manitou

Naptime. Good thinking

I see what you're saying here, Mark. Really good points. I can see Riding the Ox in a different way too. There is the kind of 'Riding the Ox' that the Master alluded to, perhaps riding for the purpose of Attainment? Perhaps this is one and the same with what Lin just mentioned - slow progression of attainment. It's wonderful how many different concepts of Riding the Ox there seem to be. To my way of thinking and at this point in my life, riding the ox for me means to stay in Awareness of Who I Am - as much of the day that I can. And to ride the ox also means (to me) to stay in the place of Love in my interactions with people; to take the high road when there is a fork in the road. Always the high road. The words of Masters are a funny thing. The day after they utter any particular words, they are at a higher level than the day before. Sometimes they may wish to have taken back the words they said the day before, but because they're considered Masters...damn! they're immortalized and stuck in cement. There is a place where no further Striving is desirable; it is a place of relaxation, Knowing that the Entity Within is in control and knows exactly what It wants and when It wants it. It's timing is perfect; on any occasion, for any reason, all the people who are supposed to be there will be there...even if our Personal Self has planned otherwise. Our Impersonal Self (the god-consciousness) is actually the one in the driver's seat. The question of Awareness, as I see it, is merely a daily practice to remember Who's really doing the driving. I realized something wonderful the other day. "Real" time, or as close as we can get to understanding the illusion of time at all, is reflected in the tiny flower as it opens in the morning, slowly offers its face up to the sun every day, and follows the sun's path until it closes at the end of the day and sleeps. I think that's the most basic way to see the illusion of time; and how incredible that must have seemed for the indigenous to notice that, back at the beginning of mankind's appearance on the planet. To watch a tiny flower move with the sun;; what a mystery that must have been to him! He wouldn't have understood things like chlorophyl and the scientific need for the plant to follow the sun. Instead, he would have seen it as a living attraction; the connection of the plant with that huge glowing ball in the sky. He would have seen life as one living connected thing. And his day would have followed the pattern of that tiny flower at the mouth of his cave; up with the light, down with the setting. How very far we've come.

Damn. I fall off the Ox daily. I guess the trick is to get back on. I had to laugh at the synchronicity of being butted in the arm by a very headstrong goat up here at the ranch. He butted me so badly it bruised. I've been trying to figure out the reason I manifested that. Like, I'm trying to strongarm something and it's trying to tell me to back off? I'm being a butt-head about something? Can't see it quite yet. but there is a really odd manifestation that just played out. is still playing out. since landing on the floor of this trailer in the mountains, where at some level I still lie there vibrating after leaving the 27 year relationship - i manifested a huge blockage. not just any blockage - a blockage of immense magnitude. i forgot to close the valves on my sewer lines the last time I emptied the tanks - and what resulted is a mountain of solidified poop that most folks would have called a plumber for (and maybe a bulldozer, lol). I decided that this was my mess to clean up, it was there because I manifested it - literally. so I spent the day trying to figure out how to cut through all this manure and get it flowing downward into the sewer. i was able to get it all broken up with a long metal yardstick. one of the rangers up here told me to 'soak' the pile overnight by closing the valve and flooding it with water, which is what i did. this morning is the big day - i get to open the valve into the sewer this morning and feel the incredible pleasure of hearing that mess go away. The trick for me now is to figure out what the blockage is about...or was about. I'm hoping that it's physical confirmation of that which is already happened and currently happening; not something new coming down the pike. I'm not strong enough right now to handle something new.. What an odd manifestation. but the more we talk about all this stuff, and the more I live this stuff, the more i realize that our daily binds are truly there for us to see and figure out why we've manifested it. We truly are the Manifester. The thought occurred to me this morning as i was gazing at a mountain that the goal of Riding the Ox is to merge our Personal self with our Impersonal self. it's not that difficult once we realize Who dwells within. 3bob - what a wonderful picture that is. I'm going to run it off and save it, I love it so. What sweetness...thank you.

