silent thunder

Perception perceives perception, not reality. ~ me to my son last week.

Life Awareness that there seems to be awareness, instead of nothing...

Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Ragnar: What do you see? Bjorn: Power, the power of a king. Ragnar: Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best. I never asked for power. excerpt from a scene in Vikings on History Channel

DreamBliss my friend... in my experience anyone with curiosity is far from foolish. To me, curiosity is a cornerstone sign of intelligence. Belief is the death of intellect, exploration and discovery. Dogma is belief so buried in cultural bias, it has risen beyond questioning, or even considering alternatives. Fools to me are those who stomp about in absolute certainty. All of the wise who've touched my life, were riddled with doubt. A wise general (forget who) said... I always prepare until I'm certain I'm ready. And then I start over from the beginning... for every time I have been absolutely certain... this is when I miss something, and good men die needlessly. For once a man is certain he becomes complacent, ceases looking, paying attention and awareness closes down. This is the foundation of disaster. What harm is there in questioning dogma and cultural belief, or anything for that matter? Unless you, or others are afraid of finding out something new. I don't even care much for the answers of life any more... They don't tend to last long anyway. Look at medical research over the last 1,000 years. Look at Physics over the last 120 years. Each decade brings new certainty that relegates all previous certainties irrelevant. When will the endless addiction to certainty... ah never mind. I find it's the questions that resonate with vitality and life. Answers are the birth ground of certainty and certainty, is to me, anathema. Ask on mate, ask it all! And chew those bones to the center and embrace all of life.

It's deeply intriguing... that no matter how many apples I eat... they all transform into human within this body. I never become apple. And yet, though I'm human through and through and all that I consume transforms into human, no matter if it is vegetable animal or insect... no where in this body do i find a human element. Within this body are all the same elements as in the stars, moons, planets, nebulas... and yet within this body, they form human and in the fields they form wheat and gophers and spiders... Morphic Fields might interest you as a topic manitou. The underlying field of energy, the frequency so to speak that determines how species grow is the idea behind it. Fascinating stuff... mostly unanswerable to me... explorable but not readily answerable... and I find I prefer it that way. Answers are rigid, fixed and ultimately boring things these days. Closed things that deaden curiosity. Living, open ended questions are fluid, vital flowing interesting explorative processes that spawn creativity and curiosity. Questions are as life, whereas answers... pfft. They are small and lack gravity for me. live the questions and to hell with the answers... i'll follow my curiosity past every answer clothed in small human ideas and words. if I have one answer, it is silence and in this silence i have been shaken by a thunder altered which only birthed another world of questions.

i seem to know only one thing of relative certainty... awareness is

From what vantage point can real reality can be observed... we observe from our own reality tunnel. Each reality tunnel the result of one's own perceptual interpretations and as such, inherently all equally valid and invalid. Perhaps why facts so seldom seem to have an influence on differing reality tunnels in matters of religion, politics and taste in music, or art, child-rearing... anything not adhering to one's own tunnel will be rejected, ignored or assaulted outright, while all notions supporting one's tunnel will be held up, worshiped and praised as the 'banner of truth'. Banner of Naive Realism more like it. "The idea of reality as a singular noun has no meaning for me any longer... reality is always plural and mutable." ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Boscovich. The 18th century Polymath. What an epic genius this man was... Boscovich was one of Nikola Tesla's main inspirations and sources... in this staged picture, Tesla pays homage to Boscovich, he points to his mind with his left hand while reading from A Theory of Natural Philosophy, published by B. in 1763. Such density, such insight in this book. The breadth of the mind of this man... Truly and epicly ahead of his time. Boscovich shines like a comet.

I'm intrigued by the interview with the Navy team who during a medical emergency in 1995 decided to save a fellow seaman's life by shortening their trip by a couple hours to retrieve him by flying through the no fly zone. While passing through the zone they observed a massive cave opening. I wonder what's in there. Sideways... it seems odd that such a remote, undeveloped, unpopulated area of wilderness would be deemed no fly and sensitive in the first place.

