9th

This seems to jump around a bit, landing on terminology and rebounding away like a frog making its way across lily pads. Hopefully that is not offensive, because it is not my intention. Sometimes its best to start out by going deep, under the water - and reaching as far as you can inside the internal world where the "true" knowledge is - which is "silent knowledge" - in other words, beyond human language but not necessarily non-conceptual. Once you have been sufficiently saturated with this "true" and "silent knowledge" in relation to a particular scenario or situation it often becomes much easier to match up the terminology after the fact. This isnt the best way for everyone, but something I would advise for those who would gravitate towards jnana (or gnosis) - which is what I sense in you - rather than those people who gravitate more towards bhakti or devotion. If you are talking about rebirth and karma in terms of the samskaras which extend beyond the confines of a present lifetime and reach back into the past as well as influencing the future, then you are speaking of a concept that can be related to the "firmware" of a computer in some ways. Its a very low level, system-wide kind of programming that may or may not be loaded into memory at any given time, but always exerts influence in terms of operational capacity. The analogy only goes so far however. Samskaras are like a skeleton upon which the karmic activity in a given lifetime is sourced as well as the repository for its resulting effects. Its not "you", but its intimately related to the phenomena of "you". Just remember that most teachings which refer to karma indicate that the objective is to grow beyond its influence, to stand apart from it, and so on. You refer to mixing buddhism and taoism (which is not necessarily a bad thing) and in fact this is the origin of Chan buddhism in China, more commonly known to us as Zen, after its transplantation to Japan. The earliest Japanese Zen monks and teachers often refer to many taoist concepts and ideas from a japanese perspective, and one might even say the practice of Koan studies are directly related to the kind of poetry found in the Tao Te Ching and so on. The most ancient Zen teachings also have direct references to the same kind of alchemical symbolism as taoism, but this was progressively dropped as more and more Japanese cultural influences were brought in. Eventually this resulted in the advent of the Soto school which ultimately came to define Zen as it is commonly understood today. However, it can be necessary to distinguish between teachings of anatman (buddhism) and those of atman (hinduism), because often there are other concepts which overlap and can cause confusion if you are starting off from the wrong foot. The distinction between these two concepts is fairly nebulous at the core, and ultimately I would regard them as two sides of the same coin - however I also have no real interest in the kinds of debates and so forth that ancient (and modern) Indian scholars and practicioners would engage in, so there isnt much I have to say beyond that. Notably Adi Shankara was supposedly a master of debating to the point that there are many fantastical stories about his prowess. I bring him up specifically because of his instrumental position in the promulgation of Advaita or "non-dualism" and its focus on the atman, or paramatman (in relation to brahman) - as well as his staunchly anti-buddhist stance. Ive always found the latter particularly interesting considering he seems to be saying the exact same thing as the buddhists, but simply arguing it from a different yet completely valid perspective. Again it seems to be a focus on terminology alone which defines the discrepancy. The teaching of anatman is a teaching focused on the concept of "no-self nature" whereas the teaching of atman is focused on the concept of "self-nature". Traditionally it is understood that the concept of anatman (supposedly first promulgated by Siddhartha Guatama or "the Buddha" around 500 BC) is a response and repudiation of the concept of atman, which is a much older concept stretching back into pre-history, through the lineage of the Jains. However, I consider this a bit too pat and dry, a bit too simple. If you do enough research on Jainism and particularly the last Tirthankara known as "Mahavira", you will find a number of striking parallels to Siddhartha and his teachings. Ultimately I would posit them to possibly be the same person, or at least directly related in a very intimate way. It seems possible that there arose a necessity to break away from the earlier tradition even as it