I've noticed an odd thing lately. My tendency to talk to myself is really kicking up. Especially if I'm driving. Sometimes I get so furled in thinking (often about things we've discussed on this board) that my inner thoughts turn into outer expression and I will talk aloud to myself. The interesting thing, is that after I've said something aloud (to myself), it's usually said aloud because there's emotion under it. And then when I have said the word, often times there is incredible synchronicity happening at the same moment, pertaining to the words I've just said (or thought). My friend Mo still has horrible terminal cancer - I've had him up on our Bums healing circle. Shortly before Easter, his doctor told him one more time that all he can do is try and keep him out of pain, that the end is near. One day I was driving back home to the ranch from Santa Barbara, intently thinking about Mo. This man has the deepest social conscience of anyone I know, and it just doesn't make any sense to me that this man, in his 40's, would be yanked off the assembly line at a time when he is needed the most. I was thinking these thoughts as I was driving up San Marcos Pass. The words I said out loud were, "He's not going to die - there's going to be a hail-mary pass". And at that very moment I said that, my eyes landed on a sign that said No Passing. It was rather remarkable - so remarkable that I pulled off the road and called Mo and told him about it. I don't know what's going to happen to Mo - maybe his time is now. But he had been dreaming all winter that he was going to die on Easter Sunday - but instead, on Easter, he started eating voraciously at his family's dinner. He hadn't eaten for months, they'd been feeding him intravenously and all he could eat were popsicles, he would get so sick. And now he's eating, gaining weight from his thin 100 pounds. Maybe he'll pull through this thing after all. We are the Creator, apparently. Somehow we manifest all this. How very long it takes for this to actully sink in. It's like putting on a new cloak and making zillions of adjustments.

My beautiful butterfly started bugging me. It was a little too happy and trivial for the place I'm in at the present, despite the change it represented. I'm really looking for a root avatar, but I'm not finding one. I came across this one and it reminded me more of 'becoming'. So this is my temporary one until the root avatar manifests. Somehow.

My guess is that you're pretty familiry with Carlos Castaneda. Don Juan Mateus would say that a shaman truly struggles with his sanity. Those of us with these tendencies truly struggle to stay in the layer between one reality and the other. How to get through the day with one foot in one 'reality', the other in another 'reality?' Obviously this makes for no 'reality' at all.....

Sorry, double post

I'm not talking about AA - that was the starting point. I'm talking about the route of self realization - and often the only way to even start that process is by some sort of a loss, alcohol related or not. So often the shattering of the ego shell has to be done in whatever way life chooses - auto accident, divorce, addiction, that brick wall in life that does us in and we realize we're not such hot stuff after all. That thing that kicks off the humility... Only with a modicum of humility can the process start. Then the triangle of enlightenment can occur; the inner vision combined with the spirit of wu-wei, the spirit of te, and wearing the knowledge of our god-being. And then once the enlightenment has 'occurred' (although my guess is that it is indeed a process of aha!'s based on the alignment of our outer experience with our inner knowledge); also thrown into the mix must of course be the words of others - those words which have formed a ladder of knowledge of the combined consciousness of mankind, which each new generation can now readily avail by merely reading the thoughts of one who lived many centuries ago. It seems that mankind is enlightening en masse, in a sense. Just look at the input just our little group of friends puts into this electronic brain of our Creation, the internet. Of course the news channels don't report things like this; the input of enlightenment into cyberspace. But reported or not, it is there and We have created it. Again, apparently. Miss you, Aaron! Come over to Riding the Ox in General Discussion...

Stosh, you are so right. I must live through the frustration of finding my own Root, my own avatar. Thank you for the correction. I'll evolve into it soon, hopefully.

