silent thunder

such resonance in these words... wow my friend. thank you for sharing.

What a fascinating topic! My preconceptions of how minds operate were utterly blown open when I discovered my wife is Aphantasiac. I didn't know Aphantasia existed and we only came to investigate it when I was very curious about the structure of a particular house she was describing in one of her dreams. I have a secret desire to build out retirement home out of components of her literal dream houses, so I keep a log book of sorts. One time, when really trying to pin her down on the details of a dream home I wanted to sketch we hit a crossroads. Me: (after a few go rounds of trying to get details) But what were the exact details of the rooms? Plants? windows? furniture? High ceilings? She: Normal ceilings... and that stuff was all there, but... well, I can't tell you how it was exactly, I don't see things in my dreams... I just feel them... I just know what's occuring." Me: what do you mean you don't see anything in your dreams? She: I don't picture things... iit's not like I actually see stuff... I just experience them... there is a knowingness. I just know what's occuring. Me: so you see nothing?! She: no. Why do you think I'm always so amazed at the details you describe in your dreams. It boggles my mind that you actually see everything so clearly. Me: (mind numbed and blown open... goes to internet searches 'people who can't form visual images ) Wow, hon... you are not alone and I had no idea this even existed. You are Aphantasiac and do not form mental images. She: um... yes... yes. Some studies estimate up to 12% of the population does not form mental images when thinking. Yet one still dreams without imagery. It takes place as a 'knowingness' instead of simply seeing virtual visual images. My wife has a full dream life, yet she feels what occurs, instead of seeing it. It's never seemed to impact her as she was thriving in her career when she stepped away and meditates regularly, readily falling into what we have come to call 'the grey zone' with relative ease. I now sometimes recognize it in folks at work. Particularly in our Art Department. The design team comes to us with ideas about a set for a show and I'll notice when I'm describing to them the manner in which we'll go about trying to build what they are describing, their eyes gloss over and they can't follow what I'm describing. This is due to them not forming mental images of it. So, when words fail, we draw pictures, or even do small or large scale simple mock-ups of what we propose. Then the light bulb goes off and we can proceed on common ground... or not. As for working on visualizing. There's a book and process for physical visualizing techniques that may be useful to you, not sure if it will lead to images, but I really appreciate it. I can't recall the title and author and have to leave for the studio in a few minutes, but I'll have the title for you this evening when I get home. eta: the book is Energy Work by Robert Bruce.

We don't build fences at my place, so come on over; we build long tables and have deep bowls. Some of them are even for soup...

that's their fix!?!? small wonder I let go of that in my early teens then.

in my case, presence and awareness... but then... those are constants... so... hmm.

I'll be spending much more time outside. We experience two seasons here, Summer and Summer Is Coming. Summer Is Coming is a veritable paradise for me and lasts from late Sept to late June. The highs are in the 50's, 60's, the lows in the 40's come January/Feb. It's often cloudy, particularly in the mornings and on occasion we're blessed with a bit of rain. The beaches are mostly empty aside from other pluviophiles. If it's raining, I'm outside. I'll walk out of work to stand in the rain for a few minutes, I adore it. I think of all the things in the Midwest and the East Coast, I miss Thunderstorms and regular rain the most. My mornings usually start with a long walk in the hour before dawn, either in the neighborhood if I'm working, or the beach when not. There is nothing quite like the calm, simple serenity of predawn this time of year when most everyone/thing else is still sleeping. We make regular batches (once a week or so) of immune boosting bone broth herbal tonics all through this season. I heat them in the mornings load a thermos to the brim and bring to work to share. I spend more time on sketching/painting and mask/model craft as well. Particularly when between shows and out of work.

With you. The older I get the less appealing the notion of daoist immortality, or immortality of any kind becomes.

In many ways... the flow of life seems like the ultimate game of hide and seek. Am I It? is It me? exactly where does It end and I begin?

When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. Wislawa Szymborska

one monk leans over and whispers to another... "are you not thinking what I'm not thinking?"

well said my friend! An example of discretion being the better part of valor.

yup... or mind is matter. Wherever I touch my body, or a bodily sensation arises, my mind is aware. This gives rise to the question, is there a functional difference between the matter of my body and my mind. Seems it could be an example of Dao in motion. Two seemingly disparate processes that are in actuality, facets of one gem, aspects of one unified flowing process.

