silent thunder

could I like the don't like button?

I'm curious how others define/experience consciousness and awareness. Is there a distinction for you or how your teachers describe them? As I experience it, consciousness is temporary and object based, closely related to personality and mind, while awareness is primal, abiding and beyond action or form. Consciousness generates and responds to symbols, ideas/thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations and personality. Awareness seems to be an abiding, underlying almost causative potential, unchanging and... thorough, penetrating... pervasive... ineffable. Awareness is not a thing, yet feels like a presence but that's misleading as it implies a thing, which contradicts the experience of it. So presence comes close but misses the mark for me. The more I ponder it, the more my sense and definition of awareness seems to mirror the descriptions I've read of Tao; ineffable, timeless, pervasive, foundational, omnipresent, empty, inexhaustible. Of course, I'm describing my sense of awareness, from my own defined process of consciousness. Is it possible to separate awareness from any thing? I can't imagine how, or under what circumstances. My sense of it, is that any thing that can maintain a form, any form, or presence of any kind within what we refer to as the physical universe, possesses awareness, otherwise, nothing would coalesce and no form would be present. Yet not every thing exhibits consciousness, or is capable of it. Stones don't give me the impression they are thinking, yet I can't shake the indelible sense that they and all else, share abiding awareness.

when one is obsessed and focused on the shapes of things and their forms and uses, beingness is lost in the fog of want and not want...

so far, nothing beats the rush of an open heart

Yea, that's one of my go-to's for when old farts start distressing about the state of the youth...

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” -Socrates

almost none of the questions had answers anywhere near my thoughts...

silence is loud space is not empty there is no such thing as darkness that's all I got for now.

love Tolle love love love

wow that's weak. at least you have a better idea of the type of person you're dealing with... that is pretty lame

Good stuff. Recently someone said something that intrigued me deeply, regarding awareness and the senses. We may be limited in how much we can observe externally with our senses, but as to turning inward, there is no limit. Thus we may use our senses to transcend our senses. I just woke up. What a great joy to be able to start my day with these thoughts, instead of the same old... I need some tea. I'm going to have some fun pondering that black box idea for sure...

I was just reading it last night...

This one really rang my bell. "Just because you feel something deeply doesn't make it true. Because a belief is heart-felt doesn't make it true. People with opposing heart-felt beliefs often end up judging, hurting, even killing, one another. It's time to stop equating your beliefs, however deeply you feel them, with truth. Doing so creates misunderstanding, separation, and suffering. You're certainly entitled to your beliefs. We all are. But you're not entitled to call them true just because you feel them deeply. Truth demands far more than strong feelings." ~ Dennis Lewis I had an insight years ago that has always served me well, reminding me to reject my basic assumptions and continually question my perceptions. Don't believe everything you think, just because you thought it, doesn't make it real, true, or important. Following Mr. Lewis' share, I've adapted it to: Don't believe everything you think. Just because you thought it and felt it deeply doesn't make it real, true, or important. So often, the emotions brought on by a thought, engenders a similar thought, that reinforces and magnifies the emotion, creating a chain of inertia that can last for days, decades, or even a life time.

I thought I was pretty cool until I realized plants eat sunlight and poop out air. Jim Bugg

that experience altered life and being for me on a foundational level.

I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder. Harry Patch Veteran of World War 1

I take my name here from an experience my wife and I shared in the deep desert of the Bad Lands. We both, after sitting down in a deep ravine to take a break after several hours of hiking, experienced a silence so profound, it triggered a subsequent life long process of checking in on things that I have always just assumed were true, because in the midst of utter silence, there came a faint sense of vibration that grew into a deafening inner roar. A roar so complete and utterly dense that it seemed to threaten my sense of self. From that experience, I have come to suspect that there is no such thing as darkness. Space is far from empty and Silence is full of sound/vibration. As for how to trigger it, I haven't a clue. For us, we were both in a place of deep calm, brought on by hours of walking and observing and not speaking, nor even really thinking much (on my part anyway). It was also ridiculously hot, which for me, will often help to trigger bouts of 'no thought', as I deal with the heat, I send my awareness fully into it, completely focusing on it to the point it no longer 'affects me'.

I've found great value in much of what Adya shares. I've read two of his books and perused a few of his youtube shares as well. In the end, wherever you are, whatever you read, or hear, or experience, it will be filtered through your level of understanding and awareness. Read a book with a ping pong ball sized awareness and you will have a ping pong ball sized experience and understanding of it. Reread that same book later, with a basketball sized awareness and the experience and understanding will reflect this and it can be like reading that same material for the first time... It's amazing to me to reopen a book I've read a dozen times and have a passage suddenly magnify and gel in full blown understanding, balls to bones, where before, it was just an intellectual exercise. Regular testing and inquiry of even my most basic assumptions is becoming my norm these days. Good stuff.

Does one really have to fret About enlightenment? No matter what road I travel, I’m going home. – Shinsho

Dig it. There are no accidents. There is reality, of which, we are simultaneously source and expression.

There is nothing humble about the blackbird in my world. Absolutely mesmerizing. What a great gift to have a nested pair in your garden! I just love this thread. Makes me smile inside and out.

Very cool. Perhaps it was an adolescent and the distinctive coloring hadn't come in yet...

dig it. I would add. There are no accidents.

No, but I knew your answer would be clear and kick ass and that is truth enough for me.