Yes, We all judge. Every word we speak is a judgment of sorts; selecting one word over the other for purposes of communication. The kind of judgment I'm talking about is the kind that prevents clarity; the judgments that harm us personally. As in the TTC, 'between aah! and Ugh!, how much difference is there really? If you ask the soccer mom at the high school what she considers 'bad' or 'evil', she will give you one set of answers based on her soccer mom and life experience. 'Bad' to her will be someone messing with her kids, like a dope dealer. If you walk down to the corner and ask the dope dealer what he considers bad or evil, he'll tell you that it's the lowlife that ripped him off for his money when he was trying to buy a shipment of heroin. How many things in our life have come at us, with us giving it a label of 'bad'? And then that very thing turns out to be the very best thing that happened to you. In my own personal life, it was alcoholism. At the time I admitted I was an alkie, I thought that was Bad. Real Bad. But now, 31 years later, I see my adventure with alcoholism and subsequent recovery as the very best thing that could have happened to me; that was the causative factor for the inner journey, the self-realization process that started the day I walked into those rooms, unbeknownst to me. I thought I was just there to get sober. But that was just the very beginning, and within a couple years it was apparent to me that the inner journey I was on, out of necessity, was something much, much more than staying away from alcohol, which turned out to be no problem at all. But it became all about the inward journey itself, not the self-denial of alcohol. That was just the catalyst. But this pertains directly to the Event Horizon that you were talking about. Okay, say a general decides in advance how the battle 'should' be fought, and because of his judgment about this, he takes a Stance. He positions his soldiers just so, and because of his Stance (judgment) he is prepared for that particular eventuality. But suppose the opposing army comes in from atop the mountains, something he hadn't counted on; his Stance makes it impossible for him to see the invaders; he can only see 180 degrees around him, because of his pre-determined Stance. Whereas if he had taken no Stance at all, he would have a 360 degree Event Horizon; he would have cut off none of his options because of his pre-judgment and Stance. Perhaps this is why the general of the Art of War will let the fight come to him; he will be pre-positioned, of course; but with no pre-conceptions about what the enemy will do. He will wait and observe, but be ready to move when he sees that the timing is perfect. The type of judgment we're talking about here is not the everyday variety of making the small judgments we need to make daily to get along. I'm talking about the ones that mess with our clarity. The judgments that are based on our contorted feelings, our contorted life experiences. The judgments that don't need to be there; they're superfluous to clarity; in fact, an impediment to clarity. These are the judgments put on us by others from the time of childhood, and conversely we wear them. And they roll downhill like a snowball over the years and get bigger and bigger, picking up more snow as they go. These impediments are often attached to odd little memories within us; and I've discovered that the odd little memories that seemingly contain no emotion are the very ones that have remained for a reason, always beckoning us to go back and revisit. There is indeed emotion lying under there; if there weren't, the memory wouldn't have been kept for so many years. As Jim Morrison would say, Break on through to the other side.... Last note - Marbles, you mentioned manifesting from the One previously on this thread. Just the idea of Manifesting from the One is such a reversal of direction! If your background was anything like mine, I was brought up to believe that there was a god 'up there', who would one day come down with his sleigh and reindeer. And his list. The expected momentum was always something that would happen as an origination 'from the sky' or somewhere 'out there'. But when we realize that we manifest from the One, the direction of manifestation is exactly opposite. Sometimes I imagine that the Energy Source is within the earth; the fiery ball at the center of the earth, the piece of the sun which is still manifesting outward. I can picture the earth energy coming up through our feet and out through our eyes and hands. Sometimes, when circumstances are very unusual, I have felt the energy flow actually going 'out of my eyes', an odd sensation indeed. But it is That Entity within, the one that knows exactly what it needs to develop the vessel that is Marbles or Manitou, that manifests and grabs everything that we need to get along, to develop along the lines that the Entity (the Void) requires to express fully from within both of us. When we have a pre-set notion about things being good or bad, therefore desirable or undesirable, this cuts off our sphere of manifestion and leaves us only with what we can see in front of us. As to the spirit of the One - it occurred to me one day that if anything (man, woman, child, bear, dog, insect) has little black spots in it's eyes, that's the Void we're looking at. That's 'God'. The little black spots in all of our eyes; if you think about it, that's the one thing we all have on our bodies that is pretty close to identical. Makes it real easy to stay in Awareness, to remember that. sorry, I hadn't intended to make this such a long post! Marbles, when I replied 'Judgment' to your post about the movie, I said that because you said it was 'sad'. The funny thing is, I was capable of seeing the tiny moat of judgment in your eye, and yet I was totally unable to see the big log of judgment within my own eyes. I have yet to respond to an email from my aunt in Ohio because I just don't want to, as I have judged her to be uber-Christian and therefore (apparently somewhere in my psyche) not worthy of conversation. Being too hard on myself? Maybe. But it woke me up. I have pre-judged the conversation, I just 'know' which way it's going to go. But perhaps I'm wrong. Duh. Perhaps we'll have the most wonderful conversation Jan and I have ever had. I shall reply to her today, hopefully with no judgment of any sort. I'll try my best. What funny talking monkeys we are.

