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To be, or not to be...is a false duality. Valid only within a frame of reference.. But outside of one... There is no such thing as existing...or not existing. Only "existing." An example of this is a thought in your mind, a dream, a video game playing on your computer screen. Do any of these truly exist...or not...or...? What is the word between yes and no? What is the Middle Way, between all binary boundaries? How can infinity even have boundaries?

Fall 2014 Shamatha, Vipashyana, Dream Yoga, and the Experience of Pristine Awareness in the Great Perfection Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism http://media.sbinstitute.com/courses/fall-2014/

Now reading book 4 - The Fall, from the Joseph Communications. Also reading, Make Us Dream, a book written by football fans of Liverpool FC, who play in the English Premier League; it is a game by game account of Liverpool's season, very entertaining! This is my light reading matter. The book is part authored by my friend's son John Gibbons.

There's very few matriarchal tribes left -- I sometimes think I should join one of them, or else there's no practicing what I believe in. The one I have in mind, which is part of what the Chinese government lumped together as the Miao people, is being "modernized" in a hurry so now their ways are understood by tourists as their women offering free sex, which is nowhere near the truth... but I guess if I want to get to the still surviving traditional (real human) ways I'd have to hurry, the overlords are making their move... That tribe is interesting in that no one cares who the father of the child is because women take as many husbands as they like, there's no stigma attached to starting or dissolving any of these liaisons, highly selective but never saddled with any obligations of exclusivity -- and no social or material repercussions of doing as the woman sees fit because all property is inherited matrilineally, by the youngest daughter... And according to a Chinese writer who described her mother's life with the Miao, teenage boys of the tribe dream of attracting an older woman, the way it's always been throughout our true, matriarchal history -- for how else could they learn the real, cultivational rather than recreational sex?.. We used to be a matriarchal species for 99.9% of our history. If anyone thinks it was unfair and "unequal" (if we were supposed to be equal, nature would have us propagate asexually like amoebas do, or switch sexes in mid-life like pumpkins... yes, all pumpkins were created equal, but not us -- nature gave us sexual reproduction and she gave the womb to half the species only -- so matriarchy is what she did to us, and whoever undid this was not of nature, was not natural, and did something against human nature) -- consider the fact that we had no wars while at it, no degenerative disease, no crime, no slavery, no polluted environments, no poverty, no famines... what we did have was a universal planet-wide cult of the Goddess, the one and only divine power recognized all over this earth, and it was the cult of life itself. Life on earth was perceived as constant ongoing happiness and equated to the feminine principle -- and while it was understood as such, life on earth was good for everybody, men and women. Which is one reason (out of much circumstantial evidence I've been collecting over the years) I believe that patriarchy was not only an artificial installation by the Intervention but a fundamental one at that -- it's not indigenous to our species, it's got to have been artificially implanted and cultivated to take root. Which it was and which it did. It won't be easy to uproot, but the goal of the original, unpolluted by Intervention, taoist proper cultivation, for both men and women, has always been just that and nothing but. What do you think "return to the Way" is about? Who do you think tao "the Great Mother" is?.. I don't expect the general population to radically change their perceptions anytime soon, after thousands of years of manipulative social engineering, but anyone who touches taoism from any angle must realize that your cultivation will all be for naught unless you get this one simple idea straight: to return to the Way is to return to the way of nature, Goddess, tao, the Great Mother... and none of these are guys. However you go about it, if you offend the Goddess by offending the Woman, you can never approach the Way no matter what else you do or don't do.

