silent thunder

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.

Life sustains life through decay. Decay nourishes all life. Life is a fluid process of acquisition, acquiring living food be it plant, insect, animal or fish, which as it decays in the gut, nourishes life. Decay is a fluid process of nourishing and providing nourishment to other life. Part of my living body now is decaying while the decay of other life, nourishes and replenishes it and it continue to flourish. It is the same with stars, planets and galaxies. Each in their cycle will come and go. Simple beautiful. As Marble said... birth and death. One fluid process, not two separate static things. Simple, beautiful, ever flowing toward balance, yet never quite in balance. Never static.

Such an intriguing sensation when it arises! I oscillate between deep ancestral knowingness and a misfire in memory. The materialist in me always considered it a physical misfire kind of thing. A rather simple misappropriation of a present experience which instead of being held as a short term memory, is mistakenly appropriated instead into long term memory storage, giving a present experience the sense of coming from deep past memory. That sense has mostly dissolved and unfolded through repeated experience into what now seems more like a function of ancestral memory, a deep biological knowingnesses hard wired into the living dna fabric of our bodies. When it arises lately, it's one more indication of the ceaselessly interconnected nature of the universe... the one long flowing unfoldingness that never ceases, never runs out and I usually refer to as dao. It is a biproduct of what we are and who we've always been, unfolding in awareness now, while connected to the unending flow of the all in all. Take the Monarch butterflies for instance. The butterflies that return to the North each Spring are the great, great grandchildren of the Monarchs that left for the overwintering trees in Mexico and Southern California the year before. It's akin to me, moving back to the same house my Great Grandparents Hannah and Haagen lived in in South Dakota when they immigrated here in 1861. In animals we call it instinct and it seems utterly natural, yet magical. Closest I can describe it in is a type of ancestral memory woven directly into the biological structure of our very human bodies. The more I sit in simple presence and stillness the greater the sense of awe in this physical manifestation I refer to as my body becomes. Our bodies have such wisdom in them, such deep, deep awareness and wisdom. Like they're woven from the wisdom of awareness and survival itself. The visceral sense of something previously not encountered in this incarnation.

Here you go, this is how it is lately, When sleeping on my side I have two under the feet and legs in the shape of a T. Two to support my upside arm and keep the chest open. And two to support my head and keep my neck in line with my spine, one firm and one soft. cheers!

Love your list. You remind me, I've yet to see the Green Mile... Also, I'd love the names of those soviet films.

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king. JRR Tolkien

Work is utterly nuts this last month... a near fantasy world of incredible noises, construction machinery, indoor cranes hoisting thousand pound lighting instruments overhead, forklifts, dust everywhere. Five departments simultaneously trying to prep a high end product for the pickiest of clients. In midst of this cacophony. Routinely, i unfold into silent emptiness in the midst of my task, for the last several days, amidst this losing of self in the task a thought repeatedly arises... what is least obvious? While i've spent countless evenings contemplating what is most obvious, only recently has this question been arising, unbidden, unsought... but repeatedly. what is least obvious?

Is space really comprised of nothing I often wonder? I've never heard an answer that brings certainty to me on this. Although I recall a lecture by Nassim Haramein that had some lovely attributes to it regarding the nature of any given point in space, but that isn't among my bookmarks to add to the convo, so I'll just mention it in case someone else is familiar with it. I find his approach to physics intriguingly fringe. I was taught that space is a vacuum comprised of nothing... but my certainty on this has never been very... certain.

awareness and light seem related to me for some time now. my mind routinely interprets awareness as a field a simultaneously expansive/contractive field made of light this field of light... unfolding... ever unfolding and where motion arises, it pivots about a point of empty stillness I deeply appreciate science and its many dependable observations. Yet our faculties are so limited and our apparatus, both biological and mechanical... are so limited that any time science claims (this is how it is 100%) The words echo with the dogmatic projective assumption of certainty that was offered by our evangelical pastor back on Sundays. Science does the best it can, but too often, our most recent understandings of things are touted and received as 100% truth, when the reality in my experience is far less certain. I take scientific claims as 'given observation... this is the best way we have of describing this at this time' and all claims are in my mind, destined to evolve as observation, awareness and insight unfold. That is a beautiful, wonderful thing to me.

is it a flowing target that one must strive to maintain or to acquire? is it a flowing state that requires some things to be abandoned before it is achieved? is it achievable? maintanable? does it require skill? or is it always flowing regardless of what story our local mind is telling and all the seeking, skill making, abandoning and acquiring are noise so to speak that masks the silent unfolding presence underlying all else?