is built directly on those foundations. In this same grey area is the fact that such a distinction between anatman and atman was probably already "in the air" somewhat, and perhaps even discussed long before, but not in the same formalized way, or at least lacking the same "celebrity" status. In any event, it is clear that Siddhartha studied and practiced Jainism in depth, and this is even spoken of directly in the Pali Canon itself. A number of key concepts and terms are directly derived from it - perhaps most notably the terms "samsara" and "nirvana" which I think most people assume comes from buddhism, which is incorrect. However, what does come to us from buddhism specifically is this focus on the concept of "anatman" or "no-self". This was the revolutionary idea that made Siddhartha stick out from everyone else, it was the biggest difference which set his teachings apart from all others at that time, as a "Master" or realized being himself. Unfortunately as modern people we lack the familiarity of context with those surrounding ancient teachings which he was responding and referring to at that time, as today the legacy of Buddhism is all that remains of the "conversation" between these ideas as far as most people are concerned - and yet this causes a great deal of problems in understanding the totality of the message presented by Siddhartha. Particularly I would say there is not nearly enough focus on the term which Siddhartha used whenever he referred to himself - the "tathagata". It has been translated in a number of ways, all of which point to the multi-dimensional truth he was trying to convey and ultimately something which I think is of great importance and key to understanding his philosophy in general. Many scholars have presented the concept of nirvana as being the end of suffering in terms of a "snuffing out", which is closer to the direct translation but perhaps loses some of the intent when translated directly in this way. A buddhist teacher once said "nirvana is like putting out the candle because the day has dawned" which is a much more accurate way of looking at it. There is a commonly held idea that buddhism denies a "soul" or any sort of life beyond death, which is also completely inaccurate. In fact there are many times in the Pali Canon where Siddhartha directly refers to the goal of reaching the "deathless". What he did deny and what he refused to do at any point, was to describe what it was like, what could be found there, how it would all shake out and so forth. His position is consistently that the awakened cannot be known or understood or even described from the position of not being awakened, and he absolutely refused to move away from this stance. There is a great deal of focus on that point in particular, and I feel it has been taken wrongly for the most part as time went on and caused a number of lingering misinterpretations that have become taken for granted. All this is to say that at the core, all the various teachings of evolution in regards to the practical progression of the living being (or self-cultivation, etc.) are related and essentially speaking of the same thing - and yet there is often seeming contradictions because we are missing the larger context of the culture and environment in which these teachings appear. If there is a need to respond to a certain imbalance among evolutionary teachings in a certain period or in a certain area, then a realized "Master" who restores such balance becomes favored and championed, and so on. Eventually, as the followers of such a Master repeat and disseminate these newer teachings which respond to older ideas, they result in fixed traditions - and that is when the problems creep in because it is like taking away all the context and placing the teaching in its own bubble, attempting to posit its existence in a vaccuum, as it were. This is simply the "wrong" way to do it, and yet it is inevitable because it is human nature to do this very thing. I wont get into another 10 pages discussing the differences between "traditionalism" and "progressiveness" but that is where such a discussion is headed. Those kinds of "righty" and "lefty" tendencies are extremely fundamental and deeply rooted at the animal level. If you want to follow that rabbit-hole down an interesting path, do some research on the terms "deva and asura" in regards to Hinduism and "daeva and ahura" in regards to Zoroastrianism. It is the same linguistic phenomena by which we have the different names "soma" and "haoma" for the same "magical potion" - but there are far deeper implications when taken in the full context of sadhana in general.