I just recently read a book by Danijel Turina called “Possibility of the new” and it was fantastic. The start was interesting, philosophical and very scholarly. Some of the historical facts were new to me, the arguments were useful and it was interesting to reconcile the views of spirituality with those of scientism. Things really started to get interesting at the chapter on “change of paradigm”. From then on my eyes were glued, popping out and my mouth was frequently wide open – either at the sheer beauty and poetry of the words expressed or the newness of the concepts. I'm still trying to make sense of the chapters on Angled shot and Lucifer. But I’ll leave people to read that for themselves: The book can be downloaded for free from his website: http://danijel.org/fileadmin/books/possibility_of_the_new.pdf Below are some quotes from the book, they may come across as a little out of context because I only included sections of the text, but they can still provide a taste for some of the contents in the book. Of course, it’s best to read the complete book in order to get the full meaning. I don’t normal recommend books to people but this one has been really refreshing: Morality of Darshan “Only when the darkness of human existence is stripped away from the soul, and when it finds itself in the presence of God, can one experience that incredible elation and relief, expansion, joy, reality – that is most closely comparable with the power of a nuclear blast, if we poetically describe it as the light that escaped from the bondage of the coarse matter, only in a spiritual sense. You can call this experience indescribable”, but that doesn't suffice, because many trinkets and trivia are indescribable, from orgasm to the scent offlowers. Had you spent your entire life paralyzed like Hawking, unable to move anything but your eyes, and additionally you had a brain injury that makes you incapable of feeling anything more than dull stupor, and at a single moment all that is stripped away from you, the entire mental capacity of greatest genius is made yours, together with the greatest mobility and dexterity, and knowledge that that, indeed, is your true state of being, and not a paralyzed brain damaged state, which is but an illusion, and the reality is the greatest glory and clarity and goodness, and that this reality has no end, that where you going is forever, well that's a limited way of describing the nature of an experience of ananda, the joy of Brahman.” “there's our foundation of morality: to remove from our consciousness and from the consciousness of other beings the ignorance, illusion, spiritual darkness and evil, so that in their consciousness the light of Brahman can shine – to remove its opposites, to dissolve spiritual obstacles, to be a flame of Brahman that sets ablaze the dry grass of human reality. That's our true morality, that is the meaning of doing good, that is the meaning of living the truth. The ethical meaning of human existence is therefore clear. One has to live in a way that makes those who feel you, feel the song of the Ainur1 and remember the shores of a distant land beyond Creation. How and what exactly doesn't matter. Your song is your own, and cannot be given to you, you need to make your own. From Brahman you take and create your own life in your own individual way, unrepeatable, unique, original, and you give something completely new, without any predefined limits. There are no ethical rules other than: be Brahman, and live so in the world. To refuse being Brahman and existing as Brahman is the foundation of all sin, if one understands sin as opposing the will of God, because the will of God is for Logos to be born in the world. The will of God is for Brahman to intrude into and exist in the world. That, if anything, is the lesson we must learn from the history of the Universe.” Ekam sat, ... “Hinduism has the concept of an avatar, a point of God's intrusion into the world with some specific goal or purpose, usually in a time of crisis, where an incarnate God leads mankind through crisis and into a new age. Theism is comparable to a situation where one dreams a dream from a third person perspective, observing some persons doing something, and at a certain point he becomes first-person aware, from a viewpoint of one of the characters involved. Theism is therefore a situation where the dreamer awakes within his dream as one of the characters, and starts acting in his dream as first-person aware. Since the dreamer has, in fact, limitless power to change anything within his dream, this explains the “miracles” within the material world. From a viewpoint of the material beings, those miracles are something impossible, but from the dreamer's viewpoint, it's just a dream and everything is possible, including complete awakening, where only the dreamer remains, and all the characters within the dream are absorbed and dissolved within his spirit. The miracles performed by the Divine incarnations are therefore completely understandable and easy to process once you understand that Universe is the software and not the hardware, dream and not the dreamer, and that God can, awake in his own dream, in form of a lucid dream, simply change any of the “laws” in the dream. The beings who perceive his dream as their reality, viewing it from the perspective of it being “the” reality, can neither comprehend nor repeat those miracles, and in that sense only God can perform miracles and change the parameters of the Universe. Any being that awakens within the dream and thus closes the ouroboros of creation by knowing itself as the dreamer, and attains the fullness of the emergence of Logos, the self-realization of Brahman, or whatever else you might call it, is essentially identical to the concept of Divine incarnation in the world, or a personal God as he is defined by the theism.” The God factory “What I can therefore confirm from my experience aren't the talking snakes, but the existence of spiritual beings who establish their influence over the portions of the physical