Are you sure about that figure? Seems to me lots of us find it by crashing and burning.

Judgment

Incredible post, Mark, IMO. The reference you make to falling asleep was one that I wasn't getting, because I thought you were always referencing the physical act of falling asleep. I see now that you weren't. My counterpart to falling asleep is to say to myself 'Do Nothing', and this stops time for my brain, allowing it to come back to True Reality, the reality where I know exactly Who I Am and the reality that this is all a dream and I am merely the dreamer. I see it as a huge IMAX theater; all of it is imagined, and I'm really the projectionist. Nothing can harm me, it's a dream after all. As it says in the TTC, 'that which is feared is truly to be feared, but distant yet is the dawn of awakening....' By falling asleep, as you put it, this enables us to face life without any fears, if indeed we can revert to the mindset of a dream. I seem to be going through the grief period of leaving Joe back in Ohio. Every fear I have of truly being Alone in life is kicking in. There are fears there I didn't know existed, at a level so very deep. We had occasion to speak on the phone yesterday for a few moments; in trying to get me back to Ohio, he reverted to a child-like voice (which always worked on me) because the inner child in him and the inner child in me are the very personas that are joined at the hip. Our 8 year old inner selves are both stunted by life in some way; it is these two fearful children that found each other 27 years ago and have been huddled together ever since. After he used that tactic I found myself on the floor, again crying so deep that there was no breath, no sound. It physically felt like a scab was slowly being ripped from my heart or something; lots of bleeding underneath. To willingly turn my back on my own 8 year old and deny her the protection she seeks takes an act of Mothering Myself that is quite difficult because I have indulged her fears for so many years. Not even big fears at this point; just the big one. Being Truly Alone. I'm 65 now - the thought of dying alone perhaps, of living out my sunset years alone. Especially at a time when my left brain organizational skills have come and gone; they are truly gone. I couldn't investigate myself out of a paper bag now. (Actually, I feel like I just did). This final stripping of myself has been so very long in coming. After weeks of this aloneness, it gets a little better each day. But yesterday when I was in that crying state, I was in that state where the tears FEEL like they're old tears and come from a very deep place. And the odd thing is that when the deep tears are gone, the perch is slightly different than the one I was sitting on before. Once the tears are gone, the transcension in this very area can begin. Yesterday's tears reminded me of the Tao Te Ching, where it says something about nature's utterances being violent in nature, but short in duration. This is EXACTLY what happened yesterday within my soul. The tears came out violently; my recent crying spells have been short and violent. And then it's gone. Just like nature. This process reminds me of ripping off old bandaids. I'm so glad you're here, whomever is reading this. I have no one else. Barb P.S. - I've been jerking around with my avatar for a few weeks. The little girl staring at the candle was apparently trying to make a cosmic decision, unbeknownst to me at the time. Well, she made it. When I chose this butterly avatar, I chose it because it felt right, like a transformation of change was taking place. But the avatar I realize is 'mine' is one I can't find. I am looking for a nice Root avatar and I can't find one. The root is me - the cosmic detective, not happy until the ultimate Cause is found. If anyone runs across a root avatar on an avatar gettin' site, I'd sure appreciate the heads up on which site that is. Truly, I'm getting older and more confused as time goes on, and searching for an avatar, which used to be an easy thing for me, is no longer that easy.

