manitou

'Beliefs' aren't where it's at in any of this. Beliefs are beyond the point. The point is to understand the microcosm so that the macrocosm can be understood. You can quote the texts of others until you're blue in the face but that will increase nobody's understanding. Go within and cease the parroting of others.

I didn't watch the videos, but most everything I've read on this thread seems dual. As though the creator is something outside of ourselves. Extreme metaphysics will always lead back to the I Am and the non-duality of all of it, ourselves included. We're pretty much on our own, but at the same time part of something quite grand, without beginning or end. Those who are capable of tapping into the essence don't require science to explain anything, they possess gnowledge, and unexplainable to anyone else at that.

Finishing the Awareness: shock waves stop me mid-action as I arise from last night's nest; I am paralyzed in motion, but for the deafening awareness of my pounding heart. My hand is suspended in mid-air, grasping a silk sheet unfamiliar to me. I sense a close warmth next to me of which I have no recollection; I feel an intimate movement, soft hairs gently tickling my arm momentarily afraid to look back I force myself to do so; I see a lovely form, gently draped; the surprising form of a woman's hip a flutter of movement beneath the silk jolts me back into myself; it appears as an odd and concentric vortex, an escaping bit of confused gas. thank you, Stosh and deci belle

What synchronicity, that you should dig up Rodriguez. Maybe a month ago I was watching something on TV, maybe on the History Channel - where they did an entire hour on him. Starting with him singing with his back to the audience in a smoke-filled dingy room. It might have even been on RT, as the focus of the piece was the political impact it had on S. Africa, and the incredible thing being that Sixto was totally unaware of any of it. Even after he remained aware of his world fame, nothing changed in his life - not his house, his habits, his dress - but he did make a trip to S. Africa, if I recall, and he was received as a total hero. The piece maintained that he didn't commit suicide at all - and I believe the film producers were able to verify that by finding him through one of his daughters and doing an interview. I didn't watch your 51 minute piece - maybe it's the very same one? What an incredibly wonderful and Dao-like human being.

There you go. Then the wheel hub is found.

it's all the same thing, regardless of where in the world we happen to be sitting.

Any date is good for me

A little delineated for my tastes

There's a few things that I wonder about from time to time. Please forgive me if these questions are already answered within the scientific community; I have no formal education at all. First of all, it seems to me that perpetual motion is a kind of holy grail that mankind is looking to manifest. Do scientists, deep thinking scientists, ever consider that Love (or mutual attraction) is the missing component to the perpetual energy question? As to how we would ever harness that, that bears some deep thinking, I would deeply think. Second question: Remember when you were a kid and you'd take a magnifying glass and hold it so the sun's rays would emolliate ants? (And then take the ants and bury them in cigarette filters in your front yard, like me and Harold did, marking the graves with popsicle sticks?) Does solar energy use this concept? Is there a way that this could be used better, i.e. more magnifying thickness and curvature of the lens as opposed to the flatness of the solar panels? Thanks, anyone. I was just wondering.

Power enticed by ego, as opposed to power uncovered through self realization.

Practice becomes Life.

To give one's self in service is to recognize that there is no space between one and the other; to realize the connection of one to all; to recognize that to do disservice to another is to disservice to one's self, and vice versa. Doing by not doing, in this sense, it to knowingly place ones self in alignment with the laws of economy of the Dao; thereby all things are done through the one who has so positioned himself. There is no plan or design necessary. All things will come to the one as they are correctly aligned to come, and they will be returned to the ethers by the workings of the one with no designs. Integral universal being. No words beyond that.

The Universal One may manifest as something beautiful and wondrous, as we would designate it. The Universal One may also manifest as something horrible and awful, as we would designate it. The Universal One requires no designations at all. The Simple would be the balance between the two, that which does not need to display one way or the other. It is simply the utility within the form without adornment.

