silent thunder

truly at this point in my path I see nearly everything around me and within me possesses entheogenic potential. The most potent entheogen I've encountered, is the air I breath, coupled with the rate i am breathed at...

Not at all... While mind altering plants/entheogens are commonly used, they are rarely the trigger that opens the initial door to the path. Most common among shamans is a very intense, often debilitating sickness at some point that awakens certain perceptive abilities and begins them on the path. The entheogen experience often comes later as their insight and potential teaching from another shaman will direct them on their use. Welcome to the Bums mate.

Yea, it's been interesting to watch Physics in particular, describing things the Taoists and Tibetans have been saying for centuries. Reinforces the concept that we all come from source, so no matter which direction you take, you'll eventually find common ground. I like this particular animation of the tao symbol, incorporating toroidal flow. Something on a rudimentary level pictures my overall essence as something like this... it's linked to the simultaneous compression and expansion that seems to coincide with how my awareness incorporates and disseminates sensations, information and energy.

I can really get behind the field imagery. My awareness seems to me, a field, shaped much like my avatar picture, a toroidal sphere.

what most call choice, to me is an one action expressed, from a few (sometimes very few, even only one) options stemming from conditioned response to stimuli.

That moment is still resonating with me. It was distinct, it feels almost like the concept was waiting for me to wake up to it. Like it was a film spread out on top of my mind pond, and I simply rose into awareness of it. Hard to describe, but it was distinctive in that the thought had no effort, intention or judgment in it. I've always been curious about and have enjoyed the brief state of first waking into raw awareness. Many times, having a few heartbeats of being awake and aware, but having no recognition of... anything, not even self. Not sure why, but it seems important to me. Like there is a gravity to it that keeps tugging at me. I normally lay very still in bed and just sense my body as I first wake. Then sometimes I'll smile into my organs, or just get up. Now, I'm intending to try and remain utterly blank upon first waking and just observe with no judgment, the movement of the bellows.

That book is absolutely incredible.

just doin my part...

san he dao the way of three in one ideally, all three in balance and harmony wei, nei and shen gong.

I can't stress enough how important I think it is to start with wei and then move toward nei... Indeed, without the foundation from working wei, the work in nei seems weaker due to being unstable and unreliable, if any reliable manifestation ever presents at all. I don't do nearly the hard form work I used to now that I'm in my mid 40's, but I have years of background in the hard arts that built a foundation and I revisit it regularly, mostly in the form of stance work. Deep Horse and moderate Cat stance are both used in one of our forms. My job has a very physical element and wei aspects to it that I love and can feel the difference in my inner work when I've been pushing myself with 12 hour days for weeks on end. Seems like a charge can build up an underlying potential. To just charge into Nei work without a good foundation of wei, results in the classic inverted pyramid. If gains are made, they tend to be unstable and usually the person involved it seems, has an inflated sense of accomplishment and subsequent defensiveness about inconsistencies or identifying the validity of any other path. One person in particular here has been displaying this of late, not part of this thread. But, having had a heightened experience, their paradigm is blown open, but lacking a foundation of stabilizing energy, they're unable to identify beyond their experience to relate to other paths and methods. This is what I think is behind much of the well meaning, but fundamentalist tendencies we so often find. I guess, what I'm really long windedly trying to say is... when I get a little twitchy, overly sensitive and moody, I find it really good to just go out and chop wood and carry water. Reactivate the bottom of the pyramid and that LDT.

All I can say with any degree of certainty is that time heals. Distance in time seems to lend a perspective and softens the edges and intensity of the emotions. Of course, love heals, but when injured, opening the heart might be the last thing one feels capable of doing... Much empathy and love mate. I've seen so much of this going on in my closest friends. Several 10-20 year relationships coming to an end. It's heartbreaking for me as well, witnessing their pain. But time truly has softened all of it in each case. Hang on and talk often to someone you trust and love. Our grief lessens as we share it and our Joy increases as we share it, it's one of the great principles of friendship. Much love!

personally... I've never seen antagonism and condescension as desired qualities in a teacher. perhaps, 'when the teacher is ready, then they can try to become a student' should be the saying.

relationships breathe in and out just as we do, just as life does... the action of tao is like a bellows. I look back on my marriage and my long term friendships and perceive the bellows analogy in effect.

time to practice...

There seems to be no limit to the lengths people will go to, to protect their reality tunnels. Any information that doesn't fit, or that shows dissonance with held views, is ignored, excused away, or attacked outright. There seems no limit to the extremes folks will pursue to maintain their personal interpretation of reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO7tGOr2NU0

Yea, I've since decided against it. I'll enjoy the film more if I give it a miss.

