silent thunder

In a conversation with my gal late the other night, I brought up my assumption/suspicion (one that I've had as long as I can recall), that before men realized they were part of the birth process, that women naturally ruled the world. Due to them being the source of new life. My wife replied "Where? When? When have women ever not been subjected to the power of men, or held the power of society? I think it's all a myth/assumption on your part." When men realized they had some input (ha) to the process, there was in my assumption, a shift to the Patriarchy. Throughout my late teens particularly, I had this recurring thought, that the pendulum has shifted to its extreme of the yang and there will soon be a shift toward the yin. I can find many references to socieities like the Iriquois Nation, where children were marked matrilineally and women held property separate from their husbands/fathers. I know that in Viking life, women held property and were granted divorce if they approached the All-Thing and voiced their desire to separate. But these are not Matriarchal Societies by any stretch... I'm curious now if this is always just some assumption of my own devising, or if it recurrs in my mind because it is seeded in ancestral memory of another time with a different way.

i no longer have any firm beliefs... but there are a few things I suspect may be truths.

I'm reminded of an incident involving a well meaning neighbor who in trying to do the right thing, caused the death of a litter of kittens. A stray cat birthed a litter under our property and this gal was feeding the Mom, tending the kittens and watching/fretting over them constantly, obsessively. She is beset by many health issues, constant anxiety and extreme stress. One afternoon she panicked and grabbed all the kittens, because the mother had disappeared. She brought the kittens to the local pound to save them. Those that didn't die from getting ill at the shelter, were euthenized soon after. Not a week later, we saw the Mother cat, still walking around the neighborhood. She hadn't disappeared at all. She was out hunting to have milk for her babes. This woman was absolutely certain she was doing the 'right thing' to help those kittens... and here I sit, typing this now and judging her, that she was wrong. Neither one of us is right. It's just life. Life just is. Just Be...

I'm desperately sick of the seemingly default inclination of my mind to cement itself to a position and then defend it, or attack other positions relative to it. Any more, it's painfully apparent to my awarness, that this process is futile, infantile adn would be humorous in the extreme were it not responsible for so much suffering in my own self and in the apparent exterior world around me. The entire process seems birthed in violence at its core and gives rise to unimaginable suffering, on the smallest and grandest scales. For decades of my life, I walked around trying to convince others when I thought they were wrong. Much of this was due to my apostacy/awakening out of the world view I was given by my Mother and her reiligion. I considered that old world view to be 'wrong' and 'false' and that I had woken up into the 'truth'. Now I realize it is not the Truth... by only my truth. My path is true relative to me, but no longer do I have any notions that I can improve another's path by interfering, altering or changing it. Who am I to know what another should do to awaken? Perhaps my assumption that in alleviating someone's suffering through my changing their mind, or circumstances to be making anything better? I'm reminded of the stories of folks who, winning the lottery, assume all their troubles will vanish only to find their lives are far more miserable after the money than before. Their old friends no longer relate to them, their fellow rich folks don't accept them, due to the random nature of their status and they end up isolated and in great suffering in spite of much money in the bank. I have no notion that I can improve another's life path. I can't fix anyone. I'm not the world police, nor the spirit brigade. This is at the foundation of my radical release approach to life of late. Who am I to know what suffering, or lack of suffering will bring to awakening, another awareness? I just walk my path. I react as I react, but there is no agenda to cleanse, organize or set anyone else straight. There is no straight, there is no right or wrong. only facets of perception, like faces on a gem, refracting and reflecting awareness. I can only effectively be me. All else is projection. So I release everything... and repeatedly, the only thing that remains, indeed I suspect the only thing that actually exists... is awareness and presence. And this seems utterly neutral. Verse 2 from My Haiku Tao 2 As high defines low, difficult defines easy, sound requires silence. Relative to self, mind creates a position, perceptions arise. Mind of perception, exists in fields of conflict, self against other. Having and losing are forever together, always rise with fall. Always opposites, reflecting in their other; the truth within form. Beyond perception, opposites experienced, as unified bliss.

She was able to tell Dr Weiss things about his own dead son that she could never have known... woof! That is some compelling stuff! Wow, I bet Dr Weiss had quite the face when that transpired through his Yale/Columbia trained materialist mind paradigm.