Isn't Gnosis inner knowledge? Can't this be found within any tradition, Christianity included? I don't think one excludes the other. My experience has been that as long as one stays boxed within the structure of any tradition, however, that kundalini shies away. For anyone who thinks that Gnosis died with any particular movement, please familiarize yourself with the 33 degrees of the Scottish Rites of Freemasonry. Gnosis and Kabbalah reign free within that structure; and yet the end result is structure-less. In this day and age, it seems like Gnosis is found in some rather fast and dirty ways - like our tendency toward substance abuse and the recovery therefrom. Surely it can also be found by many years of sincere dedication to a religious tradition; but I do submit that the true Gnosis will be found when the tradition is transcended and the seeker is then on his own for direct revelation from within.

It's when we think we have power 'over' someone else or something else that we get into trouble. We all have inherent power; it's just getting down to it that's the problem. If we're seeking power for the wrong reasons, that reason is to place ourselves at the front and not use it within the laws of harmony.

Just the opposite. It throws all the impetus for phenomena back onto us. Don't forget, I'm talking about an Absolute Entity that we are attached to and a part of - which is not separate from us. We are the creator. The separate 'savior' that you are alluding to, that would be a cop-out, is the one that most religions 'worship' - something out there in the air that they implore to, beg to, ask forgiveness of, and give a shopping list to. there is a huge difference - a bipolar opposite difference - and it throws the responsibility for the manifestations in our life on nobody but us. When we are in alignment with this creative force (in Awareness, and in intentional alignment) we have every expectation that things will align within our life. As the Sage does - which is why no harm comes to him. He knows how to access the alignment, and he knows that the only thing whacking that out of alignment is him own getting in his own way - usually an ego dynamic. Things get out of alignment when we force the issue by 'trying to be the first' (if you broaden this concept, you'll see that it goes directly to our egos pushing us onward and upward) or trying to 'take too much' (i.e. getting out of balance because we are hoarding and fearful that we will not have enough for ourselves - the bottom of that fear being the fear of death in the long run). To speak of the oneness of everything (which would include this discussion of Us being the One as well) is well illustrated in Ken Wilber's discussion of the opposites of everything (in a sense of relativity); Joe and I happened to grab this book this morning as we were going out for breakfast and having our usual morning metaphysical discussion. The book is "No Boundary", and it's on page 23 and I arbitrarily turned to it: In just the same way, all of the opposites share an implicit identity. that is, however vividly the differences between these opposites may strike us, they nevertheless remain completely inseparable and mutually interdependent, and for thesimple reason that the one could not exist without the other. Looked at in this way, there is obviously no inside without an outside, no up without down, no win without loss, no pleasure without pain, no life without death. Says the old Chinese sage Lao Tzu: "Is there a difference between yes and no? Is there a difference between good and evil? Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense! Having and not having arise together Difficult an easy complement each other Long and short contrast each other High and low rest upon each other Front and back follow one another". Chang Tzu elaborates: "Thus, those who say they would have right without its correlate, wrong; or good government without its correlate, misrule, do not apprehend the great principles of the universe, nor the nature of all creation. One might as well talk of the existence of Heaven without that of Earth, or of the negative principle without the positive, which is clearly impossible. Yet people keep on discussing it without stop; such people must be either fools or knaves." Ken Wilbur then continues: "The inner unity of opposites is hardly an idea confined to mystics, Eastern or Western. If we look to modern-day physics, the field in which the Western intellect has made its greatest advances, what we find is another version of reality as a union of opposites. In relativity theory, for example, the old opposites of rest vs. motion have become totally indistinguishable, that is, "each is both." An object which appears at rest for on observer is, at the same time, in motion for a different observer. Likewise, the split between wave and particle vanishes into "wavicles," and the contrast of structure vs. function evaporates. Even the age-old separation of mass from energy has fallen to Einstein's E=mc(2), and these ancient "opposites" are not viewed as merely two aspects of one reality, a reality to which Hiroshima so violently bore witness. "Likewise, such opposites as subject vs. object and time vs. space are now seen as being so mutually interdependent that they form an interwoven continuum, a single unified pattern. what we call "subject" and "object" are, like buying and selling, just two different ways of approaching one single process. And because the same holds true for time and space, we can no longer speak of an object being located in space or happening in time, but only of a spacetime occurrence...." Stosh - this is where I see your thinking as limited. You are still assuming that I am seeing the Absolute as something other than Us, something to blame life's occurrences upon; something which keeps us as 'victims'. My point is that at some point in one's metaphysical understanding one sees that there is no separation at all between the Absolute and Us. Your seeing the separation will not include my theory of inclusion, where my theory of inclusion does include your theory of separation. the next step in the reversion from separation is to Unity. The only way to get past this insistence on separation (and a reliance on a rather Newtonian way of looking at things) is to crack your inner egg, a very weird concept, I agree. But for some reason it seems to be set up that way, who the heck knows why? The bully at the gate, preventing us from doing this, is usually Ego - or the fear that perhaps we aren't the ones with all the answers after all. That perhaps there are people who have understanding of something we are clueless about. The answer is to examine our own motivations, going through each and every tendency, to arrive at our pure nature and a clarified inner lens.