DNA is a bit like Gaia's version of the Akashic records. Its a living memory bank, and as such is also the source of what can be called "destiny" in terms of the earthly realm. Its literally raw information - recorded, archived and encoded. These records can be accessed and decoded by transmuting sexual energy - but actually this area is often misunderstood. It does not refer to transforming semen or eggs back into sexual "energy", since they have already become sexual "matter" - because if you can transmute matter back into energy, you wont have much of anything to worry about at all anyways... The correct understanding refers to the conservation and retaining of sexual energy before it becomes reproductive fluids. Not in an absolute sense, as in stopping the flow altogether - but certainly much more than the average joe that is "leaking chi through the eyes" by lusting after every round curve and bouncing bit of flesh. Sexual energy is the living connection which interacts with DNA. Once it has become reproductive fluids or materials, it has "crystallized" in a certain formation which requires a complimentary external element for completion and wholeness. This is necessary for a new life to begin. If we wish to communicate with our DNA as it is and establish our personal connection to the Gaia mind, we must provide the equivalent space for a new life within our own being as well as the required complimentary element in its original energetic state - which is no small task, in fact it is a key aspect of the Magnum Opus, or "Great Work". DNA contains the memories and recorded actions of your family, your ancestors, as well as the memories of those before them and so on - all the way back to the origin of all living beings on this planet. DNA is the body's knowledge, it is what your body knows by way of "instinct" - and it is so vastly superior to the knowledge of your "civilized, human mind" that its like comparing the Library of Alexandria to a fortune cookie. Its hard to overstate how much knowledge is contained in DNA, when properly decoded - and Im not talking about TCAG, codons and amino acids and so forth. If you want to strike up some interesting resonances for yourself and your own situation, find a good translation of the I Ching and read it as much as possible, then look around for connections to its wisdom in your daily life. The original writings of the I Ching are directly sourced from a holistic understanding of DNA in action, as are the underlying structure of hexagrams themselves. Many peoples and cultures have esoteric teachings which speak of Dragons, Serpents and so forth - and these are messengers of DNA wisdom. If you encounter such beings in visions, meditations, dreams, etc. - you will understand why that is so. It is a universal phenomena in regards to human encounters with the Gaia mind - the Earth mind - the global network of consciousness where humanity is only one part of the whole picture.