plane, and who are occasionally motivated by their own idea of realizing some spiritual goal or another, and those goals can be essentially characterized as good. For instance, if we characterize manifestation of Brahman on the physical plane as good, it leaves an open question of the form of such a manifestation, of what it'sgoing to look like. Apparently, the opinions in the spiritual world are divided on that matter as well. As much as Brahman is a given, it leaves an open question of how exactly could Brahman manifest itself in certain aspects of the relative reality, for instance in the physical matter. Is manifested Brahman a state in which there is a complete breach, an intrusion of Brahman into the relative, a perfect self-realization of Brahman within consciousness of an individual being? Or is it manifested when several beings together manifest the qualities of Brahman, in other words when their social interactions bear the quality of satcit-ananda, reality-consciousness-bliss, in a way that the whole of their collective existence is a manifestation of Brahman? Or is it something else, ie. “enlightenment” of all beings, from first to last? What does a being that manifests Brahman look like, is it a strong, focused “ego” of an individual which is the living God, or is it a dispersed, disintegrated ego of a group of barely-individuals who manifest Brahman as a group? The answers to those questions are very important because they decide the direction of evolution, and a wrong answer that appears correct in the short term can lead the evolution of not only human species, but the entire biological basis or at least its large portion, in a wrong direction1, which is then very difficult to remedy due to the inertia of the physical, and something along the lines of a K-T event2 might be the only solution.” “So let's say that the spiritual field of some higher being applies pressure on the matter and creates the human species. That's the aspect the Platonists – or Theosophists – would find familiar. But the conscious matter, a self-aware human being, through its original thoughts, emotions and similar forms of spiritual existence, creates the spiritual forms that didn't exist before, thus giving an authentic, original contribution to the spiritual world. Furthermore, a great Yogi who becomes initiated beyond all the levels of Prakrti and attains realization, becomes in fact a new, original Purusha, a new eternal spiritual being, a new God. So it's not only true that the Gods create men and other beings, but the thing also works in the other direction: the matter creates new Gods, in quite a literal sense: a man is in fact a being which, by breaking through the limitations imposed by the matter, and providing he1 attains fulfillment of his highest potential, creates such a radical spiritual breakthrough that he becomes a new Divine being, which, for all intents and purposes, is a relative viewpoint of the Brahman, without any share of illusion. This concept is particularly pronounced in Hinduism and Buddhism – in Hinduism, some of the greatest Divine beings, the Rishis such as Vyasa and Narada, didn't always have this status, but had evolved from common men; Narada, for instance, was a servant's son from a lower caste. In Buddhism, the Buddhas are not “incarnations of a deity”, but beings of newly attained status, completely self-made. Far from the fatalist systems where enlightenment is some sort of a game for the beings that were Divine to begin with and went through the motions for the sake of an audience, the concept of evolution introduces a new category: the world as an instrument of initiating new Gods.” The plurality of the spiritual “What happens when your ideas about the goal of your spiritual evolution differ from the ideas of the spiritual being which, due to investment of his spiritual force, has authority over the aspect of the physical world in which you create your physical existence? Should one do what the good followers of monotheism would, which is to see what this being wants and declare it our own, the greatest good and the goal of all our aspirations, axiomatically, and join our spiritual energy with his efforts, as foreign as they might be to us, and as local, as opposed to universal, those efforts might be? What if the local “God” implements the concepts that are far from the main stream among other Gods? What if it's an experiment, a deviation, a branch of evolution that's headed the way of the dinosaurs? Should we join the other lemmings' cliffdiving just because the majority can't be wrong, or because “God can't be wrong?” “Those questions are highly relevant in this world, since this world has a King. The King has many names. He is a being of the Eternal Fire, the Bearer of Light. He is called the Morning Star, for he precedes the Sun and proclaims its light. He is the Lightbearer, the one who takes God's light and gives it to the world. He is the Eternal Youth. The King of this world is Sanat Kumara, known in the Bible as Satan, or Lucifer.” Freedom for the new “Instead of passively reproducing the biologically conditioned mechanisms without awareness, allow yourselves something new – a step into the unconditionality of the spiritual. We had enough of the passive reproduction of the same old ideas. Admit to yourself the possibility of the different, of the new – of your own self sufficient light, your own personal path, because the same Brahman that is the foundation of this world, is also the foundation of your own personal reality. All the enlightened ones, the wise and the Gods are already there, and are inviting you to become one of them, and have done so for centuries. You, as a person, yourself, are more important to them than any religion, society or mankind, because you as a person have a personal connection with God, and mankind, with all its self-important religions and pecking orders, is merely a speck of dust which will soon disappear in the ocean of time, together with the other, already abandoned sections of the great poem of creation.”

