Nikolai1

'Stinging like Ali' What if 'boxing like a bee'? No, some words won't work.

Hi Dreambliss, Your decision not to post the 'after' video was almost certainly sound. But why are you doing this? What was the original reason for posting a video of you singing?

Totally agree, and I thought that was a particularly special video. Thanks a lot for finding and sharing!

Hey Tibetan Ice - why did you post this? Do you like it?

Dating sites just just don't work for a hell of a lot of people. But there's a lot of hope, which is why the industry is so massive. I've also heard that if you are really serious about dating online you need to pay money and get a proper smart service.

It has occurred to me that dating websites may not suit you. I think they are great for people who are everyday conventional people with interchangeable interests,occupations and personal appearance. I think you are a niche prospect. Something unique that will appeal to individuals rather than whole categories of women. Sure you can have fun dating, but actual long term success is probable going to come at the local yoga centre, meditation class, spiritual retreat. When the right woman meets you, hears you talk, reads your poetry she will love you. And I think that you will love her back - and to your surprise she may even be a bit overweight, just like you are, and it won't matter to you and it won't matter to her. That's the way love works! Believe me!

Hi Seeker Well I guess like lots of people here I experience things that are sometimes new, sometimes weird, sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant. These things have always happened spontaneously and I haven't gone out to experience anything in particular. If my path was a yoga it would be a combination of raja (meditation) and Jnana (philosophical enquiry) - so very dry by lots of standards. I don't do any energetic work like Tai Chi or qi Gong, but there have been energetic changes anyway. The most obvious, which I feel most the time is a very subtle, pleasurable buzzing which I first noticed about three years ago. I think this is the foundation for the peace which never goes far away and which I talked about in the OP. I also sometimes get intensely pleasuable feelings in my hips, strangely enough. On bad days all of this goes and I feel only heavy. No not flickering, I would call it shimmering. But also beautiful pin pricks of light which 'show' themselves to me and are completely charming and adorable. Also water looks much different to me. it flows thicker, more like oil. When it is standing I don't see the water only what is reflected. This is also gorgeous and on a wet day the world is a stunning wide vista both above my head and below my feet. I tried to capture the spirit of this in my haiku yesterday: The line is tangled In the branches, but the carp Is hooked all the same. No not really. I think this is more a matter of the heart, and I'm not really a heart person but a head person. Yes, in that sex is the only pleasure that is available to me and it's almost like I cling to it sometimes. But for a while now I've had this strange attitude towards women. It's like they are these amazing otherworldly beings, almost like its a privilege to share the planet with them. I think women have started to represent to me 'the other'. Like nearly everything of who I was has fallen by the wayside, except my masculinity, which is a stubbornly fundamental attribute of the being we call Nikolai. So women have become this fundamental 'other'. Women fascinate me like never in my life before, and I see beauty in every woman, a sheer exoticness. I think i've wrote this before, but women. as this 'basic' other have almost become the sacred in contrast to the profane which is the masculine. I'd be interested if anyone else has noticed this strange attitude to the opposite sex? we hear a lot about an increasing androgyny as we mature spiritually, but I've noticed in myself the opposite as a reaction to loss of self. Each night I sleep with my wife on one side and baby daughter on the other; women are part of my intimate existence, and yet as a concept they are alien. Very strange. Of course, but that's been my way since I was young and before all this started. My mind went very much ahead and the rest of me is taking a long to catch up. I understand many wonderful things that I don't feel to be the truth. I don't have any formal practice any more. Each moment is either difficult enough to occupy me, or pleasant enough to enjoy. Hey thanks for asking. I've indulged in a whole load of 'me' talk, there!

Hi Seeker, I really loved the first part of the Ingram book - i thought it was brilliant - but when he started talking about the different jnanas I got seriously confused. He seemed to talk about the dark night as if it was a pasing phase of meditation? I've always understood it as being a phase of life!

Those who sow the seed Do not each month feel the pain Of the unsown seed

Sory ignore, just realised the rules...but well, you can read anyway The line is tangled In the branches, but the carp Is hooked all the same.

Let's imagine that you are asleep and half-dreaming. Something happens that rouses you from the dream; now you are awake and lying in your bed as expected. The same sound that woke you repeats. Like a sprinkling of gravel on the roof above you. Also it seems strangely dark. You raise your arms and they immediately strike a hard wooden surface directly above your nose. You realise in a flash that you and your bed have been placed in a large pine box, and are being buried under the ground. The sprinkling of the earth is getting more and more muffled. You are moments from suffocation. How do you react? Do you go into blind panic, banging on the box and screaming for help? Do you realise the futility of panic and so quickly and expertly centre yourself in your own being? Are you already centred and so able and ready to observe your own death? I think this scenario can teach us a lot about our own spiritual progress. Some of us will read this and feel the panic, some will read and feel the bliss of impending death.

