silent thunder

Forgive? What could there be to forgive? A great conversation, insight and good will. These are among the greatest in life. I'm grateful for the sharing. I seem blessed beyond reason with my son. He has brought shifts to the field of our family... healing, play, insights, simple presence... it's humbling and full of love. Much Love Mate! Creighton

I regularly play games (board and video) that enrage me. I like this, because I am instantly aware that any anger or rage I experience is utterly absurd, since it revolves around this game and it has become a great playing ground for me to engage my anger in a place where I have much control. I can stop the game and walk away. Or persist... One thing I have been doing recently is that when a wave of anger rises. I close my eyes and become body aware and see what sensations I have... try to locate any specific sensations in the body. I ask where is this anger? and then just breath. Two things have been happening regularly for me with this. One: The sensation that stands out is that there is a slight presence of pressure just outside the front of my body, about three or so inches in front of my skin, either in front of my face, or slightly lower than my heart/chest. Two: In the body presence awareness of simply breathign in presence and asking where the anger is... the anger almost instantly dissipates. I'm hoping to pull this into my daily interactions at work and home to similar effect.

This sense of waking up while already being awake... seems like a hint. My sense of waking up is unique to waking up. And how it can happen that my awareness can experience waking up, when my body and mind are clearly already in the midst of living is... seems like a big clue, to me anyway. Like a key to a map. My body and mind are walking down the street, avoiding obstacles and not falling down... awake, like they do and then suddenly, "I" have the sense of 'waking up' and becoming lucid and present where previously I was not 'awake'. This repeated experience of feeling like I am just waking up in mid-step, while my body (and mind) are already clearly awake and engaging in life stuff... is reinforced in several memories of experiences... usually and at first it was after recovering from weaknesses or tough illness and having being stuck not just inside, but in bed for some time. But other times as well... it occurs in mid-step, middle of the night, while walking down the street and suddenly (just like becoming lucid in the deamstate) I will have the sense of 'waking up' and seeing everything there lucidly for the first time. A tree on my block that I have walked by daily for a nine years is suddenly experienced as never before. There is a dreamlike surreality to this waking up experience that bends any sense of one stable objective realness... like the physical world being concrete and stable is not known to be illusory... I feel it. I simply, deeply experience the malleability and dreamlike quality of every day life, and each time I experience it, it is the same... it is exactly like waking up suddenly and grabbing, or becoming aware of one's bearings. The experience is the same, whether I become lucid on my driveway or in my dream. Ironic too, that a sense of waking up within reality would be reminiscent of dreaming... like mirrored surfaces of ponds. Am I under the water looking up, or on top looking down? How can I be certain? Reminds me that the beginning of my own personal experience of consciousness on this planet, as it mimicks my consciousness in dreams. When I become lucid in a dream, the dream is always already transpiring... it's already in progress when I become lucid and wake up into it. Then i start reacting and playing in the dream, but the dream and the setting of the dream, its whole world, pre-exists my lucidity. And my experience of my own waking consciousness in this body is the same. I don't recall my birth, or the womb, or my first several years on the planet. But at some point, I became lucid in this world, in my family and in this process that was already going on that they all told me is 'the real world'. I became lucid in my body and this life, in the same way I become lucid in dreams. There is an emptiness here that is... a point of stillness in the midst of this... the pause of becoming lucid and 'being present'... that empty pause moment of waking that is like a key to me... it feels more real than anything else.

This is me with my Son a few years ago.

Sleeping dreams Waking dreams Avatars in video games Interactive digital environments Levels of dreaming and reality seem to overlap and I have had, since the age of a young child had this nagging sense that one day... I will wake up in the 'real world' in a very similar manner that I become lucid in my dreamscapes nightly... I have experienced Hypnagogic Visions... where I wake up during a dream, open my eyes and see the dream playing out in the room I am sleeping in while my body is paralyzed. I have experienced waking visions with eyes closed that were three days of experience, all while my body was standing in a shower. Long enough for the water to go cold, but not three days. Time, Now, Dream, Memory, Perception... where does real begin and end? So many things I've experienced in the 'not real' dreamscapes have affected me and taught me about my own inner nature and in memory they are as, and more vivid than many experiences I've had in the 'real waking world'... so to me, they are just as real. for they have the ability to affect my sense of self, my understanding of my own nature and they resonate with me in memory as potently as anything I've ever experienced while awake. It's intoxicating if I follow it too deeply with my monkey mind. But the sense of it is always present. That there are many levels to wakingness and beingness and they are all as relevant and real as all the others. Thanks for sharing mate. It's appreciated.