It remains only the barest of probabilities that astronomers have just found evidence of extraterrestrial, intelligent life. Nevertheless, in the community of astronomers and other scientists who use radio telescopes to search the heavens for beacons of life there is considerable excitement about a new signal observed by a facility in Russia. According to Paul Gilster, author of the Centauri Dreams website, the Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and other astronomers affiliated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have detected "a strong signal in the direction of HD164595." HD 164595 is a star of 0.99 solar masses about 95 light years from Earth, with an estimated age of 6.3 billion years. The system is known to have at least one planet, HD 164595 b, which is similar in size to Neptune and orbits its star in 40 days. Other planets may exist in the system as well. http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/seti-has-observed-a-strong-signal-that-may-originate-from-a-sun-like-star/

no reservations for alienations they tilt the axis and the allies roll with it you can hear the snake-eyes smash into black on black stacked chips and red shoes dropping from the sky like fallen angels rushing into the upside-down inside-out types of shadow worlds trailing all possible futures into each moment tracked back to the source for posterity a billion blazing suns poking white-hot pin-holes backwards, forwards, and shifting in-between images burned into planets made of diamond and expanding forces of gravity until ignition radioactive hot-rods jacked up to the core on the way to the superluminal highway with federal mandates for unlimited speeds in the dying light of unimaginable violence

Sounds like a reference to practices towards the method of phowa - which is used to direct consciousness at the time of death into a specific realm, or into another body to continue life here. The details on that latter practice are pretty freaky - for example it can be a corpse or a living person.

I always wondered why SETI was looking for radio communications/signals, when highly advanced species would probably be using other forms of technology instead. Are they looking for other species at our same level of technological advancement? Doesnt seem that exciting. No UFOs and all that. Seems like SETI makes announcements like this every few years or so - and if you are skeptical and cynical enough you might think its purely an attempt for grabbing continued funding and public interest.

