silent thunder

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.

I used to tend bar in Greenwich Village, NYC back in the 90's. Saturday/Sunday were Jazz Brunch. That was my introduction to jazz. Three piece band, piano, sax and bass. Joel Forrester wherever you are... thanks mate. Recently Arild Andersen has come on my radar, he's my current flavor of the month. Guess even pale skinned norse can have some rhythm somewhere in em.

Modern processed sugar. Fuck. That. Shite. If only I could go back and convince my mother to never have kept that, or cow's milk in the house. Milk does a body good... ffs.

No matter how often it occurs, it still floors me with shock when I encounter words from another, whether spoken now, decades or sometimes even centuries before, that seem to exactly resonate and reflect the shifting flow of unfolding awareness in my current condition. Thanks for sharing lifeforce. Synchronicity and Gratitude mate.

In conversations with workmates and my wife particularly... I have come to realize that being right is often counter productive to being content. besides, what I see isn't what they see, and no amount of my words and the forcefulness of them will alter their perception and interpretation. Insofar as none are doing harm... live and let live.

Synchronicity to find this being discussed here now. Gratitude for sharing this. Why is it the foolish stride about unfettered and often shout certainties everywhere while the wise go about doubtfilled and clothed in reticence? It seems to hinge on the notion of what is Truth and how much we assume that the way we interpret reality is how it really is. When one believes they see the world as it is, they say 'this is true' what doubt can exist? Regarding 'The Truth', for me there used to be simple, observable Truth all about me. This is wrong, that is right. He's an evil shit, while this other one is an honorable master. This path leads to growth and others are shite. The list was nigh on endless. Lately certainty has crumbled, shattered and dissolved down to just one. Even this one that I am willing to still claim is subject to some doubt but it still seems as I write this, that this one truth remains possible, i am aware. You are aware. Awareness is. All else, all prior claims I used to hold as infallible in my life are subject now to the falibility of my perceptual and interpretive tools. Perceptual senses which bring in all the information I use to interpret what life is and how I fit within it I now from experience no longer completely trust. This can be utterly paralyzing in the extreme. Complete doubt renders all action untenable and all assumptions void. I've been in the unpleasant ramifications of this for the last eight to ten years, progressively and now understand that which I could not when I first entered this phase of my path, when my teachers warned..."this will not be pleasant. Waking is not comforting or pleasant. Awakening is not love bread and warm comfort." It is the relentless stripping away, dissolving and crumbling of false notions, mental projections and assumptions which melt like mist, leaving one no longer able to cling to any notions as something mentally solid upon which to stand. It is rather hellish at times. Though Shunryu Suzuki's words bring some comfort when he shares. "hell is not punishment, but training, it is revealing." Believing that one sees the world as it is, accurately and perfectly is Naive Realism. Our senses do not bring in accurate and complete information regarding the universe. We receive partial information and then interpret this information, often completely unaware that we've even made an interpretation, as the tools for this are imbedded so deep in the process by culture and family before the age of seven, that it is as invisible to us, as water is to a fish who has never been lifted out of it. Naive Realism has been refuted since the time of the Stoics. A strong example seems to be the notion among Catholics that their perception of the world was absolutely true and accurate which allowed them to burn Bruno at the stake with a clear conscience when he made his claims about the universe being populated by many planets and stars all spinning about each other, feeling not only justified, but obligated to do so. Looking back we see that this was not the case, Bruno's observations (I suspect from spontaneous out of body experience by his descriptions of it, [though I'm not certain] reflected the reality that we have come to assume as modern truths, even though it runs counter-intuitive to the information brought to us by our perception. While I understand why the bishops could feel infallible in their judgement of Bruno. I can't help but think on some level they suspected he may be correct. Why else were they so challenged by his claims to have to silence him with fire, instead of write him off as a harmless lunatic, no one in their right mind would ever listen to seriously? Even today we are not free of this assumptiveness. We are still prone to assuming our current tools of perception reveal to us the truth of the universe and yet, these tools are also only partial information and when it arrives, we must still analyze and intepret the data. How often does science claim 100% that it understands how things operate, only to arrive at new interpretations and have to revise the textbooks. Shortly before my Father's death, we had a conversation about physics. He was an inventor and engineer, studied at University in the 1960's. In his retirement I turned him onto the works of Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene and Nassim Haramein. He marveled that pretty much all he'd been taught at university had been obliterated in subsequent decades. I reminded him that at one point, modern medicine was absolutely certain the only way to heal some illnesses was to bleed the patient of bad blood, or drill holes in the cranium to release the demons of disease. It wasn't shit at the time. It was merely what was obvious to them. I often have this thought arise unabated and unsought. "what are my flat earth assumptions?" They're there. lurking usually just behind conscious