silent thunder

http://vpcalendar.net/Definitions/Time_Measurements.html even this rather left brain list breaks down and gets subjective when it comes to millions of years and beyond.

but slippers taste like (you) love!

I love Just Say No and Just Do It... I use Just Say No for TV, junk food and shitty people... Just Do It for all those little things I would otherwise find a reason to procrastinate on...

I was referring to picture number 12 being a close up of silica sand... makes me happy

12

did you ever grow anything.... in the garden of your minnnnnnd? Fred, layin down some awesome sauce!

*deep bow* booya!

You'll both be getting calls from Nike legal...

seems to me... absolutes are always absolutely ridiculous when followed to their extreme...

One of my all time favorite stories.

Especially that fine silica sand that's been soaking in sunlight and pounded by waves for countless who knows how longs..... it's bathing in crystals

every single one, not a blade of grass, nor a grain of sand is less than this...

illusion of separation

I've washed my hands in sand very effectively on many occasions...

Heh... I was typing this as you posted it...

compassion and love generate more merit for me than all my qi gong and breath/energy work combined... it's just... for me, the qi gong and breath/energy work aid me in being the compassion and love my teacher always repeats this phrase: kind heart quiet heart sincere heart bit of a lovely cycle when I can maintain the inertial groove of it best wishes...

Due to my perception within duality, I'm often more able to see what I am, based on what I am not, but only within/from my clinging/associating with a spot within the framework of duality perception. I'm reminded of Manitou's post and High Indifference. There exists in awareness a frame of perception that is still part of this process yet not of it. The Sage does not take the world personally. Be in the world, but not of it. This state/point allows for everything within duality, judges not a whit and cares not as to the process or passing and coming into being of 'things'; while emanating constant love. To vibrate here and emanate this...

much to chew on... thanks for posting.

For me, the mind is a process of consciousness, it's not contained within the brain or the body, rather the mind operates as a field of awareness and interacts with the brain and the body. Although the mind can be affected by the body and by physical conditions, these are not a precursor for it. I get the sense the brain and body are tuning devices that help focus certain aspects of mind, but do not create it. My further suspicion is that mind is a magnetic field in nature, this is backed up by a couple studies done in Russia and Germany post WWII where they were trying to discover where memories are stored in the brain. In one particular process, a researcher taught rats to walk a maze, then would systematically burn sections of the brain and release the rat into the maze again. His findings were surprising, he could destroy so much of the rats' brains that their bodies would stop functioning correctly, but they could still drag themselves through the maze, memory being unaffected. They then applied strong magnetic fields and the rats were lost.

for me, duality pertains to a certain frequency of being... it's a natural expression of the extremes inherent in 'things' as we perceive them, in the process we call reality. waves are composed of crests and troughs. they are not crests or troughs. they are the expression of varying extremities of both within certain conditions and frequencies that we experience as waves. they, the extremes of the conditions, cannot exist without one another as they are in fact the same thing, expressing naturally within the conditions of our perceived reality. ... i tried, it's early here, maybe I'll take another stab at it later...

Nope that's never happened to me, in fact, in my sig is a statement that I hold to be a truth. There are no accidents...

whoa

Outstanding! Olive sounds amazing. Use it or lose it as they say, so you won't be losin' it any time soon.

Irene Ryan! She set up a fund in 1972 to give young actors scholarships for college and I participated in the competition back in the late 80's. She helped me get through my first year of college without any loans.

As I move in this field of awareness, high indifference is a good descriptor for it. There is no lack of care or love, quite the opposite. One of the benefits to this has been my ability to see the child in just about anyone I come in contact with now and that has allowed me to step beyond my overly harsh judgmental tendencies and live in more compassion, (from time to time). In the end humans are not male or female, they are male and female. All opposites are their antipodal extreme and would not exist without each other. From the point of high indifference this is accepted as original nature and it is my judgment within the context of a situation from alligning myself with one side or the other that creates the conflict I experience internally. It's slow going, but after the initial vajra moment/epiphany of this, it's been steadily gaining inertia in my reality tunnel. Wow. I am so glad you shared this. This one goes right to my core... I've never shared this with anyone but my wife and my best friend. But this place is unique for me and so here goes: This is so close to me. My folks had a very nasty divorce when I was four. My mother, in an attempt to hurt my father, raised me telling me all sorts of stories about how my Dad repeatedly raped and beat her, which drove a massive wedge between he and I as you can imagine. As children believe anything they are told... As I grew into a middle-aged man and began to reassemble my actual memories, questions began to arise and I started to ask around. My sister was 7 years older than I so she remembered those four years that I do not. My Sister, flat out told me that those things never occurred in her presence. Which didn't mean they didn't happen, but it added to the inertia of the line of questioning. My Dad found another woman and they spent the next 38 years together, until her death 3 years ago. One day sitting at the breakfast table with my Step-Mom, she out of the blue said to me...'You know Creighton, not only has your Father never raised his hand to me, even in our most heated arguments, he's never said an unkind thing about me.' And then one day, my Mom came clean. She's bipolar which was never treated or recognized until very recently. and now has severe dementia, but in a moment of clarity and remorse, she admitted to me that she had lied to me, in an effort to hurt my Father and in an effort to keep me close to her. It was some years before I could even think of her voice in my head without raging on some level. While I still loved her on some level, I hated her too, vehemently. But this deep hatred and my obsessing over it in my mind relentlessly led me to resolve the opposites in this case. The epiphany/vajra moment regarding this dissolved my hatred and I've come around to full acceptance of my Mom. It was while listening to my Wife of then 21 years telling me she had lied to me about some horrible things that happened to her in the past. She admitted she made them up. In that moment with her, I realized I had no anger at this... and didn't understand why. Then it hit me. Both she and my Mother had done something they felt they needed to do... they both told me these lies because they knew on some level that it would engender my love for them and bring forward the love they desperately needed. In that moment I realized that I loved them both no matter what they had said and though hearing these stories about my wife hurt me through thinking about the hurt it was for her, I was not actually harmed. I immediately understood why she had done it and by proxy, I understood why my mother had done what she did. Desperation drove them to this. In the conversation with my wife, I told her. "You did and said those things, because you felt that you needed to do that in order to get the love you required from me. What you couldn't realize in that moment is that my love for you was always there and would have been there regardless of the stories, but you had no way to know that, no way to trust that it was possible based on your past, (both she and my mom were abused as kids by their parents)." In that moment my hatred for my mother melted away in a flow of compassion for the severe pain she was in and I could see the injured child in her desperately reaching out to find a comfort zone, something safe she could control. Vajra, unshakable truth, hard as diamond, obliterating all else in a thunderbolt of truth. My mother now has severe dementia and doesn't recognize me as her son, I'm her brother when we talk, and this is fine. In some ways her dementia has been a blessing as she's forgotten some of the most heinous times of her life and lives in semi-bliss. When we talk it is free flowing love and there is no judgment, only the desire to see her happy. As for my Father... I reached out to him about 3 years ago when my Step Mom passed. I told him what I had discovered and how sorry I was for not seeing it sooner. True to his form, he just hugged me and said ' welcome home, I missed you.' He passed this last April, very suddenly, but you are so right Anoesjka... "everything can change if you change. Even if it takes you a lifetime." Even if it happens the moment before death, one moment of clarity erases lifetimes of ignorance and pain. I'm so blessed and grateful for this lesson, it's hard to convey the depth of my gratitude. Thank you so much. I've been in a very dark place the last few months on and off since his death. This has reminded me of how much light is present in the darkness. The opposites here have resolved into one shining beautiful truth. I love them. Just love. No expectations. No exceptions.