Potentially there is use of personal energy, collective energy, environmental energy, earthly energy, lunar energy, planetary energy, solar energy, galactic energy, cosmic energy, universal energy - and so on. Yes, a constant use of personal energy can deplete your reserves if you do not replenish them (as has been mentioned), and in general, as a matter of course, in terms of the "proper way" (such as the "true men of old" or so forth) the only personal energy that is used in such a way is that which is in surplus. Thus there is a need for generating an abundance of personal energy, to be kept in a reserve which is above and beyond the concerns of a "normal, average" lifestyle. This kind of "non-ordinary" lifestyle in which an over-abundance of personal energy is generated is the true hallmark of "self-cultivation" (as it is called on this forum). It does often seem that most people who would call themselves "magicians" tend not to do this, and therefore encounter problems in this area as well as many others. In general this relates to the so-called placement of carts and horses. There are a great number of debilitating life issues which spring from a lack of understanding regarding the chain of causation, or karma (in other words "the chicken or the egg"). Likewise, usage of energies which are sourced from "outside" the body can deplete personal energy and/or damage a person, depending on the situation. Or they can empower a person and allow them to grow into new forms which harness new possibilities and drive their evolution forward into new realms of life. Just as in many other fields of activity, you usually learn by making mistakes. Some mistakes are not only inevitable but entirely required. Sometimes those mistakes are more costly than others - some people lose their lives over them, some people rebound and become twice the person they once were, and some people have results between these extremes - one thing that is for sure is that a change of some sort will happen eventually, because it is not possible to remain the same once these practices are truly set in motion. There are not many hard and fast rules for any of this because of the wide variation of people in general, and the nature of these endeavors themselves rely on such unknowns. This is complicated by the fact that the science of energy is not a well established and well understood practice for the vast majority of people on earth at this time - one might even say the current level of humanity reflects a massive degradation in this area, which is a point of fascination for many researchers of this topic. For example, the current systems of Yoga being practiced on a large scale are nowhere near being close to how powerful it was in the bygone eras - and Im talking about those people supposedly practicing the "real thing" and not just doing asanas to tone their abs and look at hot chicks. And there are many other systems besides Yoga which have been all but forgotten in essence. There is a legacy of this "internal technology" which belongs to humanity and which has become almost completely dormant by now, but still resides within the collective memory and can be accessed if you know what you are doing. All this is to say that there are possibilities available to humanity that were established long, long, long ago and have remained "open" to this day, and yet their disuse and neglect has caused such things to become dangerous in that people are no longer accustomed to them or familiar enough with the basic principals involved, and therefore are liable to make mistakes. Its a bit like finding a loaded energy weapon on your kitchen table... whats it for? hows it work? who put it there? But its often more likely that someone would say "hell yeh! lets go shoot some laser beams!! pew pew pew!!!", and that can lead to problems. But you know what they say...

letting action go collecting the allowance children and parents

I always felt this was the best example of Krishnamurti, in reality, in action Its so much more illuminating than any of his books, IMHO. I dont resonate with him at all, but he is responsible for one of my favorite quotes:

The primordial force is the radiance of the sun, which the sons of the sun have carried in themselves for aeons and pass on to their children. But if the soul dips into radiance, she becomes as remorseless as the God himself - since the life of the divine child, which you have eaten, will feel like glowing coals in you. It will burn inside you like a terrible, inextinguishable fire. But despite all the torment, you cannot let it be, since it will not let you be. From this you will understand that your God is alive and that your soul has begun wandering on remorseless paths. You feel that the fire of the sun has erupted in you. Something new has been added to you, a holy affliction. Sometimes you no longer recognize yourself. You want to overcome it, but it overcomes you. You want to set limits, but it compels you to keep going. You want to elude it, but it comes with you. You want to employ it, but you are its tool; you want to think about it, but your thoughts obey it. Finally the fear of the inescapable seizes you, for it comes after you slowly and invincibly. There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is. Now you'll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it's all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way. - Jung