Lots of spontaneous shaking, hopping, flapping, slapping and thumping going on in my life these days. Throughout my day at work particularly, I'll become aware of a seemingly random impetus to shake, hop and slap my body... so I go with it. My coworkers find this endlessly amusing.... "hey check it out, Creighton is slapping the shit out of himself again...." "need any help Creighton?" Sometimes there is a warm rush and a cascade of energy through the body as a result.

sure... moment as in the present now this moment... this is it all there is and all there ever is... and it is all of it. or just the all ecompassing word LIFE is another term that settles on my thought pond. I share this sentiment! This place is incredible is it not? It affords us the opportunity to share and meet and exchange the flow of ideas and connections. Much Love Mate! Glad you are here as well!

and as for the end of songs... and vibration. The American Navy has a log of old radio broadcasts that their submarine listeners will encounter from time to time as they pass through the oceans. Seems that there are still broadcasts of Churchill in WW2 bouncing between our bedrock and the Ionosphere, still vibrating. That always reminds me that I could probably put more awareness into what words I choose to speak and even what thoughts I allow myself to pursue, as I suspect there is no real end to the vibrations of such...

music is as alive to me as my body is... To illustrate this I want to divert real quick and share a stunning moment I experienced recently. I recall watching an episode of Chef's Table on Netflix. Season 3 Episode 1 I recommend as a study in mindfulness. It features a Buddhist Nun, Jeong Kwan whose process of growing and preparing food is imbued in her mindfulness practice. Her food, prepared in such a way has now started drawing the attention of some of the world's most accomplished chefs and so she has on occasion received visitors to come and experience for themselves, her process. Bear with me, the point is coming. She grows and tends the food in their garden and with presence and awareness, prepares ordinary meals that are meant to foster mindfulness and allow the process of eating and preparing food to seamlessly integrate mindfulness and the buddha nature. The reason I bring this up is at one point, the Western Chef who had been invited to attend the monestary relates this story to the camera. (paraphrasing) I was standing with her and she, without speaking, took me by the hand and led out of the building, down a path to a spot by the garden where a stream flows by. She looked at me and held a finger to her mouth, (shhh style) ... listen. They listened for a couple of minutes and then to him, in english she said one word... "orchestra"... and walked away. He was left stunned. Music is alive to me. and I suspect there is no boundary to it, even though a song may seem to start and end. The flow of vibrations... does the music stop because I no longer perceive it? Is silence not music? It's coming around that I, like music seem to have no end, even though there are tips to my fingers. Where can I distinguish clearly that the affect of my fingers motions on the conditions of life around me, stop... I have touched so many things that continue to vibrate long after my fingers leave their surface. And those vibrations, cause others to also sympathetically respond and so the flow continues, all one in the end, all connected. One great song life seems to me now. All our motions, pauses and touches, thoughts, words and deeds and indeed mostly our silence and the pauses too... all part of the song that is our life. Our entire life, one letter in the name of LIFE. We all seem to seamlessly merge into one another in endless flow of the unity of all. Patterns may seem to appear to my perceptions as individual things, arpeggios, clusters may give rise to the appearance of a separate song... but where does the music live? Do the vibrations die? Are they born? Or do they rise and fall from the silence as the seasons... I dunno. blissfully, I don't grasp much at the answer, but the question keeps returning unbidden but welcome... it seems to remind me of something beyond the grasp of the thinking mind... and brings me a deep, pleasant vibration near the spine and below the heart... a twinge of blissful suspicion that my intellectual mind can't put into words, yet my presence and awareness can saturate itself in bliss with... like a warm oil filling my awareness with calm acceptance and releasing loveness. guess that's enough rambling for now. I'm deeply grateful for the words and intentions shared by you all here.

I oscillate on this topic of inside outside. Sitting on ground, sitting on carpet. Sometimes i am compelled to get out of my house... since 'aside from bismuth, nature doesn't build at 90 degrees'. Yet the vast majority of my formal practice has taken place indoors, on synthetic carpet, usually about 3.5 meters above the ground. I recall a fundamentalist type who was heatedly declaring at a weekend Qi Gong seminar that it was 'patently impossible to make progress practicing while wearing rubber soled shoes'. My cousin, one of the fascilitators, overheard and countered that he had not noticed an appreciable decline in his own practice while wearing the shoes he had on at that moment, (which were the standard rubber soled kung fu type shoes). He lifted his foot then and he along with all of us was kind of startled to notice a small hole burned through his shoe at the yong chuan point. He lifted his other foot and yup... a small, pen sized hole there too. He shrugged and said "the energy seems to find a way."