I wonder sometimes when I spill a bit of water while drinking. I picture one drop of the water in slow motion, and imagine the myriad of life within the tiny globe and what their experience is when the drop hits the ground... or when it flows over a waterfall down the river to the ocean... or down the driveway along the gutter and into the sewer... or down my esophagus to my belly. worlds within worlds... perhaps on some scale, our entire universe is but a drip... a tiny life infused plop, rushing along the stream of... As above, so below. As within, without. Those words when I first heard them as a young man were like a clarion bell ringing in my mind. The ramifications of it have resonated with me my entire adult life and flavored much of my perception. The implications of it are staggering to me. Fibonacci smiles... fractally.

Hmm, interesting thought in line with the placebo effect, perhaps it's not what the medicines are made of that convey efficacy, but the true alchemical medicine exists in the mind and the medicine is an allegory for the mind, a symbol for the process of change. If the individual is utterly saturated in this notion of the efficacy of the medicine, whatever form it takes is then effective and if one is not, no medicine would bring about alchemical change. Might not be the physical medicine at all, but the mind. Many lineages perceive that the universe and reality is all mind. The thoughts, the medicine, the body the medicine effects... Hence why the same alchemical processes worked on some individuals within lineages and not others...

Seems to me wei wu wei can only ever be experienced by the experiencer and seldom accurately deduced by a perceiver... but that's just my take on things at this time. There are times when I must exert some force in my task, yet in the midst of my pursuit, there is no burden in the work, the exertion is the natural progression of the task; though requiring muscle, it veritably flies to completion and when done I am left energized not weakened and spent. From the outside it may seem I strain, yet my experiene is one of pure flow. Other times I may seem to be utterly peaceful while sitting still, yet in my experience I am willfully straining mightily to maintain some semblance of calm as the storm rages and I resist utterly. <shrug> just my take.

Heh... normal. that's an elusive one for me these days. I'd sidle up next to Robert Anton Wilson as he says: “The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.” My version is "Normal is that which seems to exist, until you spend enough time nearby and get to know it a bit." And that's perfectly lovely to me. IF I were to encounter normal as implausible as it seems these days, I'd be as surprised as I would be disillusioned.

Such treasure as this! Yes please, thank you!!

I experienced what you are describing once while on vacation with my gal and thank you for reminding me! It is one of the most haunting, lovely memories I have. It was Christmas Eve and we had rented a small cabin just off Hwy1 near Kirk Creek in California. We'd been hiking up along the jade cliffs since late morning and stopped for dinner and a couple of pints at a local pub before heading back to our cabin. There were about a dozen locals hanging out that night. One toddler boy I recall still stands out... who I overheard absolutely hated to wear shoes was running back and forth barefoot between the various groups of people dancing and taunting us with his overwhelming joy. Someone added some money to the juke box and played the following song Down to the River to Pray by Alison Kraus. As the song started, the entire bar went silent and then slowly each one there added their voice and began to sing along with it. I was dumbstruck. I sang in professional choirs as a young man and this group in that moment could have held their own with any of them. I added my voice, tears streaming down my face. I hope to never forget this memory. thanks for the jog mate.

Scrying began to happen for me, unsought and unwanted some years ago. The device of my scrying was the blank wall in our temple room where I sit and play Qi Gong. One wall is left blank to allow a neutral place to rest the eyes. At the time, I was playing daily at the same time for over a year. I would start each evening around sunset and played into the hours of dusk. While my eyes would lay neutrally on the wall and from here, full blown life-like windows into living worlds, homes, scenes of people's lives, friends would play out like a blue filtered black and white film. Alongside this, a plethora of static images and symbols would clarify in pristine brilliance. At the time, I considered it a fascinating nuissance. It was bothersome to my practice, yet it was potent, vibrant, insistent and recurring no matter my own intentions. Your treatment and approach to scrying and sharing it here in this thread has been intriguing. So I figured I'd mention how it happened for me, in case this method resonates with you. Thanks for sharing mate. Good stuff!