Mindwalk: A powerful conversation between a poet, politician and physicist in an old Irish Castle, about the shifting awareness away from the Cartesian model toward Systems thinking.

Ok I'll bite: the action of Tao is like a drawn bow... eventually, it settles in balance. *until then, all sorts of pendulum like purterbations take place as each extreme is expressed according to 'perspectives'...

I just can't shake this premise. It's everywhere I look now. This concept has grown into a compulsive mantra for me of late. It's so persistent, it's like a physical presence, always there, chewing away alongside any critical, or analytic thinking. It's very freeing. To cease looking outward to fix everything. To let go of the audacity of thinking I can know what others need and how to fix them. To ultimately release anything that is not an authentic expression of myself in the moment.

I'm really off the whole teacher/student paradigm as I've experienced it up to now. Been thinking about this often of late, can't seem to shake it even when I want to, which tells me something is growing. Having been asked a few times to teach, I always decline, my pat response is "I'm not qualified"... that usually ends the discussion. I just can't imagine a scenario, where I would have any idea what is best or worse for... anyone. As I experience it now, learning isn't imparted by a teacher, it isn't a gift, nor is it a thing or a commodity that can be traded. For me, the real basis of learning is awareness and it doesn't come from any external sources. As I see it now, teaching does not exist and learning is really just the process of awareness. I am no longer seeking any specific human teachers of specific paths. My only real teachers are and always have been, my breath and my heart. The rest are interpretations of thought sharing. Thoughts aren't real for me any longer. They aren't true, important, or even useful most of the time. Oddly enough, I now find myself surrounded by teachers... life is so fucking awesome in this... by saying no to external teachers, I've opened up my awareness to discover I am learning from, potentially everything. While wearing a vajra at work one day, a painter recognized it and asked me if I had a teacher. I started pointing around the room and responded "yea, you, him, the floor, that pile of wood, the dust... everything." Through the breath and heart, instruction abounds from every possible source... along with the innate, direct experience and solid sense that there are no external sources.

It will all settle into a natural balance of giving information and observing how it assimilates and settles with those you teach. How exciting for you to begin this... congrats.

that is one of my all time favorites!

I also like how it incorporates the lack of a need to 'do' anything. There is an effortlessness to it. As close as I get to Wu Wei for now.

I was on stage, in the middle of an audition for a show when the stage door opened behind me and without a moment's hesitation I just stopped, turned and saw her... That was in April of 1988. We've not been apart more than a few weeks in the time since then... It is without a doubt, the most beneficial and heinous influence in my life, simultaneously. In turns, healing me on the deepest levels, while tearing away at me in others... Thunderstruck is really appropriate. That moment, looking back, is the fulcrum about which the rest of my life has pivoted from that time on. My life path at that point, (just out of high school) was on a bee line for a Classical Theater MFA, then Broadway and the Rep theater circuit as an actor. I wanted nothing to do with relationships other than friends. Three months after our first meeting, my priorities shifted. It took me some 7 years to reconcile what those shifts were consciously and it took 12-15 years to balance them out in my own mind. So much dissonance. Life changes in an instant... it's me who is slow to process and accept what's already transpired and gone. In our worst times together, and there have been some completely fucked up and seriously painful experiences. Even in the midst of the most difficult... For all the times we may have needed some space, I've never once, seriously entertained the notion of giving up. There is a palpable expression of a gravity like force in this and in each of my most intense and connected relationships. None of them felt like I decided much though. If anything, I'm more like a leaf, compelled to dance in the flow of the forces about me.

We are all inherently inaccurate in our perceptions. I get edgy anytime anyone gets too sure about... anything any more. Considering, with our senses and technology, we currently perceive less than 1% of the universe... being too certain of... anything seems to me, the height of arrogant, ignorance. Reminds me of something Robert Anton Wilson shared that is based on the work of Husserl. "All perception is gamble." Every kind of ignorance, bigotry and hatred in the world, results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles... We believe what we perceive and then we believe our interpretation of it and we don't even realize we're making an interpretation, most of the time. We think, 'this is reality.' Naive Realism: What I perceive is reality. This is some of the scariest thinking I ever encounter. one day this just settled on my pond and has been resonating ever since: Don't believe everything you think... Just because you thought it Creighton, doesn't make it real, true, or even important. Any more... I trust my breath. Everything else, seems to me, an interpretation.