silent thunder

one day while working on stage, one of the painters saw I was wearing a Vajra and asked "oh, do you have a teacher?" and I said "yes, everywhere, you, him, her, the door, the floor, the sunshine and shadows... everywhere."

i don't distinguish true and false teachers. i am so deeply thankful and cursing every teacher at turns and simultaneously. true and false both serve truth... in my life it can be no other way a teachers effectiveness in my life is an action of emptying and opening and crushing, enlisting simultaneous expansion and contraction when i love my true teacher i am opening and harmonizing truth in my living being when i despise my false/true teacher i am contracting and dissonant with the recognition of the incongruity of the false holdings I maintain in my living being i am like a vortex of thought.emotion.assumption.perception.projection.illusion.depth.clarity.confusion teachers... false true caring severe teacher and student abide in the same house and i love and despise them at turns and at times, simultaneously grief and love are no longer opposites recognition and liberation are simultaneous humiliation and gratitude stem from and to every teacher, false and true become meaningless sounds as recognition that there is one teacher and one student they are one i am one with them and you love and grief again. kan and li are not opposing so potent, full and completely empty deep sorrow and bounding love

succinct and poignant... thanks for sharing.

Thanks mate!

hmm, I was intrigued, but 404 gateway error when I tried those links...

Sun shines equally on the murderer and the healer. Rain falls on the guilty as readily as the innocent.

Form and function are no less than the expression of the universe through the 10,000 things, yet they are no more, nor less important than empty space and formlessness. The interplay of form and space is part of the key to the mysterious gate to me. There is no devaluation of form and structure when one realizes and acknowledges that emptiness and formlessness are on equal footing in the flow of the universe with form. Indeed how could there be one without the other? Straw dogs are formed and carried around for the festival, honored and used in the games and merriment. Then when the festival ends they are dropped where they lie and are trampled underfoot without a second thought, yet also without a malicious thought. There form ends and it recedes to formless and there is no devaluation, nor exaltation either way.

This is great Flowing Hands... a great idea. Some years ago, I realized that really I needed to foster a deeper connection to the more elusive concepts of the DDJ. It occurred to me that I should put it into my own words... So I set out to read as many different versions in english as I could find and then sift them all through my mind and out onto paper, in my own words. I had several months off at that time, so I gathered all of my hardcopies and as many digital versions as I could find, then cloistered myself away and spent as long as it took with each verse in succession to come to a point where I could return to paper, the essence of what I had encountered in the various forms. Reading, rereading, sitting, walking pondering. Reciting them aloud. Over and over again. Really synthesizing the essentials and letting them resonate in my body and mind. That process was profound. A deep resonance that resulted in a haiku version of the Dao that was sifted through my consciousness. It was very interesting how some translations would bring visceral dissonance to me as I read them, almost offensive to me they seemed. This was the case with two particular translations, as I recall.

Recently I use a lot of cayenne ginger garlic tumeric paprika mint himalayan pink salt We make broths all throughout the Winter. I usually carry a thermos with me to work and sip it through the day. I switch up either chicken based or black bean based, depending on where I'm at... I will add a prodigious amount of the above mentioned and simmer it for several hours. raw, local honey and apple cider vinnegar are also staples in my diet though more beneficial to my health and far more important than those, is what I've cut out of my diet. no more processed wheat, sugar or dairy for sugars we use raw local honey, cane sugar on occasion, or stevia. we use brown rice pasta and rice flour for baking and for butter, my wife found Earth's Balance, a vegan product that we substitute for butter that words great.

I highly recommend Dr Yang Jwing-Ming's book: The Root of Chinese Qi Gong. This is a very good overview of the concepts and processes of qi gong and he very plainly explains many concepts that should help you as you start out. I also got good mileage from Damo Mitchell's books: The Dragon Dao Yin Excercises and Daoist Nei Gong

Watches are odd things to me. They never last long, no matter how precious. I've always had an adversarial bend away from mechanical time and it shows in my many dead watches. My wife gifted me an engraved watch on our first anniversary. It stopped working within a couple weeks, so she took it in for repair and the answer was, "there's nothing wrong with it". This scenario was repeated a couple more times with that watch, until we stopped taking it in and went with several others we purchased as replacements until I just gave up on watches and kept the original as jewelry, never attempting to set it, or refer to it for accurate man time. It's the same with every watch I've ever owned, they all soon wouldn't keep time accurately, or stopped dead, except one... This watch I purchased on the streets of Manhattan, an impulse buy. A nice looking cheap $5 knock-off. It worked perfectly for a few years for me and then I gifted it to a friend. This buddy at the time was a counselor at a summer camp every year in Vermont. One of their rituals at this camp, is to canoe out to an island and stay there for a couple days tenting. My buddy told me years later, that he took the watch off, and hung it around a branch to go swimming as it was not water resistant, then he promptly forgot it and left it. Two years later, he was on the same island and found it sitting on the branch when they went to the same swimming hole. He called me and said, "I wound it up, put it on and it's still working now." Two Vermont Winters couldn't kill that thing. I still wonder what company made that knock off.