Fun conversation! My interest when topics of this nature come up always seem to lean toward the properties of light lately. Gravity just has... well, no real gravity for me lately. I was pretty tweaked when I learned some time ago from multiple sources that the measured speed of light, long touted as a constant, like... the constant, actually measures variably. Is this due to a limitation in the instrumentation based on our own perspective oriented limitations that are built into any tools we design, or an actual feature of the nature of light itself... this fascinates me no end. That and the seeming fact that where vision is concerned, we're always viewing the past is another property of light that peaks my interest. Since there is always a bit of time that it takes (however slight) for light to reach our sensory organs from whatever it rebounds off of, which then must be first transduced by said organs to electrical signals before those are interpreted as what we see... We are always literally seeing the past. This always strikes me when I'm out at night walking and staring up as our night sky is a veritable visual story of the light of the past. Some stars we see no longer exist as we see them now but have long died out, or burst and the signal flashes of their dying have yet to reach us. One astronomer Larry Molnar and his team claim through observation of increased orbital rates of a binary star, that they have already collapsed in collision and the light of said collision will reach us in a few years... interesting stuff for sure, since the estimate is only a few years off, so confirmation is eminent in this case. Also intriguing to me, is the notion that we only ever see with our eyes the colors that objects are technically not... since our eyes collect only the frequencies of light that bounce off of objects, not the frequencies that are absorbed by them... so technically we only ever see the colors that things are not often comes to mind for whatever reason. Fun stuff, good convo... thanks all.

books are returning. Churned through a couple on my Sami heritage, which set in motion a few others. Secret and Sublime was a real stunner as was Saltzman's The 10,000 Things and a couple books on Toltec wisdom tradition. Now I'm back into reading plays. I'll be through with the complete works of Conor McPherson. I also realized, I've been reading to my son nightly all through my personal drought. We just finished The Alchemist, which he was unsure of at first, but came to love by the end. He's reading one of my first favorites. The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. I'll be having a go at it when he's done. That one grabbed me by the collar as a kid and never let go. It's a pleasant surprise and a simple joy to have some gravity in books and stories again.

I'm human, so they tell me, yet my humanness is woven entirely from non human elements. Curious that. No where inside me is the element human present. I wonder when it is exactly that in the process of growing this body, I ceased being some mixture of elements and started being human? And all of my humanness, made entirely non human bits... even the most human dna, (had that analyzed a couple years back to shut my sister up about our being 100% blah blah), that human dna is comprised of non human bits. The same non human bits strewn about the rest of manifestation that everything that is not human is also made of... Yup, curious. Nowhere inside my human body, is the element human present... and yet... human my body be. That's sticks out to me recently, though for no reason but that it makes me grin and giggle a bit inside when I ponder it and it seems to pop into my head steadily yet seemingly randomly.

while for me, manifestation seems utterly magical.

I used to consume books nonstop, there was always one in my possession. I was insatiable for more, I'd burn through 2-3 a week. It started in college and continued on to my early 40's. It was often synchronistic, how books would fall toward me six and seven at a time, all with interlocking and interrelated topic ideas, even across genres. Then a full stop and no book on any topic could draw my interest for several years. At first it was fiction that dropped off, and then shortly after, all books lost any sense of pull, or purpose. This went on for six or seven years it seems. I'd try on occasion to during that time, but usually to no avail. Nothing cut through the fog of lack of interest and I'd soon just stop in mid sentence and put a book down for good, something that would have been nigh on impossible in the past. Very recently, in the last year, several titles mentioned here have peaked interest and so there has been a mild return. Nothing of the manic, constant chewing of words and ideas as before, but there does seem to be a steady flow of interest in certain titles and topics. It's a welcome return, but the interaction with words and ideas has shifted and now it's a light dance, not a distilled pursuit.

When i was blind... all of my girlfriends were 10's.

Or those with experience just aren't interested in talking...

Had he but turned back then, and looked out once more on to the rose-lit garden, she would have seen that which would have made her own sufferings seem but light and easy to bear--a strong man, overwhelmed with his own passion and despair. Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love and as soon as her light footstep had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade, where her tiny hand had rested last. Baroness Orczy ~ The Scarlet Pimpernel

Some time ago practice shifted. Where it used to be dietary, it is now medicinal.