thought as the remaining assumptions I don't even consider... I wonder what they could be?... Insight and realization often arise seemingly spontaneously. Yet if perception is partial and interpreted small wonder those who have some wisdom and insight and realization often swim the river of doubt. This can be further exacerbated because of familiarity with tribe. Our interpretations often align with our culture and we naturally exhibit similar interpretations due to the influence of culture and of our Tribe. This familiarity breeds certainty, but only out of routine contact, not from absolute truth. As the nature of our interpretations are formed by social and familial programming, so we often interpret information similarly within our social group as we are taught to, before the age of critical thinking and thus we give rise to the notions of normal and crazy, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong. These interpretations skew the already innacurate and partial information coming in, blurring it further into a personal tunnel of reality that we often then assume is 'the world as it really is' and that so many others will agree with our blurs, they will continue on, until experience, realization, shatters it. This most often feels terrible and routinely and understandably most folks retract from it and try and force themselves to ignore new insights, even when they bring the promise of real healing, in favor of the 'comfortableness and familiarity of the old world view'. I've seen this play out at healing and meditation retreats a number of times. An example of the ridiculous notion of normal and crazy. In Papua New Guinnea, in the 1970's it was perfectly normal when a man had suffered several unsuccessful hunts, to know that he had been infected by his wife's 'evil moon blood'. In their culture, during her menses, women could not work in the fields, nor live in the same hut as their husband, so he would not be infected by her bad blood. Once infected however, in order to purge the evil blood which was undermining hunting skill, the warrior would go out into the woods, collect a barbed reed, give himself and erection, slide the reed into his member and yank it back out barbs first, causing him to emulate his wife's menstrual cycle and thus purging him of bad blood and restoring his hunting prowess. I was told this story by a professor, whose classes in Anthropology were based on 15 years spent living with a tribe as a fully indoctrinated member. This was just normal to the Tribe. Nothing crazy about it... Crazy would be allowing that bad blood to remain in your system where it would eventually kill you. I couldn't help myself and asked him once after class, if he ever had to undertake this purging in his time there... he said... 'nope, I just went fishing instead.' What we call normal and crazy, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, seem less like absolute truths and more like what is familiar to us, because that is what we experienced up to the age of 8 or so. The real bitch about it is how convincingly whole our experience seems even with only partial information about the universe coming in... When I look around at a forest, I don't perceive big gaps in my vision, yet I don't consciously experience all that there is. The seemingly unbroken flow of perception is quite convincing that we most often don't even realize we're making an interpretation at all... and thus the foolish, ramshackle their way through life, assuming they 'have it all right' and just need to 'shake others awake to the obvious truth'. When the obvious truth is that, there is no one way to anything. Life, like a gem, is multifacted... and yet life is not static like a gem seems to be, life is ever fluid, flowing and shifting. And yet, absolute doubt is paralyzing and of little use, lacking the wisdom to trust in one's faculties, faulty as they may be. While doubt may be displayed from wisdom in not acting rashly or harshly and with wrecklessness and abandon; extreme doubt undermines actionable pursuits and connectedness in life and reduces one to a reactionary mass, unable to fend for itself. I've been swimming in the paralysis of near absolute doubt in recent years. It's been unsettling to my marriage, my health and my career. One process that has allowed me to continue has been one of continual unfolding. I no longer live in a world of answers... but have come to relish living in open ended questions that require and often in my new estimations, have no firm answers, or have many potential answers. I have much empathy for your query and the line of perception it stems from... My only potential sharing point of hope seems to be, allow a space for real silence and quiet in daily life, release assumptions and allow space for all that is to abide as it is, without the need to always assign right and wrong, truth and untruth. in the quiet of your natural state, which is always there underlying all other processes, with heart open and your mind softened by doubt and quiet of incessant wringing of thoughts... In this place all may be allowed to be as it is... action may arise without attachment. Non action may abide without incessant drive to reach out and fix and in this... there is a window onto a peace that is slowly growing in my life that heretofor, I didn't know was possible. If you've read this far, I commend you, for it is just my ramblings and attempt to coalesce some notions that usually lie beyond the ken of words to give shape to. I share none of this from a desire to instruct, or convince anyone of anything. I am an idiot, blundering about... just ask my wife But out of kinship I felt the pull to share.

Oh god, you just reminded me of a doozy! One of my workmates came back to our bench from the bathroom and I joked to him... "well... everything come out alright?" "oh yea, it always comes out real easy... i usually shit like a shotgun blast... shitting takes about 0.7 seconds. The real trick is not shitting until I'm fully seated, because if I don't get a good tight seal around the seat, shitting takes under a second but the subsequent cleanup can be 20 minutes or more..." lmfao!

