silent thunder

Ah yes... of course... the one phrase reductionist complete school of truth phrase that trumps all others.... New age bs..... we can all move along now, as the cursory glance provided by the judges have ruled and now we can all go back to our comfortable boxes of 'established and traditional schools', without any pesky complex thinking or engaging of the topic in meaningful manners... or god forbid... trying something new. New age bs wins the day mate!... thank you for your deep personal insight and experience here in saving us all from a catastrophe of something unfamiliar and unrelated to established dogma. Although, as compelling as your dismissive phrase is... it seems to lack something to me... Perhaps it's that when I look deeply into any 'non New age bs' school, when we pursue deeply into any lineage we find that at one point, every Qi, Wei and Nei Gong, along with every established school of any ism... was just some guy (or gal *gasp), in the woods or a cave, breathing, sitting and noting the reactions that transpired in his mind and body while he did so... At one point every lineage was just a person, exploring and then sharing what they discovered. At one point every established (and oh so important to some people's fundamentalist\religious dogma dominated minds) school was just a new fad. I'm sure there were plenty of villagers and craftsman standing about looking at those oddballs and saying I get similar one phrase answers that are regurgitated with little thought, connection, or critical thinking... from my very old, retired friend who listens to the news all day. Then whenever we come for a visit and a complex topic comes up in conversation, rather than engage his mind in a difficult topic, to ferret out some of the complexities, or use effort and critical thinking to really dig into the topic in useful manner... he simply ejaculates one of the parrot phrases he's picked up that is designed to shut down and bully others into silence on the topic. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't presented in a manner that is dismissive, authoritarian and denying of the potential for others to pursue the topic on their own and discovere potential truths without the guiding of the parrot phrases... but I can't tell if that's your purpose... given that we have no vocal inflection, nor body language. So I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and thinking you mean to altruistically save us from wasting our time. What most saddens me with these pat phrases is that through them, my friend's world is reducing and isolating. He no longer has to engage and think about complex issues. In his mind it's all answered so easily by the one phrase fits all school of judgement. It's self reinforcing too, as the knee jerk response of short term bias thinking comes complete with its own self reinforcing built in to its sense of superiority and ease, which reinforces the close mindedness that nothing new will be of help and pursuing anything not established is a fool's errand and anyone thus following it is also, hence a fool... This type of unthinking dogma parroting allows my friend to bathe in over simplified reductionism and remain firmly, comfortably closed in he preconceived notions of how right he is... in the place he's always occupied... the place where he feels powerful, in his bias and dogma. He's down to just two friends now, who will still come and hang out with him. I love him so much. He was one of the most well read and deeply intelligent people who taught me so much when I was a young man. Ironically, he was one who opened avenues up to me when I was younger and now, I'm still occupying a lang where not all the answers have been provided and so I gladly wade into the waters of New Age and swim and bathe, then come out again, somehow untainted and not utterly ruined and so far... there's been no waste of time. well... sheesh that came on fast... well, at least I'm not bitter about it.

when i release everything awareness remains seems like there's something important to that, but...

For me the rainbow bridge spoken of in Norse mythology, was an analogy for the path of spiritual awakening.

i love to take all of my me's camping...

For me, treatment and addressing of mental health all hinges on this one premise of 'do no harm'. When harm is done, we must act and isolate and stop this behavior and use all energy to heal as best we are able. I hold that the best we can do now, is not the best we are able to do, nor the best we will be doing in the future. As I relate to it, having high functioning adults in my direct family who are formally, clinically diagnosed and treated as mentally disabled and impaired; so much of what is culturally and scientifically deemed and ostracized and treated as mentally ill in our culture, is guilty in my experience of nothing more than having manners of expressing consciousness that lie outside the parameters of what makes 'most people feel comfortable'. How many tribal shaman's could likely pass a three day institutional eval? And yet, they were central to spiritual and healing life for untold eons in our cultural past and (in my opinion) without them, none of our modern day institutions would likely even exist. Western society in its all out sprint in pursuit of and near complete embracing of left brain achievable and measurable success and safety, has all but imprisoned, ostracized and sanctioned against any consciousness other than logical, progressive left brain materialism as useless at best and at worst, criminally unacceptable. edit:add an omitted word to first sentence

Seems very valid, my wife would likely agree with you. From my perspective, I'll justify it as a case of no longer really being able to invest too much energy in any answer. None of the many concrete answers could abide in the presence of expanding awareness. And the fluid answers are, well fluid... so not really answers at all. As my good friend and workmate Kiwi says to me... "Don't worry Creighton, you're not broken mate... horribly bent... but not broken."