Chuang Tzu had a few words to say that may be of interest:- The True men of old did not dream when they slept, had no anxiety when they awoke, and did not care that their food should be pleasant. Their breathing came deep and silently. The breathing of the true man comes from his heels, while men generally breathe from their throats. When men are defeated in argument, their words come from their gullets as if they were vomiting. Where lusts and desires are deep, the springs of the Heavenly are shallow. The True men of old knew nothing of the love of life or of the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned them no joy; the exit from it awakened no resistance. Composedly they went and came. They did not forget what their beginning had been, and they did not inquire into what their end would be. They accepted (their life) and rejoiced in it; they forgot (all fear of death), and returned (to their state before life). Thus there was in them what is called the want of any mind to resist the Tâo, and of all attempts by means of the Human to assist the Heavenly. Such were they who are called the True men. Being such, their minds were free from all thought; their demeanour was still and unmoved; their foreheads beamed simplicity. Whatever coldness came from them was like that of autumn; whatever warmth came from them was like that of spring. Their joy and anger assimilated to what we see in the four seasons. They did in regard to all things what was suitable, and no one could know how far their action would go.

Mind is one, unborn. Therefore there is no am, not because of an absence of a relativistic notion pertaining to nonexistence of "other", but because no thing is the rule. In fact, the quality of otherness of the homeland of nothing whatsoever is a device of taoist alchemic process. Recognition of reality being flesh and blood entry into the inconceivable mystery of reality is this very no thing being the essence of creation and its evolution in terms of time. The world is you. As such, there is no separate nature to act on. There are no two sides of the same coin. The mystery is whole, undifferentiated. Seeing reality is not apart from delusion; authentic permanent experience of the real is by virtue of delusion's evolution. Seeing delusion as delusion is reality. Seeing delusion as reality is delusion. Stepping off the cliff and accepting one's function, who would dare to act on one's own behalf? Selfless adaption to everyday ordinary situations is matching one's potential to creation, therefore one's actions do not admit of one's own power. This is enlightening activity. It's a mystery. Effective cultivation of the empty field is deep plowing through unified sameness void of ideas of self and other. Difference is undeniable, sameness is relative to other, not the self. The way depends on other, adaption is up to the self. There is no fixed pattern. Seeing reality as is, the worldly dream partakes of true reality because we personally bring the power to the fore by our own impersonal adaptivity. We come to radiate the virtue of enlightening qualities because gradual refinement of the human mentality becomes the abode of the tao. The expression of the power of tao is its virtue, people's inherent enlightening being.