Another very intriguing aspect to the perception of dreams and 'reality', I've also been marking how becoming aware in 'real life' as a child exactly mirrors my experiences becoming lucid in a dreams. I do not become lucid before my dreams start. I've heard some folks do, I haven't experienced this myself. When lucidity arises in the dream state, the dream is already in process and something within the dream environment triggers my awareness to become conscious that I am participating in a dream. It was the same way in my 'waking life' childhood. I don't recall the start of this life. Somewhere between the ages of 2 and 4 I became aware of my life in what feels like the exact same manner I become lucid in dreams. This conversation has reminded me of a film I love on this topic. Waking Life. Time to pull that off the shelf and revisit it.

Waking life and dreaming seem to mirror each other and seem inexoribly linked to me. My earliest memory is of a dream. Before I knew what dreams were, as a toddler, I had a dream so horrific, so real, it caused my awareness to snap out of my body in my desperate desire to escape the scenario. That laid a foundation for always having a suspicion that 'waking life' is not awake at all most of the time. Our lives are rounded with a sleep and we sleep through our waking. This is why certain moments of life stand out so much... when clarity and awareness pierce the slumber and we experience that 'aha!' of true wakefulness. Humans seem prewired to drop into trance and hypnosis as their default state. Waking life and Dreaming mirror each other, to me it's like when I am in the water and my eyes are above the water, or below the water. I also find myself wondering... when in a dream of climbing a tree... what is the tree made of that I can so clearly feel under my fingers as I climb... in fact... what are my fingers made of in the dream? Also, I have moments of clarity that arise seemingly spontaneously in waking life, where in midstep while walking down the street, my awareness will suddenly 'come awake' and I look around rather stunned at the reality of the world... where before my body was walking about, yet awareness and mind were not in the body. Really intriguing topic.

We have a silver cup that lives under the spout of our water dispenser and our habit is to fill it and let water sit in that cup until someone comes along and uses it. Then they refill the cup and let it sit for the next person to come along, so there is always a cup of silver charged water waiting for use. I've been drawn recently to making my own colloidal silver water, but am retiscent for some unkown reason up to this point.

I was at work one day and a painter saw my double dorje/vajra necklace and asked if I had a teacher. I responded "yes.. everywhere! you, him, the floor, the door, those trees, the insects...."

on second thought...

I too, find it prudent to always walk a mile in another's shoes before judging them. That way, when I judge them, I'm a mile away and I have their shoes...

all my life the unshakable sense that one moment I will awaken within 'reality' in a similar manner lucid to how I have become within the dream state lucid on a multitude of occasions.

Great topic. Metals, Water and Crystals have always sung and vibrated in potent harmonies to me and I wear copper, silver and white gold regularly, yellow gold on occasion. I have three pieces I wear regularly/daily, a Tourmaline pendant, circled in silver, with a silver inlay of the Flower of LIfe set in crushed amethyst/emerald and ruby dust. I just recently changed it's chain to copper. There is also a double dorje/vajra (bronze, Tibetan) I keep on a small copper chain and wear regularly. And then there's a Yehming Zhu whom I lovingly know as "old man Lao" who came to me some years back at a retreat. He is always nearby, but sometimes his harmonies are too intense to have on the body. When not on my person, he prefers to swing from the horns of a ram skull I have hanging on my balcony, gathering light. He asks me to push him when I walk by... (he's never stopped glowing in the six years I've been his carrier). As for water... woof... that relationship has really blossomed over the last six years. We use one of those ceramic two gallon serving containers for our water. The ones where you invert a five gallon water bottle into the jug. We used to fill our jugs from a filtration unit near our grocery store, but recently I shifted and I now distill all our water at home. We live just South of Los Angeles and there is a large oil refinery a couple miles East of us. Torrance has a marsh to the South of us and 1/3 of our tap water comes to us through a reverse osmosis filtration plant. Being me, I ph tested and compared our tap water, vs the filtered water from the machine a couple years ago and found the ph of our tap water to be two levels more alkaline than the filtered water from the dispenser which was something of a surprise... (our tap water also has better ph than several popular bottled waters) but as I had no way to test the tap water for particulates and heavy metals, I coulnd't trust that... and my cynical nature was no longer trusting the maintenance of the vending/filtering machine dispenser. As such, I now distill all our cooking and drinking water in a one gallon counter top distiller and man I really appreciate that thing! That water is amazing! I then charge every five gallon jug of distilled water with Solfeggio Harmonics and place a large chunk of Amethyst in the bottom of the serving jug which I rotate out every five or six jugs. When I was seven, my Father took me on a vacation to his homeland in South Dakota. While there, we stopped at an Amethyst mine, where you could mine/collect raw amethyst for 1$/pound (1970's). I collected 7 pounds on that trip and still have the collection 42 years later (minus a few gifted pieces). When my Father passed and I went to settle his estate, it had been a while since we'd seen each other, I found one of the chunks that I mined that day sitting on his desk in his office... woof! that was a potent connection. Each piece in the collection is about the size of a man's fist. I place one of these in the bottom of our ceramic water dispenser to charge the water. Some four years ago, I met a composer Jami Deva, at a retreat where they were using his Solfeggio Harmonic compositions to great effect. There is a particular piece of his that I have listened to daily since then... listening to it is like swimming in light... I place headphones facing down on top of the water jug and charge our water with Solfeggio harmonics. edit to add: here's a link to that music piece if anyone is interested, Gaia Healing It's touching, I just noticed he still has my review of that piece on his site.