Damn, I like this, old man. Event horizon. To me, this goes exactly to what some on this thread are talking about. To plan in advance, to think we know what the best thing is for us 'down the road'...this limits our Event Horizon. This is it exactly. what a wonderful phrase. And the fact that it has a military (or theoretically rigid) genesis is ironic, but not in the sense of Smart Military. The Art of War military. The Art of War military mind is always going to see things 'as they are' and not 'as he thinks they should be'. TAOW mind will refrain from making assumptions which would limit the Event Horizon. He lets the War come to him, as the Sage lets life come to him. His mind is 'nebulous and unknowing' in a sense, although acutely sharp in the other. This seems to be from left field, but hopefully it will come together. I was thinking the other day about the beginning of the bible, the part where Man is given the opportunity to determine good from evil in the garden of eden - a story everyone knows, for sure. And no doubt there is a counterpart in other religious structures. But attaining 'knowledge of good and evil' is nothing more than making Judgments. In reality, there is no good and evil, it all just Is. It's as though the cosmic stream separates from the One to the Two at that point; the knowledge of Good and Evil. But this is very Tao! It is, after all, all One. And I think this goes directly to Marbles' Event Horizon concept; it is Judgment and judgment alone that was the first separation from the One. So the path of the Sage? Riding the Ox? It would be to get to Pre-judgment. Wow. I love this thread. I feel like a young colt stretching her metaphysical legs after a long winter.

There's no words to explain the dichotomy. It's completely experiential, why one would choose to let go of the reins and allow 'what will be will be'. How foolhardy. And yet this is the one thing that all Masters have in common.

Thank you, Zero - I've been hanging out in the Riding the Ox thread in General Discussion. I was hoping you'd stop by - It's nice to be up and running again, albeit in a solo mode. Boy, did this separation catch me off guard - just like that song by Robbie Robinson - Sometimes a wind just comes along...and blows you sideways...

Might be we're talking about two different types of will. the one type is a specific will to follow one's own ideas. Like, if you're hungry you go to the refrigerator. If you feel like going to a movie, you get up and go. This is specific and as I see it has to do with the minutae and general planning of our lives to the degree that is necessary. Planning such as, your cousin is getting married in two weeks and you have an intention to go. But surrendering the will in a different sense is what is being alluded to here, it seems. The 'no-will' of life as it comes atcha. Fielding each and every person, new thing, new circumstance - with an open countenance; to accept the person/happening/circumstance sith a loving attitude and shoot for an attitude of absolute non-judgment. To me, this is the essence of the Sage. I think it's as much a practice as all the different practices that we share with each other on this forum. But to me, it's The Big Practice. Just recently someone here asked about my Practice - I have never quite understood that question because Life is my practice. Perhaps that is a huge cop-out.

My thinking exactly, Marbles. The General Discussion area is where this thread needs to be so that it doesn't run up against anybody's structure at all. I guess we could always be run down to the basement....

CT - a wave of warmth spread over me when I saw your avatar and got the poke from you. Thank you for your kind words. Yes, what you say seems to be happening - I am feeling my organs for the first time. Literally. My innards. There are strange tingly sensations, picture Frankenstein's lab with the electricity going up the globe - accentuating each organ from the inside, somehow. About 6 months ago, I posted on a few threads that I was compelled, for some reason, to cover up my mirrors and stop seeking out other people's eyes as I passed them on the street. I don't know what told me to do this, but it seemed to set off a different dynamic within me, one day at a time. It started with a small magnetic pulling sensation in the area where I (used to have) ovaries when I would hear something that I would perceive to be a truth delivered 'within a transparent container'; I know you know what I'm trying to say, it's just nearly impossible to pin down the words. Odd that you should use the expression Mirror; that did seem to be the precipitating cause in this particular little bundle of energy. Yes, the relationship was bipolar in every sense of the word, and we managed to leave no stone unturned in indulging each other's dynamics for lots of years. We are both transcending that structure now, and it's equally hard for both. But it is necessary for both. Thank you. I love you.

