silent thunder

for me it's definitely Aloha... until next time.

lol me too. This idea of spirals has been with me most of my life. It resonates in my very bones. spirals everywhere. Spirals are progressive circles... when viewed head on, again they can still appear as a simple circle O spring summer winter autumn yet this spring is not last spring, nor the next, yet they are linked... and so it becomes progressive and residivistic, depending on perception... a spiral action. and it manifest open, unbroken, yet also contains and holds... holds a pattern that is repeated and is observed above and below, within and without. form your fist and it's a spiral.. the shape of the ear, shells, rows of sunflower seeds... fibonacci everywhere awareness and the subtle body is like this to me, yet it folds in on itself top and bottom like my avatar pic spirals within spirals, opening and closing, upon a central point, or channel expanding and contracting simultaneously. To me this is the shape of the field of awareness that my body manifested and resides within. It's the shape of morphic fields, apples, the qi fields of trees, gravitational fields around black holes...

stack enough circles together and you have a tunnel... then you can set up a toll booth at both ends and you have income aaaaand then we're back to taxes and death...

I once arrived at this observation based on an odd question that came to me... I forget if a friend asked it, if I read it somewhere, or if it just surfaced on my thought pond... but the question was... how is a circle open and unbroken? It seemed counter-intuitive, because to be a circle...well, circles are quite obviously closed. and then one afternoon, this idea settled in me, that it is a matter of how I perceive the circle. When I look at a circle top down, it is unbroken and closed O and it contains what is within and holds back what is without. When I shift my perception of the circle sideways it remains unbroken, but is now open and appears like this: I and permits all to pass through it without breaking. <------I-------> so the circle is open and unbroken...

you made me snort

My gal's brief experience with it was blissful. When I revived her, she was quite pissed at me. "why would you do that?!?!!!" (wake me from that )

Thanks. I'll be looking into him some more for sure... powerful stuff.

Powerful quote Orion. where is that from?

I love chess! What a great game. I'm decent at it, but not great. However, if you can stomach it and your friend is good, keep getting your ass handed to you. When I left NYC for the West Coast, 17 years ago this month I just realized, the guys I worked with threw me a going away party. At the party there was a young man, early 20's, he was one of our laborers at the shop (we built scenery for broadway shows and the fashion industry), sitting next to a chess board, kicking everyone's ass. I sat down and tried my hand. We played three games in under five minutes. I don't recall if I collected any pieces from him other than pawns. He aced me in a handful of moves every game. I stalled, tried the few openings I know and it was just awesome how concisely and quickly he backed me into unblockable scenarios. I asked him how he got so good so young and he replied "I spent a lot of time in the park next to our apartment... single mom and that was where I was allowed to hang out when she was at work. There were concrete chess tables set up there and these old men, who hung out at the played for cash or fun. I've been beaten by them thousands of times, thousands. Once you've lost four or five thousand games, you begin to recognize the patterns and groupings of moves in which one can be beaten and start to use those methods yourself." He talked in lines and conjunctions of pairings of pieces. It was all over my head. Alas, I am crap because I don't have the willingness to sit and take that kind of abuse over and over again. I love Wei Qi and have been enjoying having the computer kick my ass at that recently... Most Westerners know it as Go since it was introduced here after WW2 from the soldiers stationed in Japan. Supposedly one of the oldest games in the world. That game is elegant, alluringly simple and brutally deep. Alas, I can't get my wife or son interested in playing yet, so I play that online against a computer. There is something to a chess set and the pieces all set up that resonates. Happy hunting mate.

I am an artist by trade. And while I am able to imbue my art with energy/spirit, I do not consider it any kind of height, or higher achievement than playing with, or teaching my son, or walking through the woods, or sitting in relative silence and emptiness, anything may also be imbued with the qualities of awareness and energy. To consider one above another requires a perspective and then a value judgement about that perspective. For me, currently... the height of spiritual pursuit is letting go and radical acceptance.

I got the 'IRS lawsuit' scam call twice, where they claim they are an agent of the IRS and have filed lawsuit. Strung the first one along a bit before she hung up. Ignored the second one. here are a couple of entertaining responses and string alongs of the same scam...

one thing seems certain... we'll all get our chance to find out. I'm endlessly curious, yet in no hurry.

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.” Anais Nin

I suspect the mind interacts without the body in death, much the way it does in dreams. This I think is why the setting and atmosphere of the mind is so crucial for the death transition and why, say the Tibetans for example, put such emphasis and have such broad and deep processes and practices training the mind and dream work. My experiences outside the body are nearly identical to my lucid dreams. My wife's short death experience, (several of the longest minutes of my life), supports this as well.

Here are a couple from Mel Brooks. Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

Two meals a day is my norm for some time now and I generally eat all food within an 8 hour span. On those occasions I eat more, I still try and allot at least 12 hours with no food intake to let blood ph levels neutralize. My body is beginning to crave emptiness and so fasting is becoming regular... skipping a day here and there is frequent and spontaneous. Longer fasts often develop from that, usually four days.