Do you ever wonder if Science and Philosophy are walking up the same hill but on different sides? Do you ever wonder if dark matter is analogous to our subconscious mind, that which affects us in our daily behavior but cannot be viewed or measured? Theoretically dark matter affects the workings of the stellar bodies, but is not visible to our current state of technology. Isn't it speculated that dark matter take up about 85% of the universe? I wonder what the ratio of subconscious mind to conscious mind is used in determining the movement of our own bodies and our own behavior? Any chance it is 85% as well? This goes back to all of manifestation being a living thing. I honestly think that although it appear we're having two separate conversations on this thread, that we're actually having the same conversation but wearing two different lab coats. there is a bridge, a meeting place between the two conversations -

I've still got my hammer with me. We are talking apples and oranges and will always be, and so can never come to concurrence. I am coming from the perspective of the I Am, wherein all is the Absolute. There is no separation between objects, people, anything. Anything, even your texting accident, is created from the inside to the outside; as a manifestation of the Absolute. That would imply that there was a reason for your texting accident, which in my view there would have been. All thoughts, from my perspective, are not yours. They bubble up from the Absolute, and you are right where you are supposed to be at any one time - the thoughts you have are those that have been manifested for a purpose. And that this stage we are on is but a learning ground, a stage for the Absolute to manifest into some sort of physical and mental perfection, regardless of how many circuits or physical manifestations it has to make. This may not be as counterintuitive as it sounds. Look back over your own life and see the times that you first interpreted something as a horrible accident - a horrible mistake - and how that very event caused a dramatic change in your own life which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. You can look back and see how the dramatic event was the catalyst for the needed change. It is this theory, that all is the Absolute (or Mind) that is at the basis of the type of healing I'm referring to. It does work, I do have success with it - getting better all the time, depending on my own ability to get out of my own way both mentally, psychologically, and emotionally at the time of the healing. The Absolute must be accessed from a place of inner clarity, which takes a lifetime of work and focused attention to our own motives. This is very far removed from much we talk about here on TTB's - but there are those on this forum who understand this perfectly. If you're interested in finding out more about this mindset (specifically as to healing), I would really recommend the works of Mary Baker Eddy - just sidestep her occasional mention of the Savior, as I mentioned previously. You would be able to grasp the context and framework of it in short order. Helena Blavatsky will take you to pretty much the same place, as will Manly Hall or most Science of Mind readings.

