Mark Foote

I like the video, the part about bits of awareness all connected and nothing to fear sounds a lot like what people have said about NDE. Also what some people report experiencing through psychedelics, I guess. I know that sometimes I feel my sitting is open, and I have ease and joy, and when I get up and try to do the things I feel I must for my life the intention and the deadlines leave me wondering what good my practice is. Still, I have to believe that at least I'm aware of the discontinuity, I feel the loss and that's a start. I'm still learning to walk upright, seems like I was behind the door when that was passed out...

organ olympics skaters, please rotate clockwise her eye catches mine her eye catches mine sunlight glints off the water a distant bird calls a distant bird calls wind shifts, earth moves as roots grow down, deep; here is good down, deep; here is good never another to know here is all I am

Here, back, there you are reaching for an old dog's ears her eye catches mine

I frequently feel a fear of falling when I steer myself toward action solely through the sense of location. That's something I have to be able to relax and accept, before my sense of location can shift and allow the action that holds me up to occur spontaneously. I do find that sometimes having had a few drinks and being inspired to dance helps me to let go; the hard part is keeping the focus on falling up, so that I don't drink too much and fall down! Robert Monroe said that he finally realized one fail-safe way to return to his body when he was out of body, and that was to feel the movement of his own breath. I listened to "DMT-The Spirit Molecule" the documentary the other day, it's on YouTube, and there was a gentleman describing a technique for lucid dreaming. He said everytime you pass through a doorway, ask yourself whether you are dreaming; he said one day, you will pass through a door in a dream and ask yourself, and then you will realize you are dreaming and can begin lucid dreaming. A friend of mine knew someone who tried it, but in the end the whole experience felt like a hall of mirrors (to that person). Lately in my sober sitting I am struck by the way a freedom to shift in the sense of location is necessary to the turns in my breath, from inhalation to exhalation and particularly from exhalation to inhalation. It is like the freedom of the mind just before dropping off to sleep, that moves now here now there in the body; this freedom permits the turns in the movement of breath.

I agree, studying is a kind of backward step, a left-brain thing instead of a left- and right-brain thing. The things I study that are the most vibrant usually turn out to be alive in some sense; that is to say, they speak to me when I need them, and then like the teacher that Dao rain Tao described they go away. If I had not read the stories of the Zen masters, I would not have met one. If I had not met one, I might not have been inspired to read the early Pali Canon suttra volumes, and some of the teachings of the Ch'an masters. If I had not read them, I would not have found the things I needed, for waking up and falling asleep easily throughout my day and night and I would not have known that I can give those things up and be fine where I am with just nothing.

I'd like to add my 2 cents. I think that's a great thing about Tao Bums, a lot of people here have had very deep experiences with various energies, healings, and practices. The tradition in Eastern wisdom traditions is to develop a master/disciple relationship, or a teacher/student relationship, in order to learn these things. There's a great deal that is passed in the Eastern teacher/student relationship that is not communicated with words, and there's a real question about whether or not the Eastern wisdom traditions can be learned outside of this kind of teacher/student relationship. A lot of folks on Tao Bums feel that they have learned something others might benefit by. Some teachers use the site to put forward their own workshops and classes, with student testimonials and stories of healing; I think that's great. Lots of folks make bold to communicate something of what they have learned in words, or to compare the explanations of Eastern teachings with the actuality of the practices; oftentimes there's a discrepancy there, and right away the Western scientific mindset kicks in to say there must be a better explanation for what's going on here and we've got to get to the bottom of it if we are to make any real progress. That's what I love about Tao Bums. I discover that I can write my own understanding here, and as long as I reach down for things that are new to me as I write them, then what I write becomes a teaching to me and an inspiration I can take back into my practice. The saying is, "see the change in yourself first, if you would change the world" (or something like that)- I'm going for that!

"they are beautiful!" the spent roses seemed to hear suddenly transformed

Sounds like you might try a remote viewing approach. That's the practice of writing questions on pieces of paper and putting them in envelopes, and the remote viewer attempts to see something based on what's in the envelope without reading the question. This is not seeing the question, it's seeing the answer without seeing the question, essentially. I haven't done it, don't know how you'd approach it, but here's a link for you: International Remote Viewing Association Good luck!

