any action done long enough, the body and unconscious becomes better at the action than the mind that originally directed it. Think martial arts movements, or bicycle riding skills to exemplify the veracity of this. Eventually actions repeated enough times become hardwired so to speak and operate unconsciously and automatically when triggered by stimuli. My suspicion lately is that when we become consciously aware of feeling stuck in a rut, our localized awareness is saying to us... 'hey, we're out of the loop. I'm not directing much any more.' Life is happening to me, I'm not engaging. And it seems very true from my experience. I'll paraphrase Dr Joe Dispenza... neuro surgeon (who has studied this deeply and utilized it in his own life when he suffered a horrific injury in a motorcycle accident). If you get out of bed on the same side every day. Turn off the alarm clock with the same finger, go to the toilet, make coffee, drive to work the same route, perform the same tasks at work, among the same people... these will trigger the same responses as yesterday with only very fractional, occasional differences. "oh look, bob brought donuts today..." Performing same actions, prompts same thinking and same emotions from same triggers... how can we expect our experience of life to change? Where in that process is there space for new actions to arise that prompt new emotional engagement where new thought and experience may occur? Our mind is filled daily with mostly the same thoughts as yesterday. These thoughts prompt similar emotional responses which reinforce similar reaction and thinking. When our environments are also usually all the same... we experience routine. Neurons that fire together, wire together. The science on this seems very reliable. This is the basis of the sub conscious mind of the body taking over actions from the conscious mind. Once the neurons fire enough times together, the process forms a highway of signals that bypasses conscious direction and actions become personality traits that happen automatically. Not unlike a circuit board that regulates and automates multiple, repeated, robotic factory processes. Now that I've preached all that, I have to contradict myself with this little gem that has followed me the last thirty years or so: I love my routine... until I get bored. Then I crave excitement... until I get overwhelmed. Then I long for routine again. and here's one of the few curses I've ever cast... I find it to be the most intense. May you live in interesting times... I learned it from a Chinese source, but figure it's universally human. If interested, here's a 17 minute interview with Dr Dispenza regarding this process of automation of behavioral neural personality traits and how to reprogram them. Top notch stuff in my experience. Turns out, interrupting the auto process, is really as simple as meditating. Quieting the body and the mind for a time opens up space. Within this space there arises potential for new insight, which can prompt new action which will bring about different emotional states and new neural pathways. As for mind elasticity, learning an entirely new skill will create new neural pathways and change the structure of brain and mind. I picked up an acoustic guitar a few years ago and began teaching myself... now I can fly and shoot green lightning out my bum. It can happen for you tooooooooooo!

Incidents seem like events, which seem like... a mental concept, a bit of a story, with a beginning middle and end that are utterly arbitrarily assigned by the storyteller and thus, not a reflection of reality, but a reflection of the storyteller's interpretated projection of its impression of reality. From the perspective of what is.. what transpires and co-arising shift... not for me, there are no longer accidents, incidents, or events. There are the co-arising stimuli that I respond to... my response, is my personal reality, but it's mostly story. No real substance. It's all one interwoven fluid unfolding. Any demarcations I perceive are generated by the storyteller and inherently unreal. eta: Guess i just admitted that my reality, is not reality... again. I wonder how i can tell that? hmm... paradox for breakfast again!!... table of one??

https://www.anglotopia.net/anglophilia/top-10-classic-british-motorcycles/ mmmm....

I know you don't like newer bikes... and I'm all about classics and cruisers too... but a few of these are just... ww!

What are you waiting for? Life ain't all about need mate. Your situation sounds ideal for a pleasure bike. My first bike was a Honda 250. In Minnesota. Good starter bike, tough location though. Short season for riding unless you liked being chilly and wet. Which of course, this viking loved, my gal... not so much... but she did it. We sold all our vehicles when we moved to Brooklyn, but upon arriving in Cali, my first purchase was a bike. For four years, she was my only transport in LA. Hardly ever rains, and even when it does... pfft jacket... rode all year round... i miss it. Sold it when my gal got pregnant and cell phones got popular, switched to a Jeep. LA traffic was dumb enough before the phones. I wanted to play with my son, not haunt him, or have him help me into my chair... lol. Plan is to replace it when he's off to college and we retire fully to the country up north away from the city, which is just a few years off now. Just too crazy riding in the city for me. Some days I really miss it... I can taste the memory of those rides along Mulholland Drive and the PV/Portuguese bend area. Cuz when the wild flowers are really kicking, you can taste it. My ride was a shaft drive cruiser, liquid cooled Suzuki Intruder 1400, very slightly chopped. So smooth, I could spend all day on her and not feel it. On the long open straights of the 5 down near San Diego, I'd open it up. Topped out around 135mph. No more of that of course, but some fine memories. What you waitin for mate?

"Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?" -- D.T. Suzuki "Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water." -- D.T. Suzuki "The basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of our being, and to do this in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external or superadded. Therefore, anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen. Absolute faith is placed in a man's own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within." -- D.T. Suzuki indeed... what greater authority exists but awareness?

There have been times in my thirty year marriage when I have experienced the same. Deep trauma requires time to process. Suicidal tendencies on occasion have kept me close to home. Sometimes it was me, other times her. Though I have not perceived these times as chains binding me from finding and experiencing truth. They were inroads to uncovering new depth of life right where I am in that moment. To be able to be a healing presence for one I love... what is a higher calling? Is there more meaning in a monestary? Or a job? Or meditating? For me, connection is life's meaning. Twenty years ago it was me, relying on her to stay close and be my hope. Over the last seven years, she has unveiled deep trauma and experienced a total spiritual collapse. I have experienced an unfolding of awareness in my holding space for her and adding my effort to providing a place conducive to healing in our home. Things of this nature are cyclical. Working with it is like peeling an onion. Many layers, seem the same, induce some pain and tears. Remind her in the darkest times, the only constant is change. Life is change. It cannot remain the same. The layers are not the same. this realization arose spontaneously in one of my own suicidal moments: "why make a permanent decision, based on a temporary emotion, or way of seeing the world?" Life skill is developed over the course of a life... let it. It may seem like it's the same pain, but it's another layer. and eventually when peeling to the center of our pain. we found the same thing in both our pain and the onion... nothing was there... aside from mis-identification perhaps with memory and response to stimuli I can whole heartedly endorse that this does not inhibit a full life. We have traveled the globe, performed shakespeare, checkov and ibsen in front of tens of thousands, moved across the continent multiple times, brought a loving son into the world. And in my not abandoning my love for her for convenience or something shiny on the horizon... I have uncovered a shine in my own raw presence of which I was previously unaware. You sound connected and present. Those are rare qualities in my experience. Doubt is a friend I've found. I find it shifts awareness out of complacency into presence. Presence is the one thing I think we can truly offer another. All else may be lost, stolen, broken... but presence... once shared. rings of the eternal to me.

It's intriguing... the occasional reveals of the utterly personally manufactured and projected function of perception. The internal projective nature of my 'external senses' is revealed vividly through... The sounds that arise within hearing, when hearing is restricted to this white noise on headphones. Or the full color open eye visions that arise after a time while sitting in pitch black with eyes open.

what determines value? what has most worth? seeking or sitting, striving or accepting? is effort greater than release? did the buddha sit to awaken? or sit while awake?

Many questions what is there to do? what must be accomplished? aside from you being you? improve the world for others? sounds wonderful. what improves the world for others? what improves it for everyone? who decides what is improvement? when is enough improving enough? do you require meaning for your life? if so, who outside of you can give this to you? or create it for you? who knows you more intimately than you? who are you? what are you? do you owe the universe for your body? are you indebted for your experience of awareness? sit. become still and quiet. when quiet you will hear life. then not only does the teacher appear... all of life is revealed as a teacher. every stone, insect, breeze and leaf. seek, or sit, truth is revealed. even untruth is worthy, as it reveals truth when revealed as untruth. find teachers in everything and realize the anchor of the source is in your very essence you grew out of this world, like a tree grows from soil a natural part of all of nature what are you inherently lacking that could be added to you from outside to make not lacking? who aside from you can know what this may be? stranger on internet? author of book? teacher of sitting in stillness, or breathing and moving? all questions I obsessed, played, rejected, ingested and released time and again as I've explored exactly the sentiments you shared in your opening statement. thanks for reminding me again of the worthiness of every aspect of existence and non-existence. i'm reminded of Shunryu Suzuki again. Everything is perfect, just as it is. And there is room for improvement.

So grateful for the conversation. Reflects many facets of my mind gem recently. that which is harsh... why is it harsh? what makes it so? is it harsh because it is actually harsh? objectively? is it harsh because my story about it tells me it is harsh? is it harsh because it is not how my story says it could be, or should be? is it harsh because it differs from the story i wish it was instead? what is harsh? ETA: sincere open questions... nothing serious... no hard answers implied or even sought... just chewing bones.