(Reply to Stosh and Marbles) I would argue that the mental causes the physical, as in physical malady. So would Mary Baker Eddy or Science of Mind. I've actually had results with this. I went to a birthday dinner the other night. The man sitting next to me had had cysts on his kidneys for a long time, a chronic problem. He is now going to an oncologist for this problem, one area of concern has developed at the bottom of one of his kidneys. What do the kidneys symbolize, looking at it as the microcosm to the macrocosm? (And not using the qi concept of TCM, but something a little different) It symbolizes elimination. I asked him if there were something in his life that needed to be eliminated, something that had been stressing him over a long period of time. Yes, there was. He and his wife are highly agitated that they have been taking care of their grandkids over a long period of time, but have never known how to tell their son (who is in his late thirties at this time!) that they don't want to take care of these kids any longer - they want to travel the world, they have the money to do so. The man asked me to go into this further. I told him that he had two choices - to either confront the situation with their son and let the son figure all this out for himself; or they need to find a way to continue doing this caretaking lovingly, without resentment. Obviously, the first would be the easier of the two. If I were to work with this healing situation, I would bring it all into the physical by doing a ceremony; having them (or specifically, he - although it might be more potent if they were both involved) do something symbolically to show that the are washing their hands of this whole thing with the kids. It's effective to have someone bury a picture of the persons involved (in this case, the kids and their son) along with a picture of whatever religious figure they relate to (if at all) - or even just a feather or something in nature - to signify that they are turning over this problem to 'the universe' and knowing that it will be handled just the way it's supposed to be. That they're not obligated to run interference on their son, to carry his karma - and in fact by doing so they are prohibiting his inner growth, they are enabling him to stay irresponsible (which apparently he is, according to the father). The practitioner must do the best they can to convey this 'truth' to the person being healed. This is deep healing from a deep dynamic. It must be done by the practitioner without any regard for results, without ego involved in the ceremony at all. If anyone is interested further in this type of inner healing, there is a thread where it is described in real time as it was occurring, more or less. Traveler and I were having a dialog on the Hua Hu Ching, chapter 12, and after post #11 I got off into this actual situation with a young man with quadriplegia. The healing occurred during the course of this thread, and the ceremony is described in detail. There were positive results. Christian Science or Science of Mind is healing from the Inside to the Outside, addressing the cause rather than the effect. Christian Science does use Jesus as a proxy, although I think that either Mary Baker Eddy hadn't completed her evolution at the time she wrote Science and Healing, or if she had, she assumed that her readers may not have been as highly evolved as she; therefore, she does use Jesus as the proxy through which practitioners must go. Science of Mind does not use Jesus as a proxy as a matter of course, nor do I. But it's all in the mind of the beholder. If the sick person believe that only Jesus or another icon can be the healer, then by all means bring the sick one's beliefs into the ceremony. I use a shamanic setting because it separates one piece of ground from another, one point in time from another, one mood from another. It rearranges the assemblage point, as don Juan Mateus would say (Castaneda's Nagual) and leaves the energy field shook up enough to be pliable and accepting to suggestion.

Is this a TTB thread, or what?

LOL. that third man has been looking in through my bathroom window...

LOL. I will give this some serious thought.

Still think the choices for movement are limited. A silk sheet would allow for the possibility of concentric circles, as the ripples around a cast stone in still waters, or perhaps even a vortex movement of confused gas. Could we possibly pound this into the sand any deeper?

Please, nobody even comment on this post. It will be a ridiculous post. I saw a virus segment on the Science channel once where the virus was 'walking' toward the nucleus of a cell with the intent of permeating the wall of the nucleus. (This was quite a while back so I don't remember the details much - and the Wikipedia page was a little complicated for my PTSD memory banks). If I recall, was the virus 'walking' on rods of protein or some such thing, advancing toward the nucleus to insert something into the permeable 'windows' of the nucleus to infect the cell. At the time, somebody I knew had a terrible cold. I used this same visualization in a healing ceremony where I requested the viruses to all switch direction and head away from the nucleuses. As it turned out, the person did get better very quickly. Probably would have happened anyway - but the visualization was a good one and it made a whole lot of sense to me at the time. Although I acknowledge that this doesn't begin to address the reason the body is manifesting the common cold in the first place, which is the level I try to work at. I've subsequently developed my own theory about a reason for cold manifestation.

Ahh yes, I do realize that. But wouldn't a silk sheet make for a prettier and flutterier evidence of gas passage than, say, a cotton one? Just goin' for pretty here.