Potent stuff... it reminds me of a conversation I had with a fellow student on the final night of a retreat. We randomly met down at the hotel bar where we'd been staying and started sharing some of our more intense experiences. He shared one where he woke in the middle of the night, to see Master, sitting on the back of one of the chairs in his room, observing\working on him while he slept. As Marbles worded so well, the mind can have a full experience that is not centered on the body. In simplest terms for me... Body is localized mind... mind is somewhat localized spirit. Spirit is non local field of awareness. My essential nature is comprised of all of these, in a fluid manner. It refers back to what I call The Spiral Path. It is the curving line represented on the yin yang symbol and all manifestations of form occupy the line, not the white nor black... interacting with it is like surfing the waves\boundaries of the various energies of the body\mind relationship. Through my experiences, my self assessment of my essential nature of my self... lately, is that of a field of awareness... In my rather crude viking-like methods, stumbly as they are, I experience and would describe my essential nature as a multi-level field of awareness of varying frequencies, vibrations and resonances that reconciles into that wonderful childlike triangle of spirit mind and body. Spirit, to me recently, is a field of awareness that is endlessly vast and completely intimate. So vast numbers and words are not accurate to describe it... so vast it requires other dimensions to house it... but to try and put some frame of mind like reference to it, I'd grudgingly say "Spirit is a field of awareness that I would describe as Love to an order of magnitude equal to Imagination." This field is ephemeral, non local, untaintable, spotless, unborn and undying and yet saturated in interactability, incredibly personal and intimate beyond reckoning. It seems to simultaneously and without incongruency embody emptiness void and birth of all form at once, without any effort and without losing or gaining anything. It is so personal it is beyond personality. My Mind seems to be a smaller, dense field of awareness that manifests in the field of Spirit, it seems to be woven from the frequencies of thought and emotion... and the manner in which it manifests in the field of Spirit seems similar to how a single wave manifests in the Ocean. The field of this Mind in my experience is somewhat localized, (it seems to possess parameters but also manifests non locally*). Body seems to be very localized awareness. A slow, viscous fluidic vibratory expression of awareness inside of Mind within the field of Spirit. *While there is no aspect of my body that doesn't seem to involve my mind. Mind is a field within which the body manifests and thus seems like a somewhat localized-non local field. We can measure my body and get its parameters. But how can we measure the field of mind? What are the parameters of a thought? How big is an emotion? Where is imagination located? My mind may travel anywhere imagination reaches, thus is non local, yet when my mind is in these locations it still often manifests as if I were in a body in that location, so I use the phrase somewhat localized. edit to add: body may experience mind and spirit only in its location. mind may experience body in its location and also may nonlocally experience anywhere in the field of spirit, but from a somewhat localized\perspective dependent relative position. spirit is limitless awareness, omnipresent and imbued\saturated in every thing and non thing, spacial, empty, or form based.

I keep wondering where I stop and others start?

what a great conversation... thanks bums. I still hold with one prereq awareness (it's the only one that is seems unavoidable (please keep in mind, this is according to my current perspective and my perspective is not inherently true, real, or even important)) no effort, no sustaining, no achievements, no combining, no filtering, no synthesizing, no building no transducing, no transmitting, no infusing, no distilling... awareness. edit to change is to seems

Powerful stuff... thanks guys! This really resonates with me and is a great nudging reminder just at this moment. It relates for me, to one of the most potent pieces of advice I have ever received... "stop taking the universe personally". that one phrase has brought so much release for me it's incredible. For me, this is at the heart of the old saying "The Sage is in the world, but not of it." Which eluded me for some time in my younger days. But now, I fully live it to great benefit... at least some of the time. Even while fully engaging in the processes of the world the Sage holds no position, takes nothing personally and is thus untaintable and unshakable. When I began to embody this teaching and when this realization of authenticity began to crystallize in my life, I really began to be able to live the notion of 'not taking the universe personally'. The world is not happening to me... it's more like a mutual unfolding... It also released me from a sense that I had to hide, dampen, or filter my authentic self in any way for other's comfort, or approval. Incredibly liberating. the universe does not take sides.

what still resonates in memory of the event is the palpable awareness and sensation of just how alive space is... not just that it was my body, space is as sentient as form, maybe even more so... three tenets that keep tickling me after some decades of dancing with the ungraspable dao... there is thunder in silence (my experiece of this seemed like it would shake apart my body) darkness is full of light (even when it seems I can't perceive it_) space is not empty

Just read last week that a female American Blackbird has been positively id'd up in Scotland. First one ever. At last count there were four planes full of birdwatchers chartered to fly up and descend on the small town to try for a glimpse of her. That's some dedication to bird watching... and just points out... how relative everything is... most common bird in the Americas, folks here don't bat an eye when they flitter about... there, it's like The Beatles are back together and folks are nigh on foaming at the mouth for a glimpse. fun stuff... I wonder how she crossed the Atlantic?