The Opening of the Egg. On the evening of the third day, I kneel down on the rug and carefully open the egg. Something resembling smoke rises up from it and suddenly Izdubar is standing before me, enormous, transformed, and complete. His limbs are whole and I find no trace of damage on them. It's as if he had awoken from a deep sleep. He says: Where am I? How narrow it is here, how dark, how cool - am I in the grave Where was I? It seemed to me as if I had been outside in the universe over and under me was an endlessly dark, star-glittering sky and I was in a passion of unspeakable yearning. Streams of fire broke from my radiating body- I surged through blazing flames- I swam in a sea that wrapped me in living fires Full of light, full of longing, full of eternity- I was ancient and perpetually renewing myself falling from the heights to the depths, and whirled glowing from the depths to the heights hovering around myself amidst glowing clouds as raining embers beating down like the foam of the surf, engulfing myself in stifling heat- Embracing and rejecting myself in a boundless game Where was I I was completely sun." I: "Oh Izdubar! Divine one! How wonderful! You are healed!" Healed? Was I ever sick? Who speaks of sickness? I was sun, completely sun. I am the sun. An inexpressible light breaks from his body, a light that my eyes cannot grasp. I must cover my face and cast my gaze to the ground. I: "You are the sun, the eternal light-most powerful one, forgive me for carrying you." Everything is quiet and dark. I look around me: the empty egg shell is lying on the rug. I feel myself the floor, the walls: everything is as usual, utterly plain and utterly real. I would like to say that everything around me has turned to gold. But it is not true-everything is as it always has been. Here reigned eternal light, immeasurable and overpowering. * It happened that I opened the egg and that the God left the egg. He was healed and his figure shone transformed, and I knelt like a child and could not grasp the miracle. He who had been pressed into the core of the beginning rose up, and no trace of illness could be found on him. And when I thought that I had caught the mighty one and held him in my cupped hands, he was the sun itself. I wandered toward the East where the sun rises. I probably wanted to rise, too, as if I were the sun. I wanted to embrace the sun and rise with it into daybreak. But it came toward me and stood in my way. It told me that I had no chance of reaching the beginning. But I lamed the one who wanted to rush down in order to set with the sun in the womb of the night; he was deprived of all hope of reaching the blessed Western lands. But behold! I caught the sun without realizing it and carried it in my hand. He who wanted to go down with the sun found me through his down-going. I became his nocturnal mother who incubated the egg of the beginning. And he rose up, renewed, reborn to greater splendor. While he rises, however, I go down. When I conquered the God, his force streamed into me. But when the God rested in the egg and awaited his beginning, my force went into him. And when he rose up radiantly, I lay on my face. He took my life with him. All my force was now in him. My soul swam like a fish in his sea of fire. But I lay in the frightful cool of the shadows of the earth and sank down deeper and deeper to the lowest darkness. All light had left me. The God rose in the Eastern lands and I fell into the horror of the underworld. I lay there like a child-bearer cruelly mauled and bleeding her life into the child, uniting life and death in a dying glance, the day's mother, the night's prey. My God had torn me apart terribly, he had drunk the juice of my life, he had drunk my highest power into him and became marvelous and strong like the sun, an unblemished God who bore no stigma or flaw. He had taken my wings from me, he had robbed me of the swelling force of my muscles, and the power of my will disappeared with him. He left me powerless and groaning. I did not know what was happening to me, since simply everything powerful, beautiful, blissful, and superhuman had leaked from my maternal womb; none of the radiant gold remained. Cruelly and unthinkably the sunbird spread its wings and flew up into infinite space. I was left with the broken shells and the miserable casing of his beginning; the emptiness of the depths opened beneath me. Woe betide the mother who gives birth to a God! If she gives birth to a wounded and pain-stricken God, a sword will pierce her soul. But if she gives birth to an unblemished God, then Hell will open to her, from which monstrous serpents will rise convulsively to suffocate the mother with miasma. Birth is difficult, but a thousand times more difficult is the hellish afterbirth. All the dragons and monstrous serpents of eternal emptiness follow behind the divine son. What remains of human nature when the God has become mature and has seized all power? Everything incompetent, everything powerless, everything eternally vulgar, everything adverse and unfavorable, everything reluctant, diminishing, exterminating, everything absurd, everything that the unfathomable night of matter encloses in itself that is the afterbirth of the God and his hellish and dreadfully deformed brother. The God suffers when man does not accept his darkness. Consequently men must have a suffering God, so long as they suffer from evil. To suffer from evil means: you still love evil and yet love it no longer. You still hope to gain something, but you do not want to look closely for fear that you might discover that you still love evil. The God suffers because you continue to suffer from loving evil. You do not suffer from evil because you recognize it, but because it affords you secret pleasure, and because you believe it promises the pleasure of an unknown opportunity. So long as your God suffers, you have sympathy with him and with yourself. You thus spare your Hell and prolong his suffering. If you want to make him well without engaging in secret sympathy with yourself, evil puts a spoke in your wheel - the evil whose form you generally recognize, but whose hellish strength in yourself you do not know. Your unknowing stems from the previous harmlessness of your life, from the peaceful passage of time, and from the absence of the God. But if the God draws near, your essence starts to seethe and the black mud of the depths whirls up. Man stands between emptiness and fullness. If his strength combines with fullness, it becomes fully formative. There is always something good about such formation. If his strength combines with emptiness, it has a dissolving and destructive effect, since emptiness can never be formed, but only strives to satisfy itself at the cost of fullness. Combined thus human force turns emptiness into evil. If your force shapes fullness, it does so because of its association with fullness. But to ensure that your formation continues to exist, it must remain