silent thunder

McMurdo Valley reminds me of the deep need I feel to experience the vibrations of Australia in person some time. With a lengthy stop in NZ on the way home...

Student: Teach me! Teacher: I have nothing to offer Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

yea... there's a definite creepy factor to this notion... I suspect this old sense is one reason I was eventually compelled to cease watching the news regularly... it was all getting far too personal and flavor filled.

i often feel like a goofy loose tangent tendencied oscillation of myriad counter acting forces... more akin to some grinning guy mumbling to himself on the streetcorner, than some wise man.

I recall my father once demonstrating on a saturday morning while waiting for breakfast, the equations that delineated the likelihood that in any given intake of breath we inhale an atom exhaled by Alexander the Great with his dying breath. This equation accounted for a given the number of atoms inhaled in an average human and then accounted for the eventual dispersion over time of said atoms of an exhale through air currents over a set period of time, until an even distribution over time is likely. For me it caused a reaction somewhat other than the one he intended. My Father was as staunch a Materialist as I have encountered, save maybe for Marblehead. In me, it caused me to immediately feel a deep unified kinship with all things that breath and instilled in my consicous awareness a raw, palpable knowingness, a beingness that we are all breathing each other's breath. We are one fluid process, even though my body is actually a patterned collective of trillions of individual life cells, working in tribal units. We are one flowing unity. Patterns within patterns. Breath is the ultimate recycling and it occurs without any training, effort or skill. How lovingly, all encompassingly, bouyantly, effortlessly this shines with clarity.

Robert Anton Wilson is one of my most treasured gurus and a seemingly endless source of wokeness! How I love that man's verbal brain droppings... like pure gold bliss, even when it's painful.

My Uncle is a retired detective. Homicide/burglary, Los Angeles. He's also one of the most optimistic people I've ever known. It seems a paradox to me. I've got a variety of career military officers and police in my family, from beat cops to CIA operatives. I asked him once out of a pressing need to understand, how he could remain so optimistic, while throughout his career of marines and homicide investigations, he was daily dealing with the 3% of the population that causes 90% of the trouble. His response resonates to this day regarding polarizing thought, self identification and how what we allow ourselves to think becomes our perception of reality, it tempers how we view reality. It was as surprising to me as it was impacting. While a rookie, my Uncle had a veteran pull him aside and offered him potent advice that my uncle absorbed and used to seemingly great benefit. His advice was simple: "keep your civlian friends", 'don't get lost behind the blue curtain'. "keep your civilian friends. Foster civilian friendships. It will remind you that they're not all perps." he said. "Too often in the force, and you'll see this for yourself, too often, we come to start identifying as police officers first and human second. We start hanging out only with other cops and soon with enough exposure to perps, all civilians become 'potential perps'. This is when you get lost, lose your perspective that most of the trouble is caused by a very small fraction of the overall population." I strive to keep a wide variety of friends and to keep diaologue open to those who share my perspective and don't... Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Antonin Scalia were life long friends, taking family trips together and hanging out barbequing... all the while passionately viewing the world from seemingly opposing viewpoints. Much to be gleaned from this, methinks...

this!

No teaching could be more direct than just to sit down. ~Shunryu Suzuki His quotes seem rather everpresent all about me lately. Resonance and sympathetic vibration i suspect.

It's been an oddly familiar and recurring revelation to me in the last decade, as I've come to explore various other lineages and paths, incorporate a variety of teachings and experiences, that my default process seems to most closely mirror zazen and the sudden enlightenment school. Its tenets as described in the sources I've encountered describe processes that seem to be a steady undercurrent of my natural approach to life and looking back I perceive it to underly all the other paths I have sought out or fallen into naturally; without ever seeking it out, or for much of my life, even knowing it was a path of study shared by millions with a long history it seems my default..

nice, this gives rise to interesting questions. at what level does polarization occur? when/where does it begin and cease? who determines right and wrong? does a polarity represent two separate 'things'? or is this a perception dependent interpretation of the expressions of one unified fluid process? intriguing how differently a sentence, story, painting, environment, concept may be perceived and interpreted. what is the truth of an elephant? Each of these gentlemen could be very certain of their perspective. when I perceive objects with my eyes... is this the truth? certainty seems deeply entwined/necessary in polarizing mind. any more, my eyes may see an elephant, but my experience of it... the ovearching sense of it is more encompassing and less defined...

