manitou

What does the image of "God" mean as it pertains to quadrillions of souls? Do we look like Him?

But I think there are methods of helping one's self stay in the rigpa. I do 'try' to remember that we're all one body (physical and spiritual), even at the grocery store. There is nothing someone can say or do that will offend you, at least sometimes it makes you smile. The thought of one tentacle of the octopus fighting with another tentacle is ridiculous. When this concept becomes habituated, it changes the appearance (and dynamics) of most of life. And I do agree with Tulku's statement of 'when you train in this with utmost diligence...' that the rigpa moments of awareness get closer and closer; sometimes it is even constant. It's when we buy into the mental creation of 'society' and all the fears ahead - particularly in this crazy time ' - we lose the awareness and buy into the production. We see fears and projections as real. When I first got sober 41 years ago, a long-timer came up to me at my first AA meeting. During coffee break, I was talking to a woman with long term sobriety, and I was freaked out about my upcoming pension hearing, and I bent her ear for a while about it. She reached over and put her hand on my arm and said, "But Barbara, how are you right now??' It's like I didn't hear the question at first, I continued whining and complaining. She said it two more times. "But Barbara, how are you right now?" I finally heard the question, it made its way into my consciousness. I was silent for a moment, and I felt this strange awareness travel from a very far distance away and somehow land right in my chest. Once I saw what she was saying, I cracked up loudly. Even in my first day of sobriety I was able to see the difference between worrying about something way out in the distance, and being here in the moment. It was actually a physical sensation, and it felt great! I felt slightly empowered, and walked away from the meeting feeling like I was exactly in the right place.

I'd say we do have the same 'soul' but it appears differentiated due to different conditionings.

I often get stuck right before volition

Yes, we're a hall of mirrors because we share the same soul, the same consciousness. Humans communicate with humans. Squirrels have their own world to interact in, so do cows. I wouldn't recognize something in you if I didn't have it in me. Same goes for beauty! We can see all the beautiful things in the world, the rainbows, the jewels, a sunset - and we appreciate the beauty because we have the beauty inside of us to begin with, otherwise we wouldn't see it as beauty. Interactions with other humans (in particular, the bad interactions) are exactly the mirrors we need to know ourselves fully. If we're bothered by the habits of another, it's because we have the very same tendency to some degree. It gives the opportunity to make the change, smooth out the wrinkle. In this sense, the mirror nature of life is most helpful for the enlightenment path. The enlightenment doesn't take place until the wrinkles are gone. And then it becomes a matter of degrees, all showing itself in its own time.

There is no feeling in 2018

Maybe the degree depends on how we addressed inanimate objects in childhood. I remember that I was terribly attached to my stuffed animals, and would often cry into them after being punished for something. My attachment was so great that it was truly traumatic when a stuffed animal passed on...

Yes, it's all stardust. Rocks, cars, and whoopie cushions. There's enough intelligence in all of them to keep the atoms from falling apart. If water can be changed by speaking to it (Dr. Emoto and his electron microscope), then wouldn't any other substance respond as well?

I don't know if this qualifies as pushing light out from the heart, but if I concentrate on feeling the steering wheel under my hands, I can actually feel love for my little car! I feel warmth actually radiating from my heart. It is a great little car, a 2007 Prius. I will drive it until the wheels fall off. But it does feel like pushing light.... P.S. On rare occasion, I feel this for a human being too

Staying with this idea, there's no doubt that punishment is handy to repress children, for example. I would guess that most of the world sees it like this. But when one gets close to enlightenment, the concept of punishment and reward is superfluous. Because a person has done the necessary work to make one's self as transparent as possible, devoid of prior conditioning, you're right - the inner self is no longer interested in those things which are destructive to self or others.

Well, something involving volcanic eruptions, I would think, lol....

There is no judge in that the Dao (for lack of a better word for "?") doesn't pass moral judgment. There is no concept of good and evil, just denseness and lightness, or darkness and lightness, once it's realized that all is one. We are like a huge electrical cord with millions of different copper wires in it, each of us feeling separate; but that is the illusion. We are all the cord, the same cord. To pass judgment on one of the other copper wires is silly. It'll just have to be doing some more recycling until he makes the realization that he is indeed an electrical cord. It may take millions of years. Personally, I think the concept of other defined realms and statuses are an archaic human construct. It seems appropriate to me that one of the definitions of enlightenment is that there are no more structures. No more 'have to's'. If there are remnants of a structure left in one's idea of enlightenment, then it would stand that other people are eliminated in this equation. If their structure is still in place, then certainly they can't be an enlightened one because his structure is different, and certainly my structure is righter than his structure. It seems to me, Bob, that your concept of realms still has punishment attached to it. That's a crucial difference, and a difference that's worthy of a lot of consideration.

This is profound, Taoist Texts! If you ask a parent 'what is bad?', they may say the teenager who sells dope on the corner is bad. If you ask the teenager on the corner 'what is bad?' , he could say "the a-hole who stole my stash last night" The point being, it's all relative, and there is nobody to make the final judgment. I thought it was bad that I was a stumbling drunk, but now I realize that getting to Recovery was what it was all about. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. It is the inner purging of the personality that will produce the kind of results that lead to enlightenment. It's not a spiritually hierarchal thing. It's more of a 'how much can you empty yourself out?' thing. Crazy talk, for sure. As though any of this was really happening

A fellow friend of Bill's, no doubt?

then why do I feel so guilty when I'm doing it? That damn conditioning, lol.