Yesterday I was walking my dog around the ranch. There was a wadded piece of paper ruining the vista of nature; I picked it up to throw it away at the next trash can. Snoopy me. I unwadded the paper and looked at its contents. Even anonymously I wasn't comfortable about doing it, but I did it. I am hopeful that the personality who wrote these words (who is Here Now) will give me his blessings as I relay this to you. It ripped my heart out, the child-like and honest quality of this note. It's written half in English, half in Spanish. It is obviously the hand of a man doing the writing; he is desperately in love with a woman who speaks only Spanish. There are plenty of Spanish-speaking ranch hands up here. Apparently he was rehearsing what he wanted to say to her. I submit to you: "Yo se que no quieres hablar conmigo I know you don't wanna talk to me Pero no mas escuchar lo que yo voy a decir But just listen to what I'm about to tell you. Mi alma ya no sabe que decir lo que yo quiero es nomas areglar las cosas entre nos otros. My heart doesn't know what to say anymore. All I wanna do is fix the things between me and you. There is something so very simple and straightforward in his plea. It grabbed my heart as I read his words, felt his love for her. How uncomplicated his soul is; not surprising if he is a cowboy up here; he lives close to the earth, uses the rising and setting of the sun as his clock, as the feel of his words seems to imply. Like a child. I thought I was all cried out since my departure from Ohio and Joe. I was wrong. This note sent me into a trailspin of tears; not just any tears, oh no. These are the ones that cracked my insides open, all the way down to my first chakra. The tears were so deep that there was no breath, no sound. Just gut-wrenching pain. But what, I ask myself, am I really crying about? Am I really crying for Joe? There are things about him I miss; his smell, his warm skin. But the tears I cry for him are the tears of a mother for a son, not the tears of a wife for a husband. I was crying for Myself. And the realization that I am truly Alone, and that this path is a path that must be taken Alone, even if we're in the presence of another. The operative emotion, I can see, was the remnants of Fear of Tomorrow; an edge of a lack of trust and fear that I thought had been cried out previously. But I was wrong. And I find this somewhat offputting because I had thought my fear of Death had been worked out. All fears, as they say, boil down to a fear of death at the very bottom. But the fact that this remnant was there proved to me otherwise. There is only one answer; to trust the Being that is evolving within this old body (a heck of a time to make an appearance, at 65) and to just KNOW that the pattern is found in the unfoldment of One Day at a Time. Everything will come to me, if I let it. If I plan it otherwise I will miss it.

