silent thunder

Thoughts arise, seemingly of themselves and this is natural. Like clouds form and dissipate in the sky, so too, my thoughts arise and dissolve. I let them. And just as when I walk under the great sky and notice the clouds, I don't judge which cloud is best, or which is ill-formed... I no longer churn and judge each thought that arises even when my intent is to sit in stillness and emptiness. Soon enough, no matter how big, dark or stormy they are... the thoughts will dissipate and the sky (mind's natural state) will return. Rest assured the process your intention has instigated with this process is fluid and ongoing, it is happening when thoughts arise and when you are clear and in my experience, through all of it our true nature is as spotless as the sky. We can't paint, scratch or mark our true nature... just as we can't drive a nail into the sky to hang a picture.

well said mate. More and more it seems i am made of love and when I release fully into simple being... this is experienced as a clarion bell ringing effortlessly, bouyantly. This place is a constant reminder of the ground state of love. Even in the prickliest of interactions... for much like your adroit metaphor of the burnt hand... I love all of this place, even the triggers. Sometimes particularly the triggers... as they remind me that the presence of love is so foundational, when my perspective of life becomes too myopic, I sometimes lose sight of what is most obvious and lose the forest for the trees, so to speak. Even when this place challenges and triggers me, there is love flowing. Without the love, there wouldn't be enough inertia to put fingers to keyboard in an attempt to express what is flowing.

What is our water? Wow my friend... we share some deep resonance often but this is uncanny. My first title for this thread was What is our Water?. Throughout my life one notion that arises repeatedly on my thought pond is... "if my essential nature is made of some thing, I suspect that thing is love... love as the foundation upon which all else rises in the manifest." I no longer have the sense that the people I love create the love that I feel... rather I am love and when near the people, places or things that make me feel this openly, the aspects of life that I carry around that cause me to not feel this natural state, dissolve and without those occlusions, the natural state is recognized again and I tune into my essential nature. So I am no longer saying I love you... but rather. You remind me of the love I am... thank you. And here's the real kicker... in my experiences throughout this life, the action and motion of love in my life moves like water, in the beneficial and the violent ways. Sometimes a slow, gentle lapping trickle, softly feeding all it touches and gently reaching into and lovingly nurturing all the most intimate corners... and when the storms arise, these are also love, but the possessive, frightened and raging frothing fomenting whirlpool or tidal surge that sweeps all before it in a tormented stormy press.

It seems to me that anyone is free to criticize and say anything they choose, anytime they wish. Whether their words and viewpoint will possess any gravity, relevance or potency however, resides in the world view, opinions and awareness of the one hearing/reading them... and that will be pretty unique to each person listening. I've been accused of offending god throughout my life. (can't imagine how that happens.) My reaction to that ranges from "i don't think i can offend god... i don't have that kind of clout" to "what... offend myself?!? Preposterous!!!"

lol so grateful you take your time to share here my friend.

Nice topic! i love hearing what books/films others find fascinating! for me, there are so many... so... so many... lol off the top of my head: Stalker and Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman Woman in the Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigahara Blade Runner by Ridley Scott Hero by Zhang Yimou The Zero Theorum, Brazil and The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus by Terry Gillium Mind Walk by Bernt Amadeus Capra My Dinner with Andre by Louis Malle Dreams by Akira Kurosawa Spirited Away, Totorro and Ponyo by Hayao Miyazaki The Lord of the Rings by Peter Jackson The Lord of the Rings by Ralph Bakshi Groundhog Day by Harold Ramis 50 First Dates by Peter Segal

Nice!

Well said mate. There seems to always be a background noise to life does there not? Even in stillness, my body churns every cell vibrates and thoughts arise and recede from the surface of my mind pond. Even darkness and stillness when I experience them seem to be filled with potential, with the vibrancy of the possibility of manifesting. Whatever the source of my thoughts may be, this question of what is most obvious just keeps surfacing... unbidden and unsought, never insistent, yet consistently, regularly present. The question re-presents itself from wherever it is that thoughts arise from... I suspect what is most obvious may be so obvious that it abides beneath my radar. Another closely related notion arises along with this is that there may be no such thing as darkness. That what I consider to be dark is the presence of light that is beyond my ability to perceive or interact with... only this is so foundational it lies beyond the ken of my rational waking mind to really interact with... It sure seems convincing that i am no matter what else occurs, it consistently seems i am aware that i am... and that in and of itself is a kind of noise, or resonant presence.