I had two bites of a cherry tart last night around 10pm. Its memory is still causing ripples of happy right now 12 and a half hours later... even though I have no goal and I currently have no pie or tart contentment remains.... hmm curious

very... my dreams often intensify in vibration when working through illness.

my favored form of meditation when I'm sick is sleep good solid, sweat inducing sleep with many blankets and then wake up and drink lots of broth loaded with garlic, tumeric and cayenne maybe a snort or two of brandy and then back to more coccoon blanket sleep meditation

The road goes ever on and on.... down from the door where it began...

Stranger in a Strange Land.

except for the bit where there's still more story...

just in case your spine wasn't already revolving uncontrollably in a blissful spiral of ecstatic flow... i offer this: you know... just in case

I lived the materialist mindset. I appreciate why it exists, why it persists and still recall the sense of why it was so appealing; but it dissolved for me in presence at some point and has never again been able to maintain its integrity in my paradigm no matter how often, how compellingly, or how angrily and forcibly it is presented. I'm not interested in opposing it, or arguing against it. I have no axe to grind against it. It simply cannot abide in my presence as a viable manner of declaring truth. Awareness melted its foundation. I was raised in it and I lived it, willingly saturated myself in it to try and fit in and please for a time, but the reductionist surety of it simply could not abide in the presence of vajra, just as the clouds cannot long abide in Sunshine... in the presence of awareness and in the process of life, it simply fell away. Not through fighting it, or desiring it to be gone, it just happened... it evaporated as naturally as mist in morning light. An effortless occurence with no value attached. That world view evaporated and no longer sustains itself in my presence and vajra. The hinge looking back, seems to lie in how awareness relates with my perceptions and my thoughts. I tended to believe I was my thoughts and I tended to believe my thoughts; for a time, even tried to believe when faced with their fallacy, back then... how violent and cranky I could become over it... but this too was a clue, for me anyway... an inroad to clarity eventually. Everything stems from source, even fallacy, so truth is unavoidable. I used to believe my thoughts and my perceptions. and now... I no longer do. Not out of any desire... it just happened... gradually, naturally. While some of my thoughts and perceptions still seem beneficial, I can no longer presume that they are 100% reality. Not inherently. Not even remotely. Yet there is functioning and beneficial interaction with them. Nope, there are more questions than answers these days. And that is wonderful... Questions are flowing and can be open, answers in my experience usually reduce down and down. Eventually, if followed to their extremes, answers for me resemble not absolute and reliable 100% sureties and reflections of reality as it is, but appear more like fabrics made of assumptions and projective biases that are required to stretch over absurdities and leave logical battlefields worth of unanwerable and unapplicable situations in their wake. It still seems to me, somewhat persistently that whatever i am, part of what i am is a functioning relationship between awareness and perceptions/senses... yet assumption based upon perceptions is no longer viable for answers... questions roil in the very space of every form I see... my father's body is now sand. My Father's body was replaced a dozen times in his life. Yet he remained my father to my perception. My Mother at the end of her life had a healthy body, but no memories of me, nor my childhood. While the body of my Mother was very much present... the essence of my Mother died four years before her body did... and there was no connection those qualities that made my Mother my Mom... there was a form, but no substance, so to speak... So what was essentially my mother? Where in her body did she start and where stop? My perception tells me she died in essence before her body died... but death is not death to me, it is decay... decay is the first step in the growth cycle... or the last... hmm I forget. maybe it depends how I perceive it... not sure... don't have an answer, but the question of what is essentially my mother remains... flowing. Where was my Mother when her memories were gone? It's as viable to me and as insistent a question as when I sit in silence and ask myself... where inside me, is the me part? Inside I am not made of me elements... my body is composed only non me elements... unless... na nevermind. so, ya, I don't believe everything I think, or perceive... and that's just how it is for me these days... I am ok with it. I don't recommend it... it's often not pleasant. Though the old answers weren't pleasant either, they only seemed so, so long as I didn't question, or critically engage and think... I just can't believe them any longer. Is this a good thing? Or a bad thing? My Grade School Science Teacher may have one answer and my Sunday School Reverend another... would either be wrong? I don't think so... but then that's just a thought and we all now know how much stock I put in that... Just because I thought something and felt strongly about it, doesn't make it true. Just because I experienced something and it made sense to my logical mind, doesn't make it real, or true, or even important. Perception is not truth... for me. I suspect it is not 100% accurate for anyone, but that presumption dies in direct proportional relationship to the square of the fallacy inherrentin my perceptive and cognitive apparatus. Awareness seems foundational... yet only where I am now and this too may flow into another realization and the current paradigm melt... if so, I welcome it. How about this...? If I assume that my perception is 100% accurate. Then based on my accurate perception... I would and logically could justify, with absolute surety declare to any who would listen that the Sun revolves round the Earth. It's obvious. It's measurable and repeatable. To deny that observation of perception and to counteract the reductionist ease of the answer supplied by the fabric of perception required centuries of assimilation of critical thinking... it took uncountable deaths... eventually it took the fabric of the assumption of the perception being stretched to the extremes of absudities, where the answer and the fallible perceptions the answer is woven from could no longer sustain itself before it melted. Though Naive Realism is a persistent bugger. Even now there is a growing movement of Flat Earth again... because perception is so convincing when it's an answer, instead of a question. Yet for me, it's effortless now and no longer has any teeth which bring anger or upset. It is simply that it cannot abide in the presence of my awareness and so whenever it arises in my sphere, it soon evaporates like mist in morning light... for me. All perception seems like a gamble to some extent. My relationship with any declarations, be they scientific or spiritual is altering lately. Science and Religion love to provide 100% answers. Yet what has happened to the answers provided by Physics or the Catholic Church, or Medicine over the last few hundred years? Answers that were presented and firmly held up as 100% have all shifted, inevitably... Its' natural too, it's wonderful in fact. My father is a great example, ( he was an engineer and inventor with a dozen patents to his name and as solid a Materialist as I have ever met in this incarnation) shortly before he died, he relayed to me his joyful dismay with Physics and how what he learned in College in the Sixties was mostly turned on its head and was now basically so much rubbish. He'd been brought up to speed in his retirement by some documentaries and articles... and it didn't upset him, or cause him angst. He just shook his head in astonishment and then finished his drink with a grin and a chuckle. Medicine used to be 100% sure that letting the bad blood out of a person would result in healing... and sometimes it did, which just further complicated things due to the fact that through our short term thinking, we reinforce our preconceived biases and only lash out when we are presented with information that points out the dissonance in the perceptive gambles. So, when folks declare the brain, or matter as the source of awareness and consciousness, it's understandable to me, I really get why they do... but it can't maintain itself... What I hear is someone declaring to everyone who will listen, that based on their perception... the source of the DJ, The Band, all their Instruments and the Music are the radio. I'm good with it... everyone views the gem from their facet of it. It's all good, provided that no one starts piling up kindling and grabbing flint stones anyway.

