silent thunder

There is no elsewhere. The future does not exist. Judgement of the value of deeds is like a board game of mind and thought form. Realization and liberation are simultaneous.

nothing is ever lost, taken or gained. realization and liberation are simultaneous.

Yea, so far that's my understanding as well, that it's the layering and choice of metals and crystals that creates the vortices which counteract the various electrical fields of modern life which can interfere with clarity, restfulness and grounding.

Indeed. I picked up a couple of nice pieces to be worn on my person, or carried in a pocket and anticipate learning the process and making my own larger pieces when this project is finished and I have some time off later this Spring.

It's fascinating, the effects of breathing on the process of mind, particularly oxygen saturation and breath sublimation. Or beyond mind, the realms of awareness, of which mind cannot touch.

It seems quite the ironic reversal. Britain seems to be the one occupied by powers beyond her borders... The more things change, the more they stay the same, only the players and pieces move and shift, but the game it seems, remains the same.

ultraviolet sight

Awesome! Welcome back to the States and here's a heart felt hope that your school blooms and brings health and love to the region.

Great question, but I don't even attempt to answer questions of this caliber much any more. My attempts invariably used to end in rage, or thankfully, recently with chuckling frustration with my mind and its words, the audacity of it... trying to convey what lies vastly beyond them, and quietly within the void and emptiness when the mind finally quiets is as moot to me as fucking for virginity, fighting for peace, or staring at pictures of sausages to sate my hunger. It is felt, experienced, usually in moments when I'm fatigued to the point of exhaustion, or bored into a stupor and sneaks upon me so softly and is so intimate, if I twinge even a little, it's diaphanous touch evaporates into more maddening monkey mind. Simultaneous expansion and contraction perhaps... It's so maddeningly nearly tangible and the moments where its felt shine in sense memory like sunlight through ice that shakes with silent thunder. But to my mind stuff, it remains utterly untouchable, utterly beyond the ken of my thought forms and while imbuing all of them... and I'm so grateful for that... that even were I to somehow arrive at the most amazing capacity of mind and become a towering giant of intellect among all the history of men, I would still never even were I to achieve immortality and have all the eons of time, never would I be able to sully it with my mental clattering... never leash it with my chittering words and thought symbols. She is beyond.

Stalker is easily one of my favorite films of all time. I was riveted by the concept, the execution, the atmosphere, but especially the writing. Wow, just wow. The book that inspired it, Roadside Picnic, packs a serious wallop for it's few pages. I'll add Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar to my list, I've not heard of it. As for Abe and his Axe... I just can't imagine having that many extra minutes in my life to give it a shot... in spite of my buddy's recommendation that he found it clever and fun.

It's Greek I believe that uses separate terms for nouns. I've always appreciated that... One word would be used if you are talking about the idea, or concept of an apple. Another word for apple is used if you are referring to an experiential apple you have in your hand, or that you are asking a friend to pass to you in order to eat. Words are so powerful in one respect, in their formative influence on our mental process, and they become especially potent if you fall into the common trap of believing that you are your mind/thoughts. Yet they are merely symbols and like thoughts they are not inherently real. They convey and transmit all sorts of connotations and limitations along with their intended meanings, which often differ greatly from individual to individual even within similar social and ethnic conditions. It's good to remember that we are not our mind. Thoughts, words, while helpful in certain situations, are not inherently real, true, or even important.

First off I ask people where they are from, not what they do... and then how they liked where they grew up, what it was like... etc. If they are not a native or local, I am always curious as to what caused them to migrate from where they grew up to where they ended up. Many fascinating stories come from this alone. Sometimes I'll ask about their families, but this depends greatly on the tone of the first answers... for some folks, family is a harsh topic, so I'm always gauging that to not shut them down early on... I then have a few standard questions I almost always ask: If you were stranded on an island and could only have one musical artist/band to listen to while stranded, who would it be? This has led me to discovering all sorts of great musicians and groups I would otherwise likely never have found. Then I follow that up that same question but with an author, or book series. Between these first few questions we usually bring up enough substance and related topics to fill several hours of conversation and once the inertia is rolling, things just naturally flow. I like the direction these two questions take the conversation because they get to the heart of something that the person feels deeply about and so engage them on a deeper level as well as revealing something about their character based on their interests and taste. Favorite films is another good one to start things flowing. I also adore humor and find it to be supremely healing. I was a stand up comic and actor for 15 years and use my improv skills daily to keep things light and frequently will make fun of myself in order to lighten up folks who seem tense or shy. Once they see me openly sharing my current and past faults and laughing at them, it really opens them up and decreases anxiety. My career is not full time, but when I am working my job has me constantly working long hours in various locations under stressful conditions and frequently partnering up with complete strangers, usually just one other partner for specific small tasks, which then come together with the work of other small groups to complete the whole project.

