Sketch

Sitting in forgetting, a translation of the term zouwang, has been my model - and my favorite term - for my daily seated meditation practice. From Zhuangzi; Just take the position of nonaction and all things unfold naturally. Let your body and limbs fall away, expel perception and intellect, leave relations and things behind in oblivion. Become mystically one with the immense and boundless, release your mind and free your spirit. Be silent and without an active spirit soul [that interacts with the world], and the ten thousand things will each return to their root. Each return to their root and rest in unknowing—dark, obscure, chaotic: they remain like this for the rest of their days. However, the moment you try to know this state, you have already effected a separation from it. Don’t ask its name, don’t measure its foundation—it’s the spontaneous life of each being.[6]

I am compelled to recommend musical instruments. Or sing to them.

It's simply that you can't progress past a certain point as a person without compassion. My understanding is to develop the person, not just the body, or the mind, or the spirit. One system, A fractal extension of the outer system.

This thread kind of follows my understanding of the protocol...starts out at the upper Dantian, ends up with rotation of the lower.

That was an observation at the time.

No, the column is not literal energy into the ground. These sketches are..sketchy. I'm not getting as much real circulation through the arms, but I have loads of shoulder damage and beat up hands to boot. Fair ladies hand during standing practice has done a lot of good there. I'm absolutely in a stage of building structure and clearing blockages, and likely to be there for a while.

Sort of thing.

It's the "last stop" for feeling nerve endings in the middle of the head. When I "visit" the spot, there's a reciprocal sense of the pulse in the abdomen. The pulses resolve into rotating locations, and there develops a feeling of downward flowing through my gooey parts.

Eckhart on the Dark Night of the Soul By Eckhart Tolle QUESTION: Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul? Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period. Can you address this subject? ECKHART: The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses. It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed. They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self. The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”. What is the purpose of a lesson like that? It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”. With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”. You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it collapses. You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness. Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on. Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. It can bring about the dark night of the soul – to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.

I associate this with the plexus of blood vessels and nerves surrounding the pituitary. I tend to check in briefly with the pulse there at the beginning of energy work, also per Scott Meredith's writing.

Following the Tao , Give something up every day

Not the movement stuff, although it has informed my understanding of tissue movement. It has been a valuable starting point for interior sound work. Very worthwhile reading in any case.

I can make my vision fuzzy! (Using another bit from Emilie Conrad's book)

I suppose I'm looking at the sounding work as a healing modality. A place to start. Certainly working directly with a teacher and healer would be the greatest advantage.

I still don't see how it's not just more music.

Vocal modalities are also key in Emilie Conrad's methods. Working with internal vibrations sets up standing waves that can last quite a while, and can have powerful effect, but this is not identical to the wave motion i experience during microcosmic orbit practice.

Not at all. I merely say "acknowledge ".

These would be westerners who acknowledge the depraved quality that capitalism has given the issue of wealth.

I try not to count my own good deeds, to try to just do the right thing because it was the next thing to do. You mean I could trade them in for cash and prizes? What a chump I've been.

This thread has given me an earworm.

This "Implicate Order" music is great stuff. Just right for listening to.

Thank you! The drums are my very good friend and co conspirator...who also took the fish picture.

This is a major theme in Emilie Conrad's book, "Life On Land" - her Continuum work allowed people suffering from paralysis to come back to movement. Amazing work that is still being carried on by her students.

That's when it's nice to play my guitar.

This WOULD create a platform for me to pester people into letting me hear what they sound like when they chant. Be warned.