tied to your strength. Through constant shaping, you gradually lose your force, since ultimately all force is associated with the shapeliness that has been given form. Ultimately, where you mistakenly imagine that you are rich, you have actually become poor, and you stand amidst your forms like a beggar. That is when the blinded man is seized by an increasing desire to give shape to things, since he believes that manifold increased formation will satisfy his desire. Because he has spent his force, he becomes desirous; he begins to compel others into his service and takes their force to pursue his own designs. In this moment, you need evil. When you notice that your strength is coming to an end and desire sets in, you must withdraw it from what has been formed into your emptiness; through this association with the emptiness you will succeed in dissolving the formation in you. You will thus regain your freedom, in that you have saved your strength from oppressive association with the object. So long as you persist with the standpoint of the good, you cannot dissolve your formation, precisely because it is what is good. You cannot dissolve good with good. You can dissolve good only with evil. For your good also leads ultimately to death through its progressive binding of your force by progressively binding your force. You are entirely unable to live without evil. Your shaping first produces an image of your formation within you. This image remains in you and it is the first and unmediated expression of your shaping. It then produces precisely through this image an outer one, which can exist without you and outlive you. Your strength is not directly linked to your outer formation, but only through the image that remains in you. When you set about dissolving your formation with evil, you do not destroy the outer shape, or else you would be destroying your own work. But what you do destroy is the image that you have formed in yourself. For it is this image that clings to your force. You will need evil to dissolve your formation, and to free yourself from the power of what has been, to the same extent which this image fetters your strength. Hence their formation causes many good persons to bleed to death, because they cannot attend to evil in the same measure. The better one is and the more attached one is to one's formation, the more one will lose one's force. But what happens when the good person has lost their force completely to their formation? Not only will they seek to force others into the service of their formation with unconscious cunning and power, but they will also become bad in their goodness without knowing it, since their longing for satisfaction and strengthening will make them more and more selfish. But because of this the good ones will ultimately destroy their own work, and all those whom they forced into the service of their own work will become their enemies, because they will have alienated them. But you will also secretly begin to hate whoever alienates you from yourself against your own wishes, even if this were in the best interest of things. Unfortunately, the good person who has bound his strength will all too easily find slaves for his service, since there are more than plenty who yearn for nothing more strongly than to be alienated from themselves under a good pretext. You suffer from evil because you love it secretly and are unaware of your love. You wish to escape your predicament, and you begin to hate evil. And once more you are bound to evil through your hate, since whether you love or hate it, it makes no difference: you are bound to evil. Evil is to be accepted. What we want remains in our hands. What we do not want, and yet is stronger than us, sweeps us away and we cannot stop it without damaging ourselves, for our force remains in evil. Thus we probably have to accept our evil without love and hate, recognizing that it exists and must have its share in life. In doing so, we can deprive it of the power it has to overwhelm us. * When we have succeeded in making a God, and if through this creation our whole force has entered into this design, we are filled with an overwhelming desire to rise with the divine sun and to become a part of its magnificence. But we forget that we are then no more than hollow forms, since giving form to God has sapped us completely. We are not only poor but have become sluggish matter throughout, which would never be entitled to share in divinity. Like a terrible suffering or an inescapable devilish persecution, the misery and neediness of our matter creeps up on us. The powerless matter begins to suckle and would like to swallow its shape back into itself again. But since we are always enamored of our own design, we believe that the God calls us to him, and we make desperate attempts to follow the God into the higher realm, or we turn preachingly and demandingly to our fellow men to at any rate force others into following the God. Unfortunately there are men who allow themselves to be persuaded into doing this, to their and our detriment. Much undoing resides in this urge: since who could suspect that he who has made the God is himself condemned to Hell? But this is the way it is, because the matter that is stripped of the divine radiance of force is empty and dark. If the God alights from matter, we feel the emptiness of matter as one part of endless empty space. Through haste and increased willing and action we want to escape from emptiness and also from evil. But the right way is that we accept emptiness, destroy the image of the form within us, negate the God, and descend into the abyss and awfulness of matter. The God as our work stands outside us and no longer needs our help. He is created and remains left to his own devices. A created work that perishes again immediately once we turn away from it is not worth anything, even if it were a God. But where is the God after his creation and after his separation from me? If you build a house, you see it standing in the outer world. When you have created a God whom you cannot see with your own eyes, then he is in the spiritual world that is no less valuable than the outer physical world. He is there and does everything for you and others that you would expect from a God. Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world. Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you. But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you. Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives. Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and obliterate the image of my child in me. This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness. Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows. Nature is playful and terrible. Some see the playful side and dally with it and let it sparkle. Others see the horror and cover their heads and are more dead than alive. The way does not lead between both, but embraces both. It is both cheerful play and cold horror.