Spotless, with love, no malice, but to me stating that someone's statement is "utterly naive" borders on insult. Would you agree? Ego is the only thing that can be insulted, so this is obviously ego speaking, but I do find this a tad insulting, and unnecessary. (Something applicable here that I should work on, but still: 2. Don't Take Anything Personally Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering. ~ Don Miguel Ruiz) Additionally, I never actually said that "their there should not be secret teaching that is reserved for certain levels". I was stating that by and large I think that secrecy is a bad thing: And you sort of agree that a lot is already out there: Yes, of course, I agree; there's plenty out there. Just going by Non-Dual Self inquiry traditions there's enough, and none of that's secret. However if you're approaching it from another position then the secrets and gaps in between information muddies up the viewpoint to a certain extent for some approaches. If you're approaching it from an energetic approach then the secrecy can lead to problems, disparities, and create a situation where due to the secrecy between different traditions, disparities arise, underlying similarities are missed and people can end up not knowing where to go, what's legitimate. If information is open then you can verify a practice/school by going on information of what are agreed upon to be the proper approaches. I personally wasn't talking about the magic side of things, so in THIS particular area I cannot comment, because I have not explored it, and have not professed to. But still, in that case, and in all cases, there's already so much out there now that having little bits/gaps of secrecy seems to be a potential source of problems, you know? It's like having a driving manual being released, having loads of driving manuals released, but loads of them missing important information like how to slam on the brakes (and it was John Dalberg-Acton who said it, and I don't think he was an idiot, it's a brilliant quote ; I used it in a piece of writing I was doing the other month). I am primarily referring to spiritual practices re: secrecy (which I think was inferred, but I didn't state so, so fair enough). Energy work and meditation. I cannot comment on magic, but, I think the point remains:

I woke up with a concept on my mind this morning. When we develop as fetuses, the input we receive - other than our issuance of a perfectly enlightened spirit - is that of heredity, of genetics. Of course our perfectly enlightened spirit starts deteriorating the moment we start getting less-than-enlightened input from our well-meaning parents and teachers. But it occurs to me that the hereditary traits are nothing more than crystallized karma from our ancestors. This, to me, explains how everything is actually Here and Now. Our ancestors are physically within us all the time - or the essence of their lives, the concentration of their experiences. This is passed to us through the genes. Each generation has an opportunity to change the karma of not only themselves, but also the (seemingly) past actions of our ancestors. I've certainly read this before in books, but never actually had the Aha! until this morning. Must've been a dream I don't remember. What an odd and yet wonderful system this is. And how very brilliant. Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

The soul is a piece of a energy. It can contain ego. But it doesn't have to. People often speak of reincarnation. But what is the substance that is reincarnated? To a Taoist, the reincarnated substance is just soul energy still vibrating in the realm of yin and yang -- the sphere of the changing truth. The ultimate goal of Taoist practices is to reach the level of the unchanging truth -- that is, to merge one's soul energy with the Mother Universe. But people do not fly into the sky overnight -- there are no shortcuts. Truly, most cultivators are just at the very beginning stages of cultivation. And they may mistake an intellectual "all is empty" musing for real achievement, or gravitate towards a psychological approach. But that cannot begin to touch the spiritual heights our Taoist forefathers left us with. In their writings, they spoke of complete internal engineering of body, mind, and spirit. Truly, when the body is not transformed, one cannot even begin to speak of non-duality. It is a mere pipe-dream. So the body must be first transformed, until desire is refined to jing. The mind must also be transformed, until ego and mental confusion is refined to chi. The spirit must be transformed, until all sense of self is dissolved to light. This is energetic transformation wherein the light of our soul, becoming brighter and brighter with cultivation, pierces the darkness we have created for ourselves. The jing-chi-shen-Te-Tao model elucidates this point, but it confuses some people because of esoteric terminology. More plainly put, it describes a step-by-step jettisoning of all the trashes the soul has accumulated in this world. We cannot take any our conceptions, ideas, and beliefs with us. With refinement, the crude material of our body can be sublimated to pure light and higher spiritual energy. Our soul becomes lighter and lighter. After the cleansing process, our soul contains the essence of our life, our spiritual nature. Our spiritual nature is an energetic copy of the universal nature. Seeing this, what duality can still exist?