I read what you said about your experience with a sacramental plant, and I was immediately put in mind of something I wrote this morning on another site, where someone asked about sickness, old age, and death. I thought you might like it: "I still grapple with Gautama the Buddha's equating sickness, old age, and death with the five groups of grasping, but I think it does make sense in that my consciousness is not my own, not mine. When consciousness takes place spontaneously with regard to the six senses, that awareness from moment to moment is free, is not conditioned in the place of occurrence by ignorance, desire, or becoming. "That being, this is so", yet there is no doer, no sense of a do-er in control of that with respect to which consciousness takes place, no sense of a do-er in the placement of consciousness. This is just the way I experience consciousness falling asleep, when I attend to my sense of location in space as I fall asleep. When I'm waking up, the breath in, the breath out has no length except in the free occurrence of mind. Grasping after self, after a do-er in the five groups follows ignorance of the experience of consciousness taking place spontaneously, ignorance of the impact of consciousness, ignorance of the feeling that occurs as consciousness takes place. The sense of self connected with the do-er in the five groups knows old age, illness, and death as suffering, yet that sense of self is identically grasping in the five groups." Same song, and my descriptions of waking up and falling asleep are an effort to help myself (and maybe others) identify what is present all along.

Second that last. My big thing right now is seeing that falling asleep is as important as waking up. If a person feels they are not waking up, and I mean to the full experience of life, then maybe they could use to aim at falling asleep for awhile and see how that feels. All they have to do is stay with their sense of location, as their consciousness drifts off, to fall asleep. In my experience, the same is true when I am waking up. Reading "Zen Letters, Teachings of Yuanwu" (translated by the Cleary brothers) for a quote, and I find this: 'Although it is just this one thing that we all stand on, ultimately you yourself must mobilize and focus your energy. Only then will you really receive the use of it.' (pg 95) That one I'm quoting for me! And here's the one I was actually looking for, for our discussion: 'You are a master of Buddhist teaching methods only when you can recognize junctures of times and patterns of causal conditions and manage not to miss real teaching opportunities.' (pg 19) Tao Bums is an opportunity for me to teach myself, and everybody here inspires me to sit the lotus, waking up and falling asleep.

Yes I did write that. I have to admit, that I have been focused on finding the vocabulary to describe my own experience to myself for years, because I am the principal beneficiary when I get the relationships right. And I always believed the idea was to change myself, and describe how I did it while I was doing it so that there would be a coherent record if anyone else needed to follow, or perhaps if I lost my mind and had to start over! Trick is, I know the words aren't really going to communicate to someone else, but a positive and substantive description of the relationships involved has a power beyond a person's conscious understanding, I believe that. It's the hypnosis of the cosmos, if you will. I am envious of Shaktimama and Dr. Morris, and frightened at the same time. I'm only seeking the magic of waking up and falling asleep right where I am now, and yet living this life to the fullest has got to be positive, and the experiences folks describe sound awesome. Maybe I'm too timid, ha ha!

I was very impressed with Dr. Morris's approach, in that he felt even teachers with many years of experience were not teaching the method he had stumbled onto, and he went with his own experience and taught from that regardless of any lineage teaching. I've shared the videos of Shi DeLon's students wtih friends of mine, and they sent me back this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWfLdYIpARQ Right away I conclude that what's at play here has nothing to do with a particular training, and everything to do with the healer's ability to induce a trance-like state in the subject. This doesn't mean that the Christian healers are not talented individuals who have learned to channel some of the same energies, but only that the description of the mechanism of healing is not entirely objective in any of these traditions yet. I guess that means the choices are to find a teacher and learn the art intuitively through guided practice, or strike out on one's own using whatever resources one can, as Dr. Morris did. Taking the self-guided approach, a person can attempt to discover a more objective description through trial and error, using oneself as the subject. Sort of like this: Or Neil Young's 'Sedan Delivery': "I'm making another delivery Of chemicals and sacred roots I'll hold what you have to give me But I'll use what I have to use. The lasers are in the lab The old man is dressed in white clothes Everybody says he's mad No one knows the things that he knows."

