silent thunder

You're hanging up on the notion of 'choice'. Choice is illusory. Decisions are made prior to conscious awareness. They arise spontaneously from conditioning and are a precursor to thought reaction which occurs 'after the fact' and is a function of memory, analysis and storytelling. It's semantics in a manner of speaking, but neurobiology confirms choice occurs prior to conscious awareness. Concsious awareness rationalizes the conditioned response to stimuli and then claims ownership of it. It does not cause it.

subsumed

You're seeing it then. good. The posturing and posing as authority.

Maddox doing his propane thing again. This time on a skateboard. How he avoids speed wobble on those small bearings is beyond me.

My home lies within. i am never without it.

Some time ago I traded certainty for wonder; hard answers for living fluid, open, ever evoling questions, and rigid life rules and expectations for simple presence and being. The result is a perpetual unfoldingness in simplicity, love and bliss. A life of clarity amidst a potent, resonant and grounded center.

As my son says... 'Boffum!'

This guy is holding a master's class on thriving.

Always preferred questions to answers. Too many answers, offered too certainly... cause nausea.

'reality'

Hold my beer...

We each experience reality from the center of awareness. This, above all seemingly explains much of the confusion local awareness experiences regarding encounters with 'other'. Along with the illusory notion that it is somenow possible to be seperate from all of reality, or tao, ever. Each instance of awareness is like a facet on a gem. Each facet of the gem reflects every other facet of the gem. Like Indra's Net. Though myriad, it is all one.

hey... could you clean this up"?> thanks

a

The notion of being seperate seems linked inexorably to our upbringing and our language structure. English language requires verbs to be created by nouns. the boy runs the leaf falls yet in my experience there are no nouns only verbs This falsehood perpetuates in our speaking and thinking mind. And our culture worships only the speaking mind, which is celebrated as the real. All else is rejected as fanciful, or woo in this most wooden of materialist misidentifications. Nothing is static. There are no nouns in reality. Only verbs, verbing reality, beyond thought and word. Nouns are a convention of mentation. A symbolizing of conceptualization into a mentation object. It is storytelling. There is another layer of foundational thought that impregnates Westerners in particular with a heavy sense of seperation. The leftover conceptualization of the universe and our world as a great clock work. The bible describes the clay vessel into which the animating force of God blows life. This is an unnatural way of seeing life to me. I am not an alien presence, forced into the material structure of life from somewhere else. i grew out of this world, i did not get brought into it. Like leaves on a tree or grapes on a vine. i grew out of this world, innately part of all of it. what is there to be seperated? mentation, symbolic concepts. but reality is one flowing of which we are all many aspects of one process. many facets of one gem Indra's Net

The world as it is, is not the world that is talked about, or thought about. What i am, is what i am. What i think i am is not what i am. Thinking is conceptualizing. It is mentation. Ascribing symbols to conceptualize reality to describe it. This is storytelling. Reality is not conceptual, but to describe it, mind conceptualizes it in symbols and then often mistakes this for the reality. Yet symbols are not real. The map is never the terrirory. The menu is not the meal. Our ideas and images of 'ourselves' are symbolic representations, conceptualizations, not the reality of self. To conflate symbols with reality is confusion of self, misidentification. Myopia can be liberating and imprisoning. Of late, the skin that used to be experienced as the barrier seperating my 'self' from 'all rest of it'... has unfolded into the most intimate living bridge connecting inside with outside. Unifying. In much the way breathing did long ago. Like the breath, the skin has revealed itself not as barrier to, but conduit of... conduition of the ever flowing exchange of inner and outer, which are experientially two aspects of one process. Every breath in is an expression of unity. The outside becomes the inside. Every meal eaten, the outside is now the inside. Every defecation, every exhale the inside becomes the outside. There is no longer a meaningful grouping of symbols that can supplant the experience of inward and outward unfoldingness in perpetual unified process. What 'i do' and what 'happens to me' is a softening dance unfolding perpetually with no words required. Beingness encompasses unfolding awareness. Sensing occurs. Presence is. Awareness is here.

Fascinating. Who would you suggest/select as Arbiter of what healthy balance is, to be elected to the position of selecting and enforcing it?

Nope, those are not coins for general circulation. They'll be available via The Royal Mint website this summer.

The new 50 pence coin revealed by the UK mint is absolutely stunning. Not seen colors like that on an official currency coin before. Perhaps I'll start a small collection. I'd love to hand these out to some co-workers and friends. Now to find a willing Brit to make the exchange...

ego: a potent servant; a horrifying master.

The Sage is in the world, but not of it. Sage sees all are straw dogs. Passing, ephemeral, transient. Though the Sage engages fully in the world, yet is not drawn into the passings of straw. A Sage, grounded within the center that is everywhere and no where passes through and among the world without being drawn into the game of it. Aware of 'the rules' the game is played and engaged without mis-identifying one's true nature with the board and pieces, so to speak. Not taking the universe personally is a remarkably liberating experience. Though Sage moves freely through the whole world, she never leaves the center. To move in, among and through the world, without being hooked, or anchored or bound to its processing seems to speak to our overall topic and of breaking the cycle of samsaric illusion and karmic extendency/dependency through awareness. Chains of Iron and Chains of Gold, all chains bind and hold. 'Bad' action, 'High' merit... all part of the ephemeral process of unfolding karmic cause and effect and thus, all bind, if one identifies with such. i am reminded of a conversation at a retreat among two others, regarding a woman's confusion at her teacher's refusal to take up an offer to be part of building a school/hospital. "This project is so full of merit!" She declared. "Why would he refuse that option?" "Perhaps he no longer wishes to bind actions to the cycle?" another replied. "All actions bind. Even meritorious action binds one to the wheel as surely as evil." This notion of morality driven liberation has fallen away for me (though i have not rescinded acting on my impulses, which heavily favor my own current notions of good). Morality is experienced now as utterly changeable; local awareness experiences this undeniably in moments of great expansion of awareness. Morality is revealed as a societally driven story and expresses as wholly malleable from generation to generation, not to mention from society to society. Malleable Morality no longer seems no more conducive to awakening. Non-binding presence is experienced as liberating. Sage moves freely always occupying center, unbound and ufettered. Seeing all as straw dogs. Like rain and sunshine, always falling without distinction, on the murderer and the medic alike; the Sage moves among the world.

wow. just wow.

Pretty sure it's only if the underwear has two leg holes instead of one...