I can wake up in the morning, a normal day, no dreams to report and yet for some reason - I don't know why - there's a weight weighing me down. I try and work it out, but I went to bed cheerful and here it is descended upon me as if from nowhere. I know the day will be a write off. I know that I can expect nothing from it, that it is a day that must be tolerated patiently. The kind of day that I'll be pleased to end by going to bed early. But then in the afternoon, still six hours to go, I'm out walking and the puddle at the bottom of my drive is suddenly not a puddle but the boundless sky itself, flecked with pink clouds, an expansive abyss at my feet. Seeing the puddle is the sudden end to the gloom. Suddenly my soul is filled with the deepest most profound peace. I can barely think, the beauty inside me is so strong that the very idea of gloom is an impossibility in this world. But in a secret recess of my mind I wonder where this beauty and peace came from... I am a puppet. The most intimate motions of my soul come and go with a force and rapidity that has absolutely nothing to do with me. I cannot help but stand and watch, a mere observer. A few hours of this, a few hours of that...somebody is playing some kind of game. So this is surely what the old Christian mystics called the Ludus Amoris. God must invade us at our most intimate depths. There is nothing at all for us to control. Very humbling. Very hard to take.

In some ways it makes you bored of the whole process.

This meditation is not about finding the correct response to the circumstance. It's moe about reflecting on which response you would personally make. I think that is quite revealing. If reading and thinking about the scenario makes you anxious then that is a sure sign that you have much more work to do. Personally I think that in the general population, this would be the commonest response. If the thought of death makes you feel a peace and you realise that you want that peace and would die for it, then you've made progress but there is more to be done. To purposefully seek out death shows a detachment from mortality but is still grasping and desirous. If you don't care if you live or die, that is enlightenment. Perhaps you make a couple of tentative 'hellos', enough to be heard, but if there is nothing happening then so be it!

Really interesting post mostly_empty thanks, Strangely enough all what you said has by vaguely occurred to me myself in the last couple of weeks. I've really been trying I deliberately enlarge the light at the end of the tunnel and I'm becoming aware of choices that I didn't realise were there. It's also helped to realise the broader context. I was in a dark night in my early twenties, which I snapped out of and actually entered a period of great change and productivity and happiness. But actually the deeper questions I left unsolved at that time. I either needed a break or wasnt wise enough to solve them, which is why I returned to functioning prematurely. But within seven years the old questions started to return in pretty much the same form. Not personal issues, but very deep bewilderment at the meaning of life, the value of anything etc. This time it's darker and more serious and I realise that I either have to resolve it properly this time or I'll have to die, which I don't want. One thing Im getting now is what I wrote in the Ludus Amoris thread, sometimes I can be stopped in my tracks by the most sublime feelings of beauty and love for the world. In these moments, nothing could be dark or meaningless, in fact there is no thinking going on to think such things. I have no idea of people live permanently with such beauty but the fact that it keeps happening to me makes me wonder if there is light at the end of the tunnel. Anyway we shall see...I'm sure whatever happens will be reflected in my posts here ,!

I would like three buttons: Dislike Thank you Outstanding

Maybe make it a bit more oblique - eg Interests: Altered states of consciousness, the writings of Huxley and Leary.. Your target audience will know where you're going with that...!

Yes those drug references seem very out of place on this kind of thing. Unless drugs are a very significant part of your life and must be shared with your partner, I don't see why they should be mentioned.

Really interested in your views on the following scenario: So it's 2000 years ago, the South Pacific Islands, and the rain dancer is an important member of society. One young thinker decides to try and measure the effect of the dancing. Over twenty years he asks the rain dancer to dance a year, then not dance a year. At the end he compares the amount of rain in ten years of dancing and ten years of no dancing. What does he find? Please answer in the poll above. Many thanks !

Yes, I think it's so much better. Actually I think it's really good. Personally I would put the three links to your blog etc at the end rather than at the beginning, but that's the only change to the text I would make. And honestly, I think your main photo makes you look a bit strange. You have a blank expression with no love or warmth, and its taken from a bad angle, and I don't like the shirtlessness. But let's see what others think about the photo. Actually the only photo I like is the meditating one. Good luck with it! I think there's going to be one very lucky lady.

It's true that Cockermouth failed to live up to its salacious sounding moniker. But never one to be disheartened, I set off for Finland - which, I was promised, is the true and authentic home of the lapdance,.. Well, I wasn't entirely deceived, and the fault was surely mine in part...but I soon found that Lapp Dancing was something quite different...

Hi Marblehead I once saw this photo of Hemingway working at his desk, in some old waterside cabin in the Everglades. This is how I picture you. Using your Daoist arts, you're somehow managing to do all this on a typewriter.

Blue eyes snake I want your vote

I still find it fasciinating to think I write to you in Florida Marblehead...you know there's still a fair bit of snow in my backyard. Same planet, different lives.

Thelerner - but purely empirically speaking you think it's 50-50 in both conditions?