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As Above, So Below; As Within... Without. Indra's Net.

memory and imagination, long touted as the greatest attributes of human ingenuity, also seem to be the greatest source of accute suffering. the vast majority of my own suffering is mind based, and has been throughout my life... nearly all my suffering is self generated, inflicted and maintained through memory recall and imagination. my wife suffers now through memory from events that transpired 45 years ago. the trauma is no longer occuring, yet through memory, it is replayed and magnified intensely in the now. suffering it seems to be a function of dirty citta...mis-association with vivid memory and great imagination. if one is alive it seems unavoidable that there will be discomforts and even pain on occasion... this does not mean one must or will suffer. suffering it seems, is inflicted by me, I take a discomfort or a pain reject it in mind and then magnify it by many orders of magnitude through the myopic process of memory recall and imaginings. suffering is voluntary, it is a self inflicted crisis of perception. how to end this? cleanse citta

or a garden always bearing fruit.

I am no longer possessed of any notion of what could change the world more effectively than healing my own small awareness. Any presumptions that I can know what is best, or know what others should do, or should not do, or need in order to awaken, has dissolved.

For me, when I consider that in the entire history of human life to this point, processed foods, particularly factory refined sugar is a very recent addition to our daily diet, it brings me pause. My body which is a direct adaptation and expression of nature, still seems to be adjusting to the intense effects of refined, processed sugar and how to assimilate it when consumed in even small quantities. Our pancreas has a new work load in its history regarding insulin production and the breakdown of processed sugar in the bloodstream in the quantities found in American foods. Processed foods are a new source of food in terms of how our bodies operate in nature, and it seems to me; our bodies have not yet developed strong assimilation pathways for it, particularly in the quantities it is present in our food, if we do not take great care in looking at what is present in the food we consume. It was staggering to me, when I began really looking, just how many sources of refined sugar are present in seemingly non-sweet foods. Our bodies are decaying every day. Decay in the gut is what fuels the process of life that i use now to type and think here and to replace the 20 million blood cells created each night while I sleep, and the skin cells being repaired where I banged my knee. Those cells are replaced solely with the food I consume. I remember trying to impress upon my toddler son the importance of what we choose to eat. I built a man out of legos and handed it to him. As I explained how we eat food each day to replace the pieces of us that decay, I would take a piece off of the lego man and hand it to back to him, and then offer him a lego piece of a different color to replace it with. Eventually the lego man looked the same shape but was made entirely of different legos. As we talked, eventually instead of offering him a lego to replace a missing piece with, I offered him a cheeto and told him to repair the lego man with this... He stared at me ... appropriately and said "that won't work dad"... "this is your body's response when you give it processed foods instead of natural foods." I replied. Your body can only replenish itself from what you eat. Your body is comprised entirely of what you put into it. Give yourself good legos. To this day from time to time, while grocery shopping with me, as we walk along the end caps he will occasionally look down an aisle and say, 'all bright colors and boxes, no real food down that aisle."