Jerry Alan Johnson goes into some good detail regarding this in his book on Internal Alchemy. Daoist Internal Alchemy: Neigong and Weigong Training

The Limits of Control This one was a real pleasant surprise. Atmospheric, poetic and very engaging. "Reality is arbitrary"

At one point I was testing the adults around me in the church I was brainwashed in as a child by telling them I had heard God speaking to me and their reactions were very telling about what I surmised to be the reality of their claimed faith, vs the functional illusion they projected.

Spend a few days sitting with Master Wang. That field fixed my far sightedness in a few days. Haven't needed reading glasses since...

I spend my emotional money on love these days... not enough spiritual currency any longer to spare any on hate.

My buddy got jacked by a laughing gull at the local pier here one afternoon. He had just walked out of the restaurant with a platter full of crab and lobsters on his way to his families' table when a crafty gull swooped down and made off with a steamed crab from one of the plates. He said " I swear Creighton, it was laughing at me the whole time and I could do nothing about it but stare open mouthed"...

kumbaya!

yup... that about sums it up.

I had trouble with the straw dog analogy for a long time and resented its seeming implication that nothing had any value or inherent worth, but then while reading a description of the festivals which prompted their use and how the straw dogs are used I had a shift in perspective on it and it made more sense to me. The straw dogs were constructed and carried around during the festival and were in that sense precious while they were in use and for the duration of the festival were revered. But at the end of the festival, once the process was complete and their purpose spent, they were just dropped to the ground and disregarded going back to the bedding of the streets and horse stalls, their temporary form and use being fulfilled they returned to the source they came from without much fanfare and no grief. It was never the shape that was of value, but the connection to what they represented, to their connection with the process. To me it's not so much a view that nothing has any value and that we are all inherently worthless, but that form is not the end of all value and that once fulfilled, there is no need for great attachment to, nor grief at the loss of form and substance.

A good friend of mine, whose opinion on theater, tv and film I highly respect, due to having worked with him closely on stage in classical theater for almost a decade, repeatedly touted and praised the film 'Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter'. I'm still flabbergasted by that, but figure some evening I'll finally succumb to curiosity and give it a try...

I recall once having the realization while reaching for the sugar bowl, or some such... that there is a direct line of cause and effect, an unbroken chain of events stretching back from this moment, to the point where my mum and dad came together in love and thus further back to the most primordial events in 'physical reality'. And the realization was that 'nothing was, or ever could be, in this sense, separate from any other thing. There may be from our perspective in this life and body and awareness a seeming myriad inner individual distinctions within the great one, yet like individual waves of the ocean, there is but one ocean and none are separate from that.

The Sun shines and rain falls on the good and wicked alike. Tao plays no favorites and treats all as straw dogs. Yet for me there is no doubt that a good man reaps greater benefit from the Tao, than the demonic.

Powerful sentiment. Thanks for sharing. Once, while sitting outside of the apartment where I lived with my wife during our University years, I was enjoying the sunshine and not thinking much at all. I looked down and saw a line of ants processing and disassembling a piece of fruit on the ground at my feet and it occurred to me, that there had never been a point in time when I had not been simultaneously touching, something much smaller and infinitely greater than what I considered to be my 'self'. Then it followed that what I considered to be 'my' self, my body, was actually a colony of several trillion individual cells, working in a sort of consort, but each of which could be considered an individual in its own right. All oscillating in patterns that came to a semblance of the body which my awareness considered to be some sort of self. This prompted the following thought to settle on my awareness like a flower on the surface of a still pond. "It seems I am part of something vast, while comprised of small things". Patterns of energy form into the objects I interact with in physical reality, using the patterns of energy formed into my body. Patterns of thoughts, feelings and intuitions comprise awareness which expands and contracts simultaneously out to the furthest expanses of imagination and into the deepest crevices of quantum consciousness.