I've been out of touch for several months and have missed out on this thread. I apologize in advance that I didn't take the time to read all of it. I love the basic premise for this discussion. As an individual, I like to say that I'm All of It and None of It. I came up a shamanic route, after left-braining everything else, including Christianity. The shamanic route made this all very real for me. But I also feel comfortable with Taoists as well, or Buddhists - I like to say that Self-REalization is when we finally get to the room where all paths meet. Structure of any kind has heen transcended. There is just the void. Yes, I am absolutely sure that Jesus was a shaman too. I do keep a picture of him, but I have hanging on the frame a beaded feather. I think he learned to move energy so well that he was able to transcend gravity, if indeed such a person really existed and if the tomes can be relied upon as historical documents. Much of shamanism and the essence of Daoism can be found in the words of the J-man. To Love Your Brother as Yourself; this Love that he speaks of is one of the 3 Treasures of the Sage (Yutang translation); the unconditional love of both the sage and the shaman. Readings of the Essene literature verify the shamanic aspects of this culture as well; When the shaman Jesus turned water into wine, if indeed he did, there's no doubt in my mind that he spoke directly to the spirit of the water, the 'water angel' as they mention in Essene literature. I think it merely becomes a question of Awareness - we All have the capability to do exactly as he did, but we are not in Awareness of Who We REally Are. He apparently was - to the point where he felt so comfortable wearing that cloak that he'd step right out of the boat onto the water. My guess is that Moses, if one believes that story as well, had the same capability. The essene literature speaks of many within the cult of Moses that had that ability; the Knowing of Who They Actually Were; not everyone within Moses' group was Aware, they say - but enough of them were to actually make it happen. And according to them, the water didn't Divide, as that would 'be against nature'. Maybe they temporarily froze it, gelled it, or floated an imagined plank bridge across. They stress that the miracles (or energy manipulations) must be congruous with the tendency of nature. The water wouldn't have divided. As a Child. This was another thing he talked about. And this is shamanic as well, or at least the only 'shamanic' mindset that I'm familiar with, which is the Castaneda or Way of the Toltecs. As with the recapitulation that Don Juan Mateus had Castaneda do with his life, so it is for the recovering person who has to work the steps of recovery. What occurs, if the path is followed long enough and sincerely enough, we do become As A Child. We walk with our eyes higher, we choose to address the highest parts of each other, we choose to Love, and most importantly, we cease any judgment at all, if we're lucky The TTC (Yutang) starts one stanza off with 'Between Aah! and Ugh!, how much difference is there?' What this is saying to me is that all perception is relative; that what is 'good' to me is 'bad' to you. There is no good and bad, no good and evil. All just Is. It's when we walk in this haze of Is-ness that the child-like qualities can come to the fore. Even in the Bible, way back in Genesis, I realized the other day that the Adam and Eve story is the story of pre-judgment versus post-judgment. The Knowledge of Good and Evil, that's what the story represents, the apple. Judgment. Perhaps that's the metaphor for the rise of the 10,000 Things of the TTC as well; differentiation and separation from the One. Yeehaw. I do think all things certainly spring from nature; way back in the beginning, when man first crawled out of the cave and noticed the sun, or whatever happened; the absolute connection with nature must certainly have been overriding; nature would have been their only instructor. We've been un-learning ever since. I'm also pretty sure that man didn't figure out how to cook his meat until after a forest fire one day; then he walked by a dead smoking carcass and said to his buddy "Damn! That smells good!" I've also given a lot of thought to the idea of the primal fire as well. I think that after a forest fire and when they first figured out how to capture the flame and keep it alive, this is when society really changed big time. Imagine. All their days were used up with hunting fishing and gathering, and prior to fire their nights were probably spent in a cave huddled together. This is also where their sense of Oneness would occur, from fright of the spooky noises outside the cave. They would all be touching each other, huddled. I can feel the incredible Oneness when my puppy comes up and sits on my lap; it's like a stream of warm energy flowing back and forth from her to me, and I actually feel a magnetic pull sometimes. Imagine how One they would have felt in that dark cave with only the sense of touch to comfort them. Another thing about fire; if they suddenly had fire to keep them warm at night, this probably stimulated conversation. It probably stimulated sex too, lol, because those hairy women would have looked a lot better by firelight. So it seems to follow that more conversation sprang up, the idea of society (and cave painting art) sprang up too. They had more time on their hands, as they could see each other at night. I think that Jesus the shaman (or the Taoist master, in this incident) was practicing wu-wei during his last days. He was doing 'Not-Doing'. Recall that he was in court before Pontius Pilate and maybe one of the Caesars, Maximillian maybe. He was repeatedly asked to say something on his own behalf. He said nothing. HE LET IT ALL PLAY OUT, one day at a time. Wu-wei j He manipulated nothing; but his Awareness was such that he knew that the right thing would happen if he stayed out of the way. Which makes what he was willing to do even more incredible, if there is truth to the tales. (I just don't trust Constantine one bit). Perhaps what he did, if he truly did it, was to unconditionally love so much that it really did move 'heaven and earth' for the rest of us in some sense. Of course, it would. We're all one. We're all here Here and Now; both the ones here now, the ones who have already lived and died, and the ones yet to be born. We're all here. And some of us are called upon to pick up the cloak as well. He showed us how to do it, perhaps. I see it all in the words of Buddha, the words of Jesus, the words of Lao Tzu, the words of Confucius, the tradition of the Toltecs, and also the words of Flowing Hands. The words are hard to come by, that's for sure. It takes years of studying structure (perhaps not essential but I only have my own path to go by), years of meditating so that one can empty one's mind and choose instead no-thought when needed, and years of internal housecleaning so that the child-like state can be reached. The place of no judgment. That's when the Love can shine, when there's no judgment. And then something else takes over; the brain is no longer man's brain, it becomes more of a shining presence within. The Source can be seen in the little black spots in the eyes of men, animals, insects; we truly start to walk in Love and look to nature for our lessons. The time for inputting the words of others comes to an end.

SANTA YNEZ Nice to see you out of the woodwork, therion. 71 posts in 6 years, lol? I'd be thrilled if someone else would add a little Taoist or Buddhist anecdote from their own life on this thread? Something that happened to you today? I plan to post daily on this thread, but I'm going to be real lonely if I'm the only one putting myself out there. I'd love to make this thread about Us. After all, WE are the manifesters. Any takers?