Buddhism is most famous today for everything it never taught... Religion is secularized metaphysics. Neutered metaphysics. Lacking logic and not touching the absolute. It carries (to me) the distinctly unpleasant scent of Naive Realism: the Cult of Familiarity which is ruled through use of 'Truth by Consensus'. Repeat something often enough and folks will begin to accept it as true. Look at modern advertising and political campaigning to see this as it functions so readily in our life today. The unmoving absolute. The Transcendent. Brahmayana. Citta. Anatta. Through his sharings of his translations, I perceive now why my exploration of nearly all Modern Buddhist philosophy to this point has lacked gravity and substance for me and never bore fruit; as to me it's a sharing of dead language dead concepts, not dead in terms of not being spoken or understandable, but dead in terms of not engaging in a viable, functional exploration of absolute reality, devoid of a living vital exploration of metaphysics. It rings of childlike unquestioned acceptance of beliefs of familiarity instead of active exploration of what is. A childlike story time... versus the core teachings of Gotama's realizations revealed in Ken's translations of the Pali which dissolve ignorance like lightning dissolves fog and in relentless clarity, reveals the empty nature of modern buddhist philosophy as little more than monastically controlled, moralistic-humanistic-atomistic materialism, a neutured system of beliefs, devoid of metaphysics or the functional capability of exploration of the truths revealed by Gotama and in its current systemic inertia, is seemingly uninterested in the seeking or experience of truth of the absolute of what is, but is rather interested mainly in the promulgation, propping up and regurgitation of the familiar mistranslations that are considered true only by consensus and the familiarity of exposure, not in function on the level of the attainment of Tathagata. This truth by consensus, denies and attacks any questioning of the status quo, and its lacking in logic or any grounding in the experiential teachings of the original Pali is propped up not by experiential truth, but by the cult of familiarity; which now explains why my previous exposure to it, always left me flat, no gravity present... there is soil present, but the seeds from this farm are non-viable and will not take root. Truth by consensus is to me akin to intellectual violence. The original Pali shares transcendence not moralism. Brahmayana, not the lack of soul! No acting good. Trascendence of the psycho-physical. Soul is charioteer. Deeply grateful that Ken unapologetically eviscerates beliefs and atomism/materialism, whether he encounters it in the mistranslated Pali, or the atomism now worshipped unquestioningly (if one wants to attain their PhD) in Quantum Physics, which is modern science's attempt to explore metaphysics. His discoveries in these ancient texts is nothing short of paradigm shifting. Brahmayana. Citta. Anatta. Wow... just wow. The ramifications of this process are beyond words at present. But deep gratitude and a palpable sense of revelation of essential nature saturates awareness.

This taste of the core Pali along with some Soto Zen encounters I've experienced... Like large stones dropped in the pond of my mind. Deep resonant impact.

Sir! Yes Sir!

Niether good deeds, nor evil will bring liberation. Chains of gold or chains of iron, both hold captive. Agnostic Humanism, Atheistic Morality Driven Philosophy is all the stuff of the builder. Nothing wrong with it, but not reality. Mind stuff. Imaginings, stories... the builder's blocks of faith driving the engine of samsara. cleanse citta. this is it. This simple declaration of Pali is so centrally resonant with my ever simplifying natural path over the last decade of 'radical release'. Release absolutely everything and what remains is... Release all mental constructions, falsely held up, maintained, mentally constructed and projected... release all and what remains is... what is. cleanse citta make extinct the builder, make the imaginations extinct. citta It's closely related to what you're mentioning @Fa Xin on intervening in another's life to 'set them straight', 'help them out', or 'fix them'... which lately have been revealed in my life as actions based on mental constructs in the dust covering citta. My youthful instincts involved a staggering amount of assumption; that my mental constructions, the interpretations of my perceptions and my subsequent reactions to them were the correct ones, were right... and that because of this assumption then followed myriad others in which I assume to somehow know what another needs to awaken and it is somehow my obligation or duty... I must, or should, (as if I could) somehow act on another's path, to fix it, or make awakening happen for them. In this are so many false assumptions from my experience now, it's staggering that I ever held such notions so firmly. Now 50 years into my particular experience of awareness... I can no longer fathom that I can know with my wrinkle of mind constructions spun of the illusion dust overlying absolute reality, just what is possibly required in another being's path to awaken. I now experience there is no changing of other... only cleansing of citta. Other and self are notions of the mental constructs... the smoke castles of the builder. Cleanse Citta... know absolute reality. Know Self. Brahman. Banish the builder.

"The children of tomorrow, wear their dreams until they are born." ~ My Father thought/said this to me as I was waking from meeting him in a lucid dream this morning. I found him sitting in a grand reading room near a fireplace. He stood and turned to me, dressed in a marroon pull over shirt with gold filigree. We compared reading glasses and he shared that phrase as the dream was fading, while my body was sleeping but mind was awake and eyes not yet open. I lay there for a time before moving into my day. After settling in with my coffee to read and write like I do each morning, my wife walked in from the kitchen and glanced at the calender and says: "It's your Father's birthday today." Skol Father!

Wow... lifeforce. Dropping Pearls! Such resonance... thank you! The ripples of this I experience as founationally permeative.