Like to mention Dr. John Upledger, fine interview that outlines his basic understanding and approach to healing here. In the instance of traumatic injury, Upledger teaches that the body sometimes has to be repositioned to allow the force that has entered the body to exit by the path it came in on. He teaches that traumatic injury can cause an energy cyst to form, which is the body's way of containing the force of the injury, and that the release of the energy can require the patient to resume a posture similar to that in which they were injured. If I'm remembering correctly! Prayer and practice postures around the world are a fascinating subject to me; many of them seem to involve the knees directly or indirectly. There's prayer on the knees, meditation in the lotus, the sufi zikir practice that involves bowing the body and straightening the knees, straightening the body and bending the knees, martial arts standing postures with the knees bent. Occurs to me just now that the idea in some of this may be to accent the motion of the sartorious muscles on the pelvis by fixing the position of the knees and lower legs. I've been working in the past week with the relationship between the action of sartorious at the pelvis generated in the lotus, the action in the obturators as the length of the spine and balance of the head work the hips, and the action in the piriformis as the obturators extend the hips (which action in the piriformis causes the sacrum to pivot on the vertical axis opposite to the rotation of the pelvis). A practice I return to frequently is observing motion in three planes associated with my sense of location in space, observing motion associated with my sense of "where" as consciousness takes place. I read some advice from a Zen teacher last week that included placing the mind in the palm of the left hand, with the hands in the mudra; I prefer to free the place of occurrence of mind as though I were about to fall asleep, and to observe the relationship of the position of my hands, my elbows, and my shoulders with the pitch, yaw, and roll present in consciousness. The space in the armpits can be found with the roll at the location of consciousness, that's my experience, and similarly the angle of the elbows with the yaw and the proximity of the little fingers to the abdomen with the pitch. Real prayer practices involve the induction of a hypnogogic state, between waking and sleeping. The recollection of a prior relationship between the place of occurrence of consciousness and an ability to feel can be a part of that; the word "zikir" I believe translates literally as "remembrance".

Thanks, ShaktiMama, for the insights into teaching methods and the story of the healing at the 911 site. I always enjoy Tao Bums for the sincerity of the contributions, even though sometimes the feathers get ruffled a little, and the inspiration I feel as I learn to sit the lotus. Not so easy to change and be open, here's a favorite picture that I think Apech turned me on to, the queen and the goddess: would you believe, I don't think I ever noticed the snake wound in among the horns?

could be arrested at any time, this old beater dried leaves, dusted bones

Here's something I wrote this morning to another Tao Bum'er, in response to a question about the "waking up" part of "waking up and falling asleep"- I'm hoping this explanation will be useful to myself and others (yes, I don't get things the first time around either): 'When I'm falling asleep, I generally have a few moments where my mind seems to be shifting around in my body, right before I drop off. This is probably more apparent when I've had enough sleep so that I'm lying there in bed wondering if I'm going to get to sleep, what a luxury that is! Because I know that I have to let go of any direction of mind in order to fall asleep, I tend to turn my attention to where my thoughts just took place, to where my awareness is in my body. That's when maybe I'll experience my consciousness taking place somewhere other than between my ears. This is not usually a continuous thing, but a now here, now there, in my side, in my leg, in my back thing. And then I'm out like a light. I occasionally come to the same experience in the daytime, which is why I think it's about waking up as well as falling asleep. There's a sensation of my balance being dependent on where my consciousness is taking place, in an upright posture. I read about hypnic jerk phenomena the other day, that's where the muscles in the arms or legs contract just as a person is dropping off to sleep, and they wake up. The article I read said about 70% of the people experience this regularly, and they hypothesized that the mind feels the loss of motor ability but doesn't recognize that it's connected with sleep, and so tries to regain motor ability with a signal to the muscles. I guess what I'm talking about is connected with that same shut-off of motor ability, and the trick is to perceive consciousness taking place without motor ability.'