Well here we are again with this choice topic. Rather than derail another thread, I'm bringing this here. Disclaimer: I'm not sharing this to convince anyone of anything. But I'm driven to share my unfolding experience and realization of the processes going on within that amorphous thing I refer to as 'myself'. To be honest, this doesn't even feel like a choice. I've deleted it twice, hidden it once in my personal section and am now going to post it because I find it intriguing and enjoy sharing and listening to other's experiences. So... Lately (particularly the last 13 years or so, moreso since becoming a father and watching my son develop, delving more deeply into cultivation than ever before in my life and witnessing as my wife's life is totally consumed for the last four years in the suicide inducing pain of assimilating resurfacing repressed memories of childhood trauma and torture), my experience of choice has shifted and I no longer hold to my prior notion that what I refer to as "I" is something that moves through life enacting conscious choices that exhibit control over my actions, environment and responses to the stimuli of life. More and more as I release into being, it seems compellingly to be the case to me that what is commonly referred to as choice is really the illusory experience of control over compulsive unconscious actions of response to stimuli, driven by conditioning, subconscious impulses and survival prompts... and is not a consciously driven response at all. Action and reaction happen, and then conscious mind assigns rationalization after the fact. As I experience it now, the actual choice occurs beyond/beneath conscious awareness, prior to the concsious mind's involvement... the illusion of choice, is the rationalization my conscious mind makes during/immediately after the compulsion to act and is an attempt by the conscious mind to explain to my mind and to others why the compulsion took place, while giving me an illusory and supposedly comforting sense of control about it. I know this is neither popular, nor irrefutable and whenever I share this, I add the disclaimer that I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, merely sharing my unfolding realization of my experience of the illusory and surface nature of the concept of conscious choice... (and boy did I resist this for a long time, it was unsettling in the best of cases at first, and downright terrifying in others). Yet it has arisen time and again, more recently as an almost physically palpable sense that this experience that I used to call conscious choice arises deep beneath conscious direction. Accepting it, or at least no longer needing to define it or fight against it, has become incredibly liberating. This notion has been reinforced repeatedly with myself and those closest to me in recent years, particularly in cases where there are repeated patterns of destructive 'choices' being made by seemingly rational people. Looking back, how often do we think to ourselves... 'why the hell did I do that?'. Only after the reaction, does a rationalization arise with 'a reason' for why I made that choice... when in the moment, there is only action/reaction. Conditions arise and my system responds to the stimuli and then my conscious mind interprets what occured in an attempt to make sense, understand or have a sense of control. Also contrary to what I used to assume, that this would be demoralizing and inhibiting and eat away at my sense of potency... my experience has been the opposite. Liberation, bouyancy and a sense of incredible potencty arises as I release into accepting that my choices arise from my true nature, in the same manner that my heart beats, my endocrine system operates and my bones and organs repair themselves without my conscious choice or interference. I experience a grand bouyancy of the utterly intimate interconnectedness of action arising from my essential nature. A merging of the outer and inner is a seeming biproduct, giving rise to the palpable notion of unity between my true nature and the entirety of stimuli around what I consider to be my separate self. It certainly seems I don't choose my emotions, or illnesses, or thoughts. Who chooses their thoughts, or has conscious control over their mind? Isn't that what meditation and cultivation is all about? The attempt to rest control over what and how much, when and what we think and feel? Isn't cultivation on a base level and admission that we don't choose concsiously what we think and feel, but would desperately like to... so we train and rewash our brains in order to try and gain some more control over processes that lie beyond the slim light of our conscious focus? Are you choosing how you feel in response to my words, or the barking of your neighbor's dog, or your reaction to the guy who cut you off, or the woman who held the elevator door for you? Do you choose to drink water over juice? Did you choose to be thirsty? Can you choose not to have an emotion, or not to respond to my words if you disagree when I claim 'we are all meat bots of awareness... complex patterns of predictable behaviors, programmed by unconscious survival drives responding to the stimuli of our environment through our desires to certain responses by the vast unconscious process of our own dance with Maya? If we choose our parents... then perhaps there is some choice in the universe. Otherwise all of the stimuli that forged the responses I have to my environment, were beyond my conscious control as I was conditioned by my environment, society and family. How often do we ask a child why they did something and they respond 'i don't know'. How often do we wonder why we did something? We act according to our nature... just as all living beings do. And are we ever really acting? Primal action?... My experience is I am always responding to stimuli, not creating independent action. So where is choice, from where does it arise? To me, my actions accord with and stem from my essential nature. How often do I intend to do one thing, change a behavior and then find myself doing just the opposite? Even after decades of dedicated practice and systematic brain rewashing... my reactions seem to arise from deep within my compulsory nature. When there's a discrepency between my conscious mind's intentions and wants and my actual responses... I get the sense that my conscious mind is like a child with a toy steering wheel, sitting in the passenger seat while dad drives the car. I steer and shift and choose... and the car goes where dad drives it. The flea riding the elephant says... "let's go to the library and study daoist texts..." and the elephant nods, then crashes back through the forest to the watering hole where the pretty ladies bathe... Take the actions of soldiers in battle, who find themselves careening through cascades of bullets and mortar fire to grab their fallen brothers and sisters and drag them to safety... Ask them after the fact what was happening at the time and they often respond "i don't know... i wasn't thinking, i just did it". Reaction arises from our essential nature is how it seems to me. The teacher who stepped in front of the bullets meant for students in the high school... this to me speaks of the compulsory nature of reaction to stimuli being a choiceless action arising from one's essential nature with its source far beneath the slim flashlight of conscious awareness.