decided to share less

My son likes to make up riddles. How can I go to sleep in my room, wake up in my room and not be in the same place? My answer was... The Spiral Path.

*nods* Extremes of expression in energy do seem to manifest their balancing energy inherently... I watch it every time I go to the beach. The yang energy in the wave as it meets the resistance of the shore, builds upward. The force of its mass and inertia carrying the mass of the wave up and up until the yang energy reaches its zenith and then the magic shift and yin spontaneously manifests, as the yang inertia can no longer support its own mass and the water settles in balance. All seemingly without effort. More and more for me, Yin\Yang no longer seem like opposites, nor even to oppose one another, rather they seem mutually beneficial and self balancing expressions of one energtic system. The drawn bow will settle in balance... or snap into balance... but balancing the spiral line as the expression of the constant flow of energies balancing.

for me, recently it's not... if I'm not me who am I? or even who am i? it's... at what point am I not me and you are you? at which point in the space between us, do I stop and you start? is there a line of demarcation? is this the infamous spiral line of the yin yang? i sometimes suspect i am that line and that i am you so you also are that line as are the 10,000... and none of it is static or solid, not one solid form anywhere all full of space that dances with vibration it is all flow, flow from form to form within space. form flowing in space while space is infused in the very core of the non solid and vibratory pattern that lends to the experience of the form

*deep bow of respect*