I talked to a friend of mine last night, and he said that he read the article about "the myth of the eight-hour sleep" and it changed his life. Previously he would wake up in the wee hours of the morning, and lie in bed anxious about the fact that he wasn't asleep; the anxiety actually kept him from going back to sleep. Now he reads for awhile and then falls back to sleep, no problem, because he realizes it's ok to be up for awhile. Big difference in his life; thanks, Apech, for pointing out the article.

Well, the Chinese control 97% of the rare earths, and their government subsidizes a whole infrastructure of manufacturing and engineering to take advantage of the fact. Apple moved the manufacturing to China where the labor is cheap and the engineers are right next door to the factory 24/7, and Apple found a way to funnel their company money through a 10-person office in Reno to avoid California taxes. I think there was a surplus when Clinton left office. Not that he did the country a lot of good, getting rid of the restrictions on banks engaging in hedge funds and other gambling schemes. The real stuff of revolution is ordinary fun, I believe in that; is that Taoist?

Well said, IMO. Boston harbor, "no taxation with or without representation!"- I think not. This Tea Party is really about taxation by monopoly capitalism in the form of hedge funds, large banks and corporations, for the benefit of the few as opposed to the many. And yet, the darling federal expenditure of the fascist crowd is imperiled; whatever will the party of "nay" say when the mandatory cuts are imminent, this fall? Does it matter to the Koch brothers that the cuts will throw this country and the rest of the world into a second recession, per the federal budget office? If not, then there will be a second recession, as surely as the critical Tea Party activists receive the majority of their funding from the Koch brothers. "Four states were crucial to the success of any new government- Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York. Of these, New York was the most difficult casewith the strongest opposition. ... The New York convention abandoned its opposition to the Constitution in large part because a nineth state (New Hampshire) ratified during the Poughkeepsie debates, leaving New York with the prospect of lonely nationhood to itself." (from Gary Wills' introduction to the Federalist Papers, published by Bantam 1982) Point being that all the way along, it was a combination of luck and circumstance that this country moved from the articles of confederation to a constitution in the first place.

hide in the shadows under the waves, below ground propping up the sky

I believe the Republicans in the U.S.A. have a plan to give the citizenry vouchers so they can pick private schools instead of public. I think it's a ruse to continue the trend toward making a real education something only the rich can afford, thus "keeping the people uneducated". In the world today it's the rate of population growth and the demand for "modern" amenities for all that population that is likely to be our undoing. I try to have faith, and I know I can only act toward the future when judgement is no longer part of my considerations, and this is the practice. I am grateful to those who have taught a way beyond judgement in the action of the moment; Taoism and Tao Bums is a part of my education, and the existence of Tao Bums and sites like it is to me an encouraging sign that the information age may actually play a part in our future. Am I off-topic yet?...

merged. No horizon. And now the darkness of day shines the light of night

the flag of India includes the Ashoka chakra, you can read about it here. .

The practice is indeed darn simple once a person witnesses the location of consciousness shifting, as just before sleep. I think the same practice is at the heart of seated meditation. Here's Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen: "...learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward." (from the Fukanzazengi, by Dogen, here) Usually meditation is associated with something a person does, but I think anyone who tries seated meditation will find that the ability to feel in the posture relies on the activity as consciousness takes place in response to the posture. The practice is exactly "coming back to location", yet as an aspect of waking up and falling asleep, as a catalyst of the free occurrence of consciousness in space. I'm still thinking about the blobs, checking google and it looks like there are some other reports of people seeing black blobs out of the corner of their eyes. Someone described seeing sea-urchin like little black shapes out of the corners of their eyes, and later the dark, shadow-like outline of a person.

I would like to thank Ralis and VMarco, Ralis for the material on facism and VMarco for the material on the founding fathers and the separation of church and state. I read somewhere that the separation of church and state was the actual American experiment, not democracy which had been tried before. I believe it's so, although we are apparently in jeopardy of trading the great experiment for McCarthy-ism in the age of "terrorism". I agree, "under God" should be removed from the pledge- that was added in the McCarthy era. As to the notion of a Taoist state, see above.