<shrug> this was my reaction to being in the scouts as well...

at this point I seem to be a citizen of the following cities. generocity, reciprocity and synchronicity

or like this fat bird... they ride the pale blue dot as it flies through the inky expanse...

i never take myself too seriously... cuz everybody knows fat birds don't fly

a few moments after reading this eloquence, from my television Alan Watts said: "and so we can come to wonder...who it is, who carries this corpse and its skeleton around in what we call life?"

When the bible was cannonized and the books codified into the form they now occupy, there was I would wager, no one involved in the process who could envision a time such as we live in now... when a common farmer, or carpenter/artist such as myself, would be able to read the bible for himself and thus inquire directly to answer the inconvenient questions, so often ignored or shut down by the church. As such, the wealth of contradictions in the varying books was considered a non issue, as no commoner would ever have access to the wealth, the means, or the time, to devote to learning to read the words for themselves and thus would always be required to rely upon the clergy to interpret the words of god and remain firmly within the context decided by doctrine.

Apple settled a class action lawsuit probably 10 years ago now. I will never purchase another apple product after my experience with them. They were caught deleting personal files from their customers hard drives when their program encountered music files that weren't listed in their data base. It was an attempt to strike down illegal downloading from sources such as Napster. In my case. I had no files from Napster, but having several close friends in the music industry, I had acquired close to 10,000 music tracks of personal releases, demos and private live sets gifted to me from internationally renowned DJ's and artists. For years, I thought my hard drive had simply malfunctioned when I realized nearly 15% of my music files had dissolved mysteriously one afternoon. After I was done raging and sobbing, (i've had a remarkable attachment to music all my life), I let it go. It slowly began to dawn on me though, that the only tracks missing, were the gifted and privately shared tracks. Nothing commercial was gone. Some years later, (when I still read the news), I happened upon an article about the class action lawsuit brought against Apple. They admitted to the action when they were caught deleting files from libraries that their source read as lacking a purchase license. In my case, I lost thousands of personal gifts that could never be replaced. I deleted anything associated with Apple from my systems that day and have never purchased another item from that company.

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

Gratitude shifts awareness to opening the heart and softens the mind. In my experience, it cultivates awareness of the very real and subtly tangible, but very meaningful connection between the perceived self and the 'rest of the world', softening the illusory boundaries of 'separate self syndrome' with the actual connected reality, bringing comfort, resilience and healing.

My son and I love this series! He was about 8 when we first watched it together on netflix a few years back and the concepts and story lines inspired many potent conversations about some incredibly deep topics. Just last week he brought out the dvd's and we are now working our way through the series for the second time. We just passed the assault of Bah Sing Sei. I appreciate it even more this time around. General Iroh is a compelling blend of duty to his station and country while maintaining a non-judemental accepting openness to his former enemies while hiding among them as a refugee. And Zuko's overall storyline is an incredible journey of self discovery, and the painful systematic stripping away of projected notions of culture, self, family and duty. His story arch to the end of the tale is in a word stunning. Such writing and conceptual topics make it far more than a children's show to me. I deeply love this series.

sparklies!

*deep bow* thank you!