While the pyramids and all things 'ancient egypt' have never held any gravity for me... there was a documentary (believe it was a four part series called The Pyramid Code) that discussed the pyramids as power storage, transfer devices and I found it very compelling. Paraphrasing and oversimplifying what they shared: The waters that feed the Nile, flow through the natural aquafers that run under the plateau and the pyramids. The flow of water through the limestone generates electrical charge. The charge is carried and stored well in the limestone core of the pyramid. The surface level stone, (forget the type) was non-conducive and acted as an insulator to house and store the accumulated charge. Seems plausible in theory and was entertaining enough to keep me watching to the end anyway. While the mythos and history of egypt is not a natural draw for me, every time I see anything on egypt, I wonder with rather keen interest, just how much lies underneath the sands that we haven't ever seen.

the ball lasts for a surprising long time... eventually our mother's were wondering why their oven mits were all blistered, melted and crispy, laugh my ass off! <shrug> 'i dunno mom!" It's been long years since I've heard the call of my primary element, but this conversation has it singing. That sounds fecking brilliant. Like literally brilliant! Would have loved to have seen that.

oh dwai! the quote at the start of that video... "there is no path, but only a fool doesn't follow it." love it!

Wonderful stuff. This open question arises... is effort a requirement for what is? There are subtle distinctions for me within effort/non-effort that perhaps may seem contradictory and non-sensical, yet for me, there is no contradiction. maybe I can find some words to describe what the sense within awareness seems to be... While authentic action can involve much activity, this does not necessarily involve or even require the expenditure of effort, nor the presence of tension. The natural state may involve activity, does this connote effort? Where does effort fall in the perfection of what is, as it is? Is effort required? Is effort beneficial? open questions, I have no firm answers, just riffing on a theme...

Tennis balls can also be wonderful mini fireballs. Puncture tennis ball. Fill with flammable liquid of choice/availabilty. Light tennis ball on fire. Kick it around the Cul de Sac with friends. For best effect play at night. For safest effect, play with heavy boots on during the wet season only.

Well said. Thank you. While I usually espouse here solely the merits of deep and radical release and downplay the usefullness of tension/effort, I also appreciate the experience of the deeper relaxation that arises after intense tension. We seem to flow fluidly within a spectrum of antipodal forces/conditions; forces that are always flowing toward balance, yet are never static and in balance. This flowing of conditions toward balance occurs seemingly naturally, effortlessly, to me, without need of skill or thought. As water flows downhill without training, skill or mind, so do we move fluidly through life. In this mode effort is inhibitory. Yet to arive at this perspective, considerable effort may bring benefit. My words seem muddy no matter how many times I rearrange them, so I'll parrot and share the words of Shunryu Suzuki. Hopefully his words resonate the paradox of the perfection of what is as it is, vs achieving through the use of force/effort. As a good friend says... it seems to be 'both, same time'. "Everything is perfect, but there is a lot of room for improvement." "As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself." "it is wisdom that is seeking for wisdom." "No teaching could be more direct than just to sit down."

Wow, compelling concepts being shared; a nice gift to wake up and discover. All I am able to share are a few open ended questions that arose while reading. They have no firm answers in my awareness; but I'm compelled to share them out of deep curiosity for the insights such minds as are present may be willing to share. What is the origin of thought? Where does thought occur? Does it seem there exists a thinker, separate from thought? Are thoughts and bodies separate? Are thought and meditation mutually exclusive? Perhaps a new thread if this seems too ranging...

I shit you not... I was just thinking that exact thing, moments ago, about your last post in the DDJ verse 81 thread. Wishing I could like and thank it... both same time rofl *shakes head and smiles*

*walks into the forest... "hmm... all the damn trees looking and acting so much alike!" "fuckers!"

Walking back home this morning, I picked up a loaf of dog shit from our yard and put it in the flowerbed. While carrying it, in utter fascination, I peered into the smeary fabric of the loaf and smiled broadly in recognition of my own nature... the resonance of a similar loaf, resting steamily in my own abdomen. The very decay of which, powered me on my walk to breakfast with my son... I smiled in recognition of my own natural state and at the deep smell of Dao wafting from it. How utterly incredible that decay should nourish life! How utterly beyond belief that there should be anything at all! This moment in your gut, Dao. In your toilet, Dao. In your words, Dao. In your silence, Dao. The only impossible thing, is for you, or anyone to ever be separated from it by even a hair's width... ever. Relax into beingness and cease this senseless search, the only product of which, is to cloud that which you are searching for... or not. how what the fuck should i know

Whatever you do in the pursuit of truth or reality takes you away from your own very natural state in which you always are. It’s not something you can acquire, attain or accomplish as a result of your effort. All that you do makes it impossible for what already is there to express itself. That is why I call this your natural state. You’re always in that state. What prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is the search. The search is always in the wrong direction, so all that you consider very profound, all that you consider sacred, is a contamination in that consciousness. You may not [Laughs] like the word contamination but all that you consider sacred, holy and profound is a contamination. There’s nothing that you can do, it’s not in your hands. This is something which I can’t give because you have it. It is ridiculous to ask for a thing which you already have. There isn’t anything to get from anybody. You have what I have. I say you are there. UG Krishnamurti