Dead things change, they decompose, they rot, they continue to fall apart. This is pretty obvious as well. You fellows both win, how about that? Can you be happy with that? Or is the fact that you are both right all too close to the fact you are both wrong?

To serve a purpose, you must be of service. To be of service, you must become useful. To become useful, you must discover your uselessness. To discover your uselessness you must choose to have no choice. There is a thoroughness in the process of living and dying and being reborn which cannot be comprehended within the confines of a mind that clings to this life alone. It does indeed have a definite aim which is all too clear within the mind that is beyond this life alone. To resolve the eternal within the temporary and the temporary within the eternal and bridge all the connections between them is no small task, no small endeavor. Humanity as a species has its own agenda which follows a timeline appropriate for a species. Your internal being has an agenda which follows a timeline appropriate for such a being.

Talk of talking about talk

This is essential. There are a number of experiences which will more or less shatter the continuity of the "normal world" in terms of personal experience. Eventually, as it becomes "more" rather than "less", and that continuity is indeed permanently "broken", it creates a space or opening for awareness to functionally grow beyond the confines of the mind. Its not an overnight prospect, although the suddenness or contrast of such experiences with the "normal world" is often the most memorable aspect and thus is more apparent in hindsight. Yet the process initiated is like any other cultivation, like a plant growing from seed to sprout to flower. This effect is the best reason (if not the only worthwhile one) to pursue "alternate" realities or siddhis or any of the other non-ordinary phenomena. For example, a functional aspect of the sahasrara gives a 360 degree non-local (where presence arises with awareness, wherever it is placed) view of reality in its composition of rays and lights, i.e. energy flows, i.e. so called "dark matter". The three aspects of all-directions, all-locations, all-apparent goes a very long way in breaking the hypnotic vice grip which the internal dialog imposes on the mind, as well as the instinctual imperatives which compel the energetic system to serve only the earthly cycle - although the latter is more like a ripening than a "breaking free"... as its all part of the plan rather than a revolt. This is usually impossible to fully understand until it becomes hindsight - although the intellectual idea of it can serve you well if you can truly agree with it. Also, in many traditions it has been dramatized in various ways which certainly do emphasize the "one" vs "other" or "us" vs "them" type aspects. Swimming upstream and so forth - its like resistance training for a certain task. You need it until you dont - unlike resistance training so you can look like Mr. Universe, which by definition is an endless endeavor.

The name "YHWH" is probably derived from the Hebrew triconsonantal root היה (h-y-h), "to be", become, come to pass", with a third person masculine y- prefix, equivalent to English "he".[6][8][9] It is connected to the passage in Exodus 3:14 in which God gives his name as אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (Ehyeh asher Ehyeh), where the verb[which?], translated most basically as "I Am that I Am", or "I shall be what I shall be", "I shall be what I am"[10] or "I will become what I choose to become",[11] " I Will Become whatsoever I please".[12] יהוה with the vocalization "Yahweh" could theoretically be a hif'il (causative) verb inflection of root HWH, with a meaning something like "he who causes to exist" (the creator deity) or "who gives life" (the root idea of the word being "to breathe", and hence, "to live").[13][14] As a qal (basic stem) verb inflection, it could mean "he who is, who exists".

Vipassana is not a ritual - its a type of meditation that focuses on generating insight into the root causes of various personal delusions

It is even worse if we have no knowledge or personal experience of the absolute states, and yet remain attached to the verbal descriptions and expressions gathered from others who have, mistaking them for our own understanding, and arguing for or against them based on such appropriations. What is being developed is no different than the standard divisive attitude which prevails among lay society, which requires people to sharply define their identity through opposition to another. Such playing at practice, pretending to practice, giving lip service to the dharma but still acting against it - its quite a normal situation. And it fits in with all the other normal situations quite well. Hypocrisy is not the exception, but rather its the rule for people who have unconscious minds - such as most people on the street, the average lay person that has never heard of these practices and has no interest in them.

But you see, it makes no difference if it is "true" or "not true" if you always act as if it is "true". You are only fooling yourself, playing silly mind games with yourself - where you claim to know better than to treat existence as "true". Yet you cannot prove your claims, and therefore your claims themselves remain "not true". In other words, you have no clue what is "true" or "not true" because you cannot discern the difference between them. You seem to be saying "I know whats going on, Ive figured it all out", but this in itself is the clearest evidence of your lack of knowing, especially in the light of all these other statements. When you actually discover that you dont know whats going on, that you really are clueless, then you will have actually made some progress. Most people prevent themselves from making such progress, so good luck. For the sake of argument lets say life is all an illusion, its not "real" or "true" - if you truly recognize something as illusion, it has no power over you, it is merely a phantasm of no consequence. I am asking you to demonstrate this claim you are making, but you are unable to do so. You cannot walk through walls, fly through the air - for you, there are laws of existence which act upon you and control your actions and thoughts at all times. If it is all an illusion, then you are not above it, in fact you are very much under it - you are subjugated by it, you are a slave to it. In such a case, it is quite easy to see why you would want to run around claiming such a thing is not true - it is much more exciting for your ego to think you are over it, that you are free of it, that you have achieved some sort of gold medal of wisdom, and that now you must run around and proudly show this to everyone so they will shower you with recognition and accolades. But you have not shown any achievements, and you have not shown any real understanding - all you have shown is empty psuedo-intellectual claims that cannot be proven. If that is enough for you, thats great - enjoy yourself. You will find plenty of company here, I can assure you.