I'd start with what you love. My energetic potential bloomed by losing myself in pursuits that energized love and metta. Nature. Kung Fu. Theater. My Gal. These were my big four. Nature was it for me as a child and this love only grew as I did. Tree climbing, rock climbing, hiking and swimming... dear god, looking back, thousands of hours of swimming. I would empty my physical cup out on the trails and energy would fill the void... I spent every spare moment with my gal. We debated and challenged each other on every topic imaginable and we made love almost non-stop for years, (yea this one will tweak a few folks here, but my experience is that with a connected partner, energy builds in love making, not depletes). We met when we were quite young, 19 neither of us were looking for a relationship as we were studying at University and my plans were to spend my life traveling and performing Shakespeare, Ibsen, Checkov, etc on the regional theater circuit. Three months after meeting her, I knew I'd still be doing those things, only by her side. We would spend days in our little apartment, with brief forays out to the pool, or to acquire more food. We had no television and no furniture, other than a few blankets and pillows on the floor and stacks of books. We even ate our meals on stacks of books. I should add though that sex was never a casual thing for me. I've only been attracted to two women in that way this life. Those were the only ones to engage me that way and I've always been energized by love making, not depleted. That empty apartment was akin to a blast furnace of vital energy. I read and studied. I read every book I could lay hands on, on just about any topic and fed my monkey mind. When finances permitted it, I found a local Kung Fu school and trained. When finances ran out, I took what I had learned and practiced that over and over again... empty apartments are great for that. In short, I lost my self in love.

Well, I may live in the land of perpetual Summer, but right now, it's Winter here. Johnny Winter.

this question keeps manifesting on my thought pond. In my youth , in my mind... and for some decades in action, I was ready or readying my self to engage something to fight against, to prove my self. I was eager to see battle against anything I considered to be an evil thing, not only in order to prove my worth, my ability and my value; but to make the world a better place by engaging evil opponents and utterly destroy them to eradicate evil, or die in the attempt. Now, I will spend every available essential ounce of energy I have, to prevent, or minimize violence and when the violence, if it must manifest through greatest need is done... I have no ability to heap justified punisment on the perpetrator. All I want is to try and heal both the perpetrator and the victim. So much is made on the Art of War. I have the tools of war, the weapons and I have learned how to wield them and I find at their core, is weakness and fear and the same uninformed and vengeful nature that my youth was so seemingly hungry for... What I now sense in the very vibrations of the atoms in my body and the essential vibration of my thoughts and emotions is that my hunger was a hunger to confront the nature of violence and reveal the truth for me, which is that violence is... failure, however necessary it may seem in the moment. So what are the Arts of Peace? What is the Dao of Peace? How is peace manifested and cultivated? How do we realize that opposites are complimentary aspects of one whole... not separate 'things'?

well that leaves me out... I'm done with brain.

I got to book five. Enjoyed them, but eventually tired of the author/serial killer's style.

It sure does seem that violence is inherent in the system. Life is predatory. Even the predators are eaten by the tiniest of bugs when their time is done. And plants predate upon each other for space in the soil and sunshine. Don't give me the whole... I eat vegetarian. Life feeds on life. It seems inescapable. Unless you have attained Breatharianism. We are all the descendents of super-nova explosions. Literally our greatest grandmother was the most violent explosion we as humans have observed. So for me the question isn't that we will ever abolish violence. But how to foster the art of peace in spite of the nature of... nature. But to glorify fighting is nauseating to me. Unthinkable to me any longer. Violence is failure, although at times, absolutely necessary. Yet to revel in it... to glorify it the way our culture does. Ask most soldiers what they want... they want peace... to go home. Yet peace at the cost of violence is a shill game and a failure. I've always appreciated George Carlin's take on this topic: "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity... or burning sandwiches for hunger." verse 31 has always resonated for me on this topic. It speaks of the need to preserve life and protect ourselves, yet the spirit in which we engage in that... is crucial to me. 31 Weapons: tools of pain, used for violence and fear, Sages abhor them. Yet in direst need and if compelled will use them, with utmost restraint. Peace, highest value. When the peace has been shattered who can be content? Glory in fighting? Those who delight in killing do not know true self. Your foes not demons. Simple beings like yourself. Sage desires no harm. No victory dance victory by force, no joy how rejoice in this? Sage battles gravely with sorrow, and compassion like tending a grave.

I suspect that no such definitive book exists and that the books that do exist, were probably finally written by folks who had read many of the other commentary books and found them unsatisfactory and decided it was up to them to try and write the book they were looking for...

I have never sat down on a toilet without looking... must be my youth spent going in an out house and not wanting spiders to crawl on my bum.