No longer seem to be able to ask who am i?... As my mind has no answer at all. I'm fine with this as concrete answers to most questions are rendered absurd eventually and absolute certainty is all but a dried husk/relic of a mode of mind that unfolded into something else years ago... Nonetheless, the question keeps arising and the mind now morphs it into what am i?... Now I love playing games and as this is something my mind can actually answer, I had some fun and put some time into making a very comprehensive list of what i am... in an attempt to eventually find the folly in it. In reading this lengthy, intimate list I was reminded of a realization from years ago... when I realized that every attribute on my extensive list... was not a noun... nor a thing... they are all processes. Every thing i could think to list as what comprises 'me', is something I do, or something that is ongoing, unfolding. Even being a human man with a body that can be considered a thing... this very physical body is not a static thing, but an ever shifting, unfolding process. So for all that I have no concrete answers, this one keeps resonating when the question keeps arising. No matter what I list it seems that I am awareness in process. How bout you? what are you?

awareness seems so foundational... it recurrs as the likely candidate for me. what could be more foundational than awareness? aside perhaps from void? or unness... the unmanifest? perhaps void and awareness are two aspects of one foundational unfolding...

My experience was seemingly spontaneous. This was decades ago when I was in my twenties and at that time I had no formal stillness/sitting practice, yet the experience occured when I had become very still and relaxed at home, in the small hours of the late night/early morning. At the time, my only pursuit was rather intense dedication to Shao Lin and Jeet Kun Do practices. I had no formal stillness/sitting practice yet, but this experience was a major catalyst in moving toward stillness pursuits.

If I wasn't laughing at that... I'd be cryin'.

Nice!

It's interesting and informative to notice what draws my attention, retains my focus and elicits emotional responses over time. Patterns emerge. I often notice it in the manner in which I currently tell my most often retold stories. The feel of each retelling shifts, reflecting the tones of my life at the time of the retelling. Certain aspects of a story may be left out entirely, or glossed over, in favor of other details that suit my current flavoring and mood. It's like this with things that draw my attention. Invariably, whatever peaks my interest, or draws my attention is what is resonating within. Like sympathetic vibration in tuning forks... strike an A fork on one side of a room and any other A forks in the room will pick up the resonance and vibrate as well, without being struck. What draws me without, is what resonates within. Where there is sympathetic vibration, conscious awarenes is drawn. In a river, with no stones or logs as blockage, no waves manifest even in great flow. So too within awareness, with no occlusions, what is there to resonate and resist within? What stands out without, seems to be what resonates within... all that said... I feel the shift here.

Powerful stuff, fascinating topic... thank you for sharing. I recall an experience of full conscious awareness in void. It's the only real taste of separate I can say I've ever experienced. It was wholly, radically terrifying at the time. Conscious awareness arose in void. No objects anywhere, no universe... anywhere. no universe possible... even as my same familiar usual conscious awarenes was present... there was nothing. pure. infinite. nothing. pure voidness pure absence... utter and complete 'unness'. Not only was there nothing... there could be no thing. It was horrifying in the extreme... utterly alien. When awareness snapped back into body, the weeping was a combination of the remaining aweful experiential sensation of pure separation from the manifest and simultaneously a previously unimaginable level of gratitude as the palpable knowingness, the pure sensation of the unity inherent in beingness unfolded in awareness. All previous notions of duality and unity, utterly unfolded into something previously unimaginable. The waves of that stone being dropped in my pond still resonate now.

Thanks for sharing that, some impressive stuff going on there. Many adjectives come to mind when considering his abilities... primitive is not among them.

I've always found indestructible toys to be the perfect tool for deconstructing destructible toys.

I always assumed the Russians stole it from the Chinese who got it from... Aliens

evaded a potential argument and created laughter at the same time... Marblehead again showing his adept verbal aikido skillz

thanks mate, it's an attempt to describe a recurring sensation lately.

fluid, flowing life within each motion, i sense a point of stillness about which the motion pivots... this point is not always present within my form. within form i sense a similar emptiness...

Well it seems at least you've not lost your give a shit... have you seen mine perhaps? last time I can clearly recall it is Fall 1997... it was in a pub in Park Slope Brooklyn NY.