How could politics (or anything for that matter) be devoid of spirit i find myself wondering? Politics to me, seem to deal with the practical application of our foundational, collective, cultural moral and spiritual notions. Politics to me, is something of a barometer of Spirit. It's the process of dealing with morality, integrity, corruption, poverty, wealth, resources... How will we respond as a culture to aggression? How do we treat those among us who are infirm, disabled, impoverished? How should we allocate our collective resources? How much of our various commodities do we dispense to armaments versus education versus health care? What constitutes an actionable breaking of our collective ideas of the Law? What Laws do we choose to create and enforce? How do we address the way we treat people in the work place, at school and in public? All of these areas that are determined by political activity are to me, steeped utterly in the most foundational of spiritual conceptual noumena and phenomena. Spiritual to the core is every act of politics to me. But then, I consider every movement in the bathroom to be equally spiritual, so... as always, let my words convey only as much resonance as they do for you. I'm not a qualified observer in any of your lives, so for me to try and convince you to alter your manner of interaction with the all in all, is way out of my jurisdiction. The reason I tend to avoid political threads and conversations wherever they occur is due to the unshakable notion that I no longer perceive life accurately enough to push others into my current manner of perceiving life, nor do I sense I know enough about other's lives to be able to with any degree of conviction, begin to assert how they should think. I sense no need, or ability to cajole others into being other than they are. I respond to actions.

Was reading the bathroom stall at work the other day. The topic and tone of the Trump/HRC thread there is nigh on exactly like the tone I've read in the two times I've poked my nose into our main resident political thread here. It struck me that bathroom stalls were the original forums. Before the interwebs... we had to use sharpies and bathroom stalls to post our rhetoric. It's just harder to edit your posts on the bathroom forum. Now it's so much easier. Ain't progress grand?

The staff has always been one of my loves. The peasant's weapon, the wanderer's companion. thank you for sharing this!

For some time now I don't seem inclined or even capable of perceiving the mundane as separate from spiritual in any way. They are one flowing. Spirit seems imbued into every aspect of the manifest, indeed the very fabric of phenomena and noumena alike teems with the essential tones of the flowing vibrant spirit of liquid light. And the sense of my self, which used to seem like a machine that required fixing, or a process of refining that needed my (or a teacher's) constant conscious directed interference in order to be pushed, pulled, cajoled, tricked, hammered, learned, skillified into its true nature, its perfected form... has now utterly dissolved into a sensing that when left to its own devices the notion of self unfolds in clarity in utter bliss. Indeed when my incessant seeking and striving to create the refinement ceases, then in the ensuing quiet, stillness arises and with that the occlusions in the liquid light settle like mud in a still pond and the waters become clear and calm. muddiest waters left undisturbed by process rest in clarity In effortless unfolding am I discovering authentic 'self' of late and this 'self' seems like fluid flowing light. Thoughts, emotions, knowledge seem like occlusions within this, much like clouds within sky that come and go, yet never really touch the sky, nor alter it in any permanent manner.

Investigate, observe with presence and awareness and truths will be revealed. The nature of source is within our very being as much as in our instruments of science and the phenomena of conditions we observe and co-arise amongst. One undivided flowing process. All is connected to source and there are myriad inroads to observe the truths which are all interconnected. Source is source. However one approaches source, it is as it is, though how we encounter and interpret it, depends on the quality and nature of our inquiry and of the tools and apperatures we enlist. Inquire with presence and awareness and observation and truths will be encountered. So will untruths. Yet untruth serves truth as truly as truth, for when untruth is revealed as untruth, we learn more about a truth. I often find it more approachable to define my self by what I am not, instead of what I am. For is my own observation of my own self, absolutely true? The nature of life and decay seems to me a constant unfolding fluidity. All interconnected. Source is ever revealed wherever one looks with clarity and presence. This was I sense, behind the realization of Fritjoff Capra when he wrote about the similarity of truths revealed in Taoism and Physics in his book, The Tao of Physics.

I recall having that notion as a boy, but one day in my teens it struck me hard that we are not descended from the infirm and the easily duped. We are the descendents of the agile, endurant, adaptive, clever, creative hominids who survived and eventually thrived to pass on their virtues and attributes.