Intriguing how we all see reflections of conversations differently. Where I perceive no arrogance in a reply, some seem to pivot upon it. When I look in the river's waters, what is it I see? the River, or me?... or? It's challenging to offer words for processes whose ken lies beyond the scope of words to encompass. Awareness for me underlies all other processes, ego is no longer perceived as a thing, but a pull or push action. When pulled toward a desire, when scrambling in aversion from what seems dispicable... this is egoing. No ego object have I encountered, only a tendency toward or away usually linked by desire/fear. Awareness is. Raw. Baseline and ascending simultaneously... utterly permeative.

what bird is shreaking?! fools talk while sages listen! whose voice is that now? oh mine... ha@!

i really do love this place...

Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher The Mandala of Being by Richard Moss Martin Buber's Ontology by Robert E Wood and The Biology of Freedom by Krishna Chaitanya

Folks may enjoy this gentleman's take on Ed's work.

Very well said mate. Wholly agree and appreciate the expanded perspective.

The degree to which siddhi's manifest seems directly proportionate to the level of unity, love and compassion present in the flow of the individual in which they arise.

I'm rereading Fritjoff Capra's, The Tao of Physics and Robert Saltzman's, The Ten Thousand Things

I pursued Qi Gong initially for health. There was a time, for much of my 30's where I could not walk without a cane. There were times I could not walk at all. I longed to play with my young son. Unable to play the hard arts and Kung Fu I followed so passionately in youth, I returned to the soft aspects of the arts that before held no interest for me. On some level, I became aware that in this soft pursuit, was the potential for healing that Western Dr's could not offer with their carpentry mindset approach to the body and their pharmacological mindset. Curious that as my body healed (and it has now become whole again), my mind began to soften in manners I could never have anticipated. This led to a pull to sit in silence and abide in stillness. Ironic that when Qi Gong was originally pursued it was to be able to run and jump again, and it then led to finding a resounding joy in the stillness that before, was a prison to me. The stillness resonates now in all aspects of my life to much benefit. It resonates even in the midst of great motion, when my son and I run on the beach, play games or sit in comfortable silence with each other.

It's an Einaudi kind of morning, so this is on repeat. Not often is the southern california sky filled with big wonderful clouds, but this morning the sky looks like this sounds to me.

Well said Song of the Dao. There seems to be a threshold of wisdom that allows me to realize how much ignorance my mind is comprised of and prone to fostering, and this realization softens my approach to life. As a result, no longer maintaining mindless certainty that any given notion entering my mind is based on absolute truth is a treasure worth pursuing and cultivating and when I speak, it's then from a desire to share and explore connection, instead of alter others' minds or convince them of the one correct way. One of the manifestations of this softening, is in what I call spherical listening. Hearing not just the words spoken, but with my whole being, in full presence. In youth, I sometimes listened closely, but not to understand so much as to be able to respond potently to share my position which I considered manifestly accurate. In surety and certainty, I'd listen to be able to refute what I considered wrong in others, or promote my 'rightness'. Lately, I listen to connect and understand. I listen to foster fluid presence, not reinforce a rigid position. And when I speak, it isn't to convince or influence, but to share and connect.

What was it written above the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi? 'know thyself'? Strong advice in any age. Learn your body's rhythms and tendencies. Listen to it, it doesn't lie. My wife can eat neither gluten, nor dairy without consequences, sometimes severe. Bless her, she'll still try on occasion, because she loves many foods with these in them and interestingly we have found that when her stress levels are low, her tolerance increases, sometimes dramatically. While I can eat nigh on anything and not suffer outwardly, though in spite of that, I still choose to eschew [ha] most diary, gluten and processed foods, unless eating at a friends or in restaurants, which isn't that often... as I prefer prevention over treatments in all but a few cases.

I'm not sure, but I'm curious about and will look into Chlorella. He just described it as blue/green algae. I never got the name of the product before we parted ways. This was in the late 90's. Years later, prompted by my recall of his experience another snippet resonated with me, about the benefits of consuming 'base line lifeforms' like algae in complex organisms like us. Seems supported even more by recent revelations that with our burgeoning understanding of the importance of healthy microbiome in the gut is a greater indicator of disease, or sustained health and restructuring the microbiome is a more effective method of approach for long term healing than surgeries and chemical stimulants/affectors. My suspicions and experience say eat yourself healthy. And when I say eat, I mean food and thought/no thought. Physical food being the minor effect of health by what I choose to put in my mouth and on my body; the far more impacting health effects in my case have come from what I allow myself to eat and ruminate on mentally.