That's perfect. "Rain falls on the murderer and the healer (or murdered!) without distinction. I agree that to recognize that the Dao (or 'God') as Impersonal is to understand it. But love is definitely the connecting force that holds it all together, if you consider that love (mutual attraction) binds things together, at least initially, until we fall victim to our conditioning. There is no one judging anything. There is no set of eyes in the sky that chalks us up as Good or Bad. To see the Dao as impersonal is to reject nothing. Judgments are superfluous. To look into another's eyes is to look into the eyes of 'god'. Same as when we look in the mirror and see god in our own reflection. I like the way you brought the element of Time into the straw dog discussion. 'Celebrated for a time'. I never thought of it that way. I always just looked at it as the Dao having no preferences, no judgments. The rain falls on all.

LOL. There's plenty grass here. Just leave the critter and the concepts to graze and mosey on... As to the goodness or badness of kids who die because of drugs, for situations like this, my mind always jumps to the Dao regarding us as straw dogs. This will sound absolutely heretical, I know, but my view is that the Dao doesn't care who lives and who dies, and when. There is nobody judging what's good and what's bad, it all just Is. The soul of awareness inside of all these bodies is the very same. They appear separate because they've been divided into separate bodies, but the eye to eye contact of awareness knows that it is not, that each look into the window of the soul leads to the very same soul looking into itself, the other merely a mirror. This is the Oneness, as I see it. And it's seen in the pupils of another's eyes.

From my experience, there are two ways of daily realization of this. One is on an intellectual level, where every time the realization occurs to me it blows my mind each time. But you're right, one doesn't go walking around in that realization. I mean, I guess you could, but even walking would be a challenge. The other aspect of the realization is the lack of pressing distractions getting in the way of daily life. When my thinking mellowed out, when I became able to think with singularity at the center, this produces a type of joy that is produced just from the ease of life! Because I'm not putting a bunch of convoluted emotional stuff out there, I'm not getting a bunch of convoluted emotional stuff bouncing back at me. It seems to be a karmic reaction to changing the way one thinks. In order to stay sober for the past 41 years, I have had to change my thinking from something negative to something of a more positive force, for the good of everyone, not just me. When my mind opens up and realizes that the person standing next to me is every bit as important as I am on this planet. Even if that person is dirty and homeless. For mental training, especially if that person is dirty and homeless. It seems that this integrated joy is a result of subtraction of traits that get in the way, rather than new thoughts added to the knowledge base of the brain. Experiencing it in daily actions and occurrences is all the proof I need. And acceptance of everything and everybody is the key.

Actually, there's some truth to that; when you don't know what it actually is. What it actually is isn't realized until one is capable of stilling the mind and stepping out of ego. People who don't know what it is think they are enlightened because of intellectual pursuits only, or achievements, or how many students they have. Folks who fall into that category can be dangerous because their perception of their own enlightenment consists predominately of ego gratification. The further down their ego road they get, the more dangerous they become because they are blinded by their own personal perceived studio lights. The humility required for complete clarity is only had after an inner purging process has been done, where one's life has been thoughtfully examined, and where complete responsibility for one's self is attained. The true enlightenment of the sages is one that has been experiential, and most likely merged with intellectual understanding, as one who is willing to go through the enlightenment process has probably collected many masters along the way, whether that be in person or in books. The experiential aspect of enlightenment cannot be shortchanged. Otherwise, we have only a really knowledgeable person.

I sometimes wonder why atoms don't fly apart (aside from the physical electromagnetics explanation). Why do they stay in the form of say, a fountain pen? This appears to point to the 'form' being nothing but 'idea'. The thing that keeps atoms from going outside of the form is that they are based on an idea, a concept, as I see it. The whole concept of time is so arbitrary and so relative, in the sense that if we were a little further from the sun, time would be a whole different thing. If our planet was bigger and rotating slower, time would also be a whole different thing. The concept of time, in our universe, seems to start with rotation. I too run across 'time' on a bias. It appears to us as linear, but pre-rotation it wouldn't be. So is it really there at all? I am of the current understanding that it is all happening at once, and we have blinders on which only allows us to see it a day at a time. It always brings me back to the quantum physics of matter being both a particle, which utilizes space; and a wave of probability, which utilizes time for the measurement. It is the intersection of the two, time and space, where life on this particular planet occurs. Something spinning different or further from the sun? Our receptors probably couldn't even pick that up.

To truly 'see', it's very helpful to look at things without time. Like a slinky all coiled up when there is no time, stretched out when there is. In that state, everything is in the here and now. When time is taken out of the equation, things can be seen more clearly because the beginning, middle, and end are all 'visible' to our intuition. In order to see this way, I think the most important thing is to have the ability to remove preferences and judgments from the personality while evaluating the phenomena. I don't think time's a big mystery. It's planetary rotation, that's all. There would be no time if day didn't follow night. It seems to be the mechanical means for this strange world drama to play out - both collectively and individually.

Because it's all happening here and now. No connection required. We are the One.

How do you separate the two?

If I'm reading this correctly, it would have to be Coke Classic. Keep that little village traditional.

Thank you, Steve. I think the thing that makes this website exceptional is the kindness with which we speak to each other. It hasn't always been that way, but it seems like all of us personalities have matured over the years.