silent thunder

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.

without seeking it, constantly am i reminded how like a dream is this waking life? only it seems, insofar as I can tweak my nose, and yours and we may agree that such has taken place do we seem, or tend to find comfort in proclaiming one real and one false... or that in this collective dream called real, we can count and agree, that there are definitively five trees in this park we sit in together... only here is a caveat as well, for how often in waking real life, do we sit in the same space, read the same book, hear the same lecture and not agree at all as to what is taking place? one shared and one private is more how i experience it. not at all that one is more real... this is just me perhaps. good bad, right wrong, have no place in the discussion for me. is there not an assumption that waking life because it appears not as passing, illusory and mist-like as the dream realms is thus more real? many realizations and experiences of the dream are more impacting and revealing of the natural state than those of the waking manifest flow... when realization arises is it only valid from certain sources? the light of a candle the glare of a flashlight the light of the sun all will reveal, which is best? most real?

truth used to be an adamantine gem for me... vajra, shining, unbreakable, unchanging interesting to note that a gem has many facets, all part of the whole is any facet of a gem more real than any other? and as glass is a liquid, not a solid, this gem of truth, that used to seem so solid and rigidly fixed... is now experienced as a fluid, flowing living unfolding.

Gabor Mate, no longer practicing medicine as a doctor, rather ironically is now becoming a bearer and fascilitator of deep realization and healing.

the world we perceive... is it the world as it is? what is real? <shrug> time for a nap.

Most of my teachers are non human. Turns out they are literally everywhere around me... in every thing and non-thing. Patiently sharing of their nature without claims, obligations or usually even words. For much of my life the pursuit of truth masked the experience of the natural state. Occlusion to the simple raw beingness of truth, mostly it seems due to my own efforts, striving, seeking, ceaseless straining and endless searching 'out there' for 'the truth' that I assumed must lay somewhere outside me, created a cacophony of noise, sound, assurity in assumption that blocked out the teachings. When real exhaustion after endless side paths of untruth and fruitless bs brought on deep silence and all but the most raw awareness fell away... Then did I unfold effortlessly into the natural state. Do flowers unfold in great striving, or effortlessly of their own nature? Truly, it was a poor man, who strutted about proclaiming the universe to be mute, while not listening. That which is, is. Perhaps this is why so many lineages share similar realizations of 'quieting and abiding in simplicity'. The most basic teachings seem to convey this most effectively to me at this point. ZZ, simple sitting, shine with depth, resonance and peace. Was buddha sitting to achieve something, or was he awake, and simply sitting? Reminds me of the old daoist notion that 'a learned man adds something every day in search of truth, while the sage, loses something every day until what remains is naught but what is.' If i let go of all, that which remains... is.

How much wisdom do we require, to realize how much wisdom we lack?

In the late 90's when I left the acting biz, I worked for a few years in a sculpture studio that specialized in large scale productions for architectural applications. Mostly casinos... Ceasar's Atlantic City, Atlantis Island in the Bahamas... We used a lot of Gypsum Figerglass Reinforced Cement in our pours and compound industrial rubbers for our molds. Full hazmat suits and respirator/vapor helmets. It was rather toxic, but hella challenging and fun. Not everyone was anal about full coverage however all the time, particularly when the weather was hot and humid. One of my co-workers shared his experience using blue/green algae as a cleanse on recommendation of his girlfriend if memory serves. A couple days into using it, he was awakened in the middle of the night, by burning and itching hives all over his torso, arms, face and neck. He went to the doctor who in the process of examining his skin, began to tweeze out odd little hairs that seemed to be growing out of his skin. Turns out they weren't hairs at all. Doctor examined them under a microscope and then asked my buddy if he had ever been exposed to fiberglass. When he replied he'd been working with it for a few years, doc said... well something is pushing the fiberglass in your body out through your skin. Should be cleared up in a few days. Here's a cream to apply, blah blah blah. He quit the studio very soon after.