From the opening to his book THIS IS IT... Alan Watts Spiritual and mystical suggest something rarefied, otherworldly, and loftily religious, opposted to an ordinary material life which is simply practical and commonplace. The whole point of these essays is to show the fallacy of this opposition, to show that the spiritual is not to be separated from the material, nor the wonderful from the ordinary. We need, above all, to disentangle ourselves from habits of speech and thought which set the two apart, making it impossible for us to see that this--the immediate, everyday, and present experience--is IT, the entire, ultimate point.

this quote from Alan Watts stood out when I read it while mulling over your observations and questions. It is the opening of his book THIS IS IT.

Very potent stuff LimA... thank you for sharing. Lately, (last few years).. I have been aware that there is no longer for me a hard and distinguishable barrier between body/mind and spiritual nature. They are no longer considered separate, but ceaselessly I am experiencing them as the ever inter-responsive, synthesizing expressions of source in varying manners/frequencies and resonance. My old manners of perception lent to the idea that maybe truth and spirituality were separate from my mind and my body... and that to achieve spiritual insight I had to reach outside myself, or renounce the body, or reject the mind. To a book, or master, or method, or a natural place such as a river, waterfall or forest. This sense fueled my ceaseless seeking for decades. Now I sense that I am never at any moment, apart from source, spirituality imbues every nuance of every object, thought and motion and that my very sense of seeking was one of the major impediments to my experience of unity and bliss. What we as humans often describe and refer to as spiritual in our writings and sharing, has come it seems to me, to carry a connotation of 'otherness', of 'out there-ness' to spiritual experiences. That spiritual insights and experiences are somehow apart from our core essential nature, our physical form and mind. Increasingly I have the palpable sense that there is no longer an appreciable distinction of these, that they are facets of one (source) gem, not separate things of themselves. Never apart from me in this moment here, with this breath, in my hair clippings, even my piss and shit. Your thoughts on this have been echoing all week while I considered my response. Thanks again. Potent stuff.

Good one Marble! Reminds me of riding in my Dad's van. Weekends and road trips, camping/hunting/hanging out. These guys got a lot of play too.

Tones, vibration, resonance, frequency. I had a waking vision once and in it, the Great Mother showed me the glyphs that represented every aspect of physical life that ever manifested in this Maya Dance. Every being, every blade of grass, every animal, flower, insect and inanimate object. She said to me, 'they all sing their life'. And I understood that she was conveying to me, that the entirety of my manifestation, with all its thoughts, motions, sounds and stillness... all summed up into a frequency, a tone, that was unique to me. And that I sang my existence through this and that my entire life was one note... one letter in the name of life. All of us singing our life in the jazz riffs of the All in All.

Acceptance to me has levels. I accept that the conditions of the world are as they are... Acceptance also means sometimes accepting that I will act to alter conditions as they are because I do not tolerate certain conditions as they exist and I accept that I have the means to alter them... so I do. Then in either case... act or not. I let that shit go. release and accept. Marblehead offered another take on it when I mentioned it a while back. Acknowledgement rather than acceptance. That works just as well for me. But the quix of it is, even when I accept some things, I don't necessarily tolerate them. I accept that I may be the means of change on occasion.

That is stunning. She painted the landscape and her portrait. They are not separate, not mutually exclusive. Really powerful. Thanks for sharing.

on second thought... na. remain silent, or say something better than silence.

@Spotless Read this and immediately thought of you and your handle here. The greatest sin is to call yourself a sinner. You are a child of God. Though gold be covered with mud for centuries, it remains gold. So the pure ‘gold’ of the soul can be covered over with the mud of delusion for aeons, but in its true nature it remains forever undefiled.” —Paramhansa Yogananda”

I had no mistress, until she saturated me. Now I have no other. Beyond words... beyond perception. inutterable, gossamer, expansive, saturating, ever-pregnant and empty. utterly complete and more... real she is.

I had very tense and tight hips and ankles for many years. These stretches were helpful. I grew up sitting cross legged on the floor most of the time, so getting half lotus was pretty quick. Full lotus took a few years longer. There is no more intense stretching for me. Not like I used to for Kung Fu and Sports with the straining, pushing and pulling. I'm entirely done with the 'no pain, no gain' philosophy. That is not helpful in my experience. Stretching now is very gentle and based on breath and awareness in the point of tension. The majority of it is informal and woven into my movements by breathing into body awareness at any given point where tension arises. The more seated practice I engaged in, the more my hips seemed to open up. Since much of the preliminary seated ritual is dropping the physical body in emptiness and silence. Lately, I suspect that the real source of flexibility is not in the pulling of muscles, but in relaxed presence. It's in the breath and awareness.

reminds me of the Bob Marley quote: Some folks feel the rain, others just get wet.

Badass bees buzz byzzzzzz Ultraviolet eyesight and flowers for food.

This conversation really rings some bells for me.