From my be ing... ? I appreciate that in english we call ourselves human beings, not human doings, or human havings... that seems significant to me. The life/decay contradiction is a palpable one. Part of my body is always decomposing, while others are still growing. Life energy is nourished by the decay of other life. life and decay are what comprise my being?

the rules reveal themselves as such: if there is a box, it's definitely part of the game. unless of course... otherwise revealed in the rules.

Phones are tools. Like a knife, or a pencil. I am conversing with a dear friend daily/regularly, trying to aid him in fielding his emotions and thoughts as he transitions through a painful divorce. The stakes of this conversation, taking place for about a year now, has evolved our friendship from one of workmates who had a lot in common... to one of deep abiding kinship. Texting is the majority of our communication. We work freelance and often work together, but also go for months without seeing one another. A verbal conversation is now always an option. We talk when we can, but much of this conversation has played out through texts. Due to the nature of the topic, it's not always possible to talk without affecting others in the home environment, texting is a wonderful option. Allows as well, for the formation of thoughts intact, without interruptibility. I suspect thinking shifts with the mode of communication. Mind operates differently in writing than speaking for me. Tao is present in all things, yet indistinguishable. Meaning is what it is in my mind, provided by the storyteller. The storyteller defines what means what according to the story created from the stimulus. I have developed cherished friendships all across the globe due to this dao bums interface, so like my phone, but larger. How i use a tool seems to determine its nature. This seems exemplified at how often many other objects are transformed into hammers when a hammer is needed. Does the knife cut? Does the pencil draw? without the hand applying pressure directed by Mind? What cuts? Knife? Mind? Hand? Knife never cuts itself it seems. Pencil can't draw itself. from where does meaning arise? what is the source of the story we live?

not things but happenings? be com ings? th ing happen ing becom ing ing. My ancestors had a symbol for ing. They named it 'inguz'. It symbolizes the force flowing through our bodies and minds, driving us to connect through our personal innate pleasure of being alive and bring the next generation to manifestation. be to exist come movement relational/subjectivity ing a process an unfolding presence un fold ing perhaps we are ings, inging ings...

I pictured it like a series of buckets, tiered over one another. Cultivate to acquire energy to fill them up, overflow them, store, horde and maintain energy... that sort of thing. Feel vital? Buckets are full. Simple. Feel shitty? Buckets empty. Simple. Looking back I see the wholly unsustainable tension inherent in that model. A fear based, materialistic notion of gaining, hording, losing energies, having energy stolen or leaked, worry, constant need to oversee and remain watchful. lol... the high energy and certainty of youth. Seeing and relating to the energy body as another material body (same shape even), just more ephemeral than the one typing these symbols now. This model crumbled painfully, gratefully and spectacularly under its own tension. Then the buckets were replaced with ideas of tubes. Tubes that could constrict, or expand to account for vitality or weakness... tubes that still kind of flowed into buckets. More of same really, but a new awareness in the relation to the constriction/expansion that replaced the notion of empty and full buckets. Flow constricted, feel shitty. Flow expanded, feel amazing. I'd found a similar tune sung in another octave. Still much tension in the tubes, obligations to cleanse them, worry over potential sources of constriction that then become sources of... constriction. More crumbling. Pain and relief simultaneously. As uncertainty has expanded, stress has diminished. Certainty breeds tension in me it seems apparent now. Then there were streams and rivers, that led into eddies and pools. Tubes and buckets gone. The flow of the streams converging into rivers naturally. Energy flows as it flows, not as directed. Allowed to be and go without forcing, seeking or obsessively directing. Flowing through banks of... hmm what are the banks made of? what is the river made of? Fuck... constriction. sneaky devil... Lately it's light. Light that flows like warm oil, or cascades like stars made of sound. Varying colors of light flowing directionally as rivers and directionlessly as isness, depending it seems on awareness and identification with sensation. Patterns of light flowing into, diverging. Light of myriad variety as tangible as they are ephemeral. Gold light, white light, lavenders and blues lately. Swimming in light. Unfolding as light. Made of light, singing out light in thoughts and words and deeds... deeds and movements generating light. verbs verbing verbs...

relishing the heat in the paradox hot tub! i find i don't mind... that it's actually soup! who's the main ingredient? when i eat of the world, it becomes me? so the land is now me, from the fruit of the tree? is it cannabalism if i'm consuming me? ****************** relishing the heat in the paradox hot tub i find i don't mind i find i don't mind that it's actually soup comprised of just me for all that i eat transforms into me you see not i into it yet are we not we?