Dairy and processed wheats, sugars or their derivatives cause inflammation in me within minutes of ingesting them, so I'll add a +1 to that suggestion.

Nice topic. I deeply appreciate and resonate well with many metals. I wear them often. Best way I can describe it, is that they seem to sing. Metal sings to my inner hearing. There are a few that I have on or around me all the time. Silver and Copper are ever present, I wear or handle them daily.. My son gifted me a pair of Copper Baoding balls that are often in hand. Right now I'm wearing one of two pieces I wear daily, it's a Tibetan Vajra made of brass, fastened to a necklace I crafted out of copper rings. Tungsten and Damascus steel also carry a deep resonant draw for me, very soothing and stimulating simultaneously. The other piece that I carry with me, or wear daily is a pendant with the Flower of Life design, inlaid and mounted in a Tourmaline disc, wrapped in Silver. The inlay of the design is filled with the dust of rubies, saphires and amethyst. Gold was often too potent and I hadn't worn it much in the past, though my Father passed a few pieces to me and I'm wearing them regularly and keep them close and in view But where the songs really take off for me, is with crystals and minerals. They bring a depth and breadth of resonance that is staggering and awesome.

any more for me, there is no achieving, or striving, or acquiring, or learning. it's about release, letting go, radical acceptance and presence in awareness stillness and compassion seem to be bi-products of this releasing...

I have carried within me, the abiding and unshakable sense that there is sentience on all levels of what I can perceive and what is beyond my perceptions. Stones, plants, dirt, water, light, sound, planets, stars, books, pens, computers... aware all. At least, that's how it's always seemed to me. For what that's worth Thanks Bums for another great thread!

So it's not that I'm in love with you. Yet somehow when I'm with you, or I think about you, that which is love in me, naturally releases and encompasses my experience of the present moment and I say 'I'm in love'. It's not because you do certain things, or say the 'right things' to me, or about me, that 'make me love you'. Certain events cut through the fog of my monkey mind and shake me a bit and remind me of the love which is already present and I momentarily release my blockages on that love and it flows, naturally, effortlessly. Then I analyze this and say "you love me". Love just is... Do I really have to give myself permission to not need permission to be this love? Let go. Let Love Be.

in-credible as always, thanks for sharing bud.

Yes! this sense... permeates all about my life like a scent a dreaming within dreaming. to wake from a dream into a dream... who dreams? thanks for sharing this neti neti...

Thanks for sharing, I find his work to be very compelling. I bet Mr Hoffman would find a very receptive and understanding audience among those of achievement and realization in both Buddhist and Taoist cultivation and I was just saying in the shared dreaming thread yesterday, that for me, the waking state is another dream state. The first time I encountered him, he made an appearance in a documentary and I was reminded of the many potent similarities Fritjof Capra unveiled between the then cutting edge realizations about the nature of quantum physics and the canon and nature of taoist cosmology. Potent stuff. Go Mr Hoffman!

I'm interested. Pacific time zone, america. "Myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths." ~Joseph Campbell This statement resonates with me on a foundational level. I find, imagination, dreaming, wonder and the surface of the mind-pond to all be in a relationship. We have so much more in common than we do in distinction. I became a playwright and actor in my early life due largely to my experiences in dreamscapes and my love of consciousness exploration and a desire to enter the shared realms of imagination with the audience. Many potent realizations have crystallized for me through experiences in dreamscapes, so as a disclaimer... dreams are as real to me as sitting here typing is for most folks... and that to me, in a very literal sense, I consider the 'waking or conscious state' to be a shared dreaming state. So for me, going to the store, or the beach, or sitting here typing a conversation, is a form of shared dream work. I would sincerely value the opportunity to meet up with anyone else who is willing to invest the intent.

i am

I adjusted that a bit and now it feels more balanced... for me anyway.

What bird is screeching? Fools talk while Sages listen. Their voices so loud. Voices amplified by the incessant flapping thought-wings in their mind.

I support Heifer and The International Wolf Center.

The Chinese Chang'e 2 rover has been up there for around 3 years now... there is a complete surface digital survey from multiple altitudes. The American litter was observed and confirmed. Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0d8_1328628079#zXWIuc1b868TOTSo.99