I always have dreams at night but they can be really crazy. I know that dreams have a meaning of your life or future but I wouldn't know. Normally by the time I wake up, I never remember my dreams. It's once in a while when I do remember a dream. As crazy as it would sound but I would like to share it with you guys a piece of me because first of all, no one lives forever and if there's someone who understands what I'm going through or wants to be helpful, I would be very thankful to anyone who replays. There are mysterious/evil things going in my life. And I do kinda know why but I don't have all the answers. You know who Jenn is? She's on my friends list if you look her up in my profile. Her story is similar like mine. Ya it's sad and scary. I try to leave her a message but she hasn't logged on in years. But anyways there are demons haunting me everyday. They follow me everywhere I go. It's like demon attachment. They talk to me through any kind of noises, I've seen like a white foggy shadow flying a round and a dark shadow. I've also seen light. They like to whisper in my ear and enter in my dreams. I believe in God but there's Christians who would tell you that satan or his demons Cannot read your mind or thoughts or know what your thinking... BS! They can! And they have proven to me. A lot of times I think about something random or I say something in my head, and they reply to what I said in my head. And yeah my mouth is closed. They do threaten my life and hurt me on my chest. They want me to obey them and they say they are angels from God..... -____- anyways I'm not going to explain everything about it here I just said a part of it. Anyways since a month now every time I go to bed, I listen to this Christian guy praying at night in YouTube. He does many verity of prayers. And long prayers. So, I listen to him last night & a demon came in my dream. The way that the YouTube guy prays, well the "demon" came to my dream and used the guy prayer and twisted his words. I don't remember nothing what the demon was saying but I do remember he was saying evil wicked things & against me. But I must say at the time I was deeply asleep so I wasn't awake. So throughout the man on youtube praying as the demon was talking over him and twisting his words, as soon as the man finished his prayer and said amen, the demon who was praying evil told me and kept telling me to say Amen in my sleep. It said, say amen! Say amen! And I said No! After that I felt it flee from me . I then woke up as I immediately prayed to God. I was just thinking... me being that heavenly asleep, Thank God I didn't say amen to the devil. Plus the Bible does say, resist the Devil, and he will flee.

Thought experiment time: Let's say 5 people witness you doing something amazing and they all agree that something happened. Then for various reasons they die and you no longer repeat your prior deed. Once the 5 people who saw you do something amazing die, their power of testimony dies with them. What is the status of the deed at that point? Is it an illusion? Is it real even though all the people who could testify to it are now gone? Is your own memory of those 5 people agreeing that you've done something amazing itself the testimony required? Even assuming the 5 people each left their testimony in writing before they died, without them being alive to defend their written words from critics and doubters, what power will such testimony have? Won't that power wane with time? Even when consensus is widely shared it doesn't seem to have a lot of stability. For example, look what happened when classical physics got displaced by the quantum-relativistic physics. Classical physics is now more like a distant memory rather than something we consider real. Nobody thinks atoms are like billiard balls anymore. That's gone. But at one point everyone agreed that atoms were like tiny little balls. And now what? So even if many people agree your powers are "the real deal" so to speak, how reliable is that? Public opinion is not guaranteed to be constant. For whose (or for what) benefit is such testimony? Please don't get me wrong, I think involving other people into the world of greater possibility is a fun thing to do. I am all for it. I'm just saying that the issue of testimony and objectivity is not so clear cut once I think about it deeper. I've had a lucid dream once where I reached out my hand to another dream character, and by doing this I was able not only fly myself, but to have this dream character fly with me. In the context of that dream, that was basically objective proof of my flying ability. When I woke up, the character who could testify for me and my objective proof were gone. Even if you convince everyone on Earth that you have genuine psychic power, where will that crowd of people be once you die? Will these folks follow you to the next life and offer their testimony there too? I think that's doubtful.

I've always found that the more "real" dreams are the ones to be aware of and keep track of as they are us, well another part of us, getting stuff done in other planes/places. That's how I see it anyways. I think that what we think of as the real world is only a tiny tiny slice things. I think the dream world is yet another slice. We are closed off to so much all the time. Less so when we allow it to all crumble of course. Personally I have a difficult time allowing the crumbled what I think of this physical reality, to stick around. I get all stressed out and do mundane stuff for awhile .

ZOOM, you must have had quite an interesting experience. Everyone who's practicing something, anything, has reasons for doing it the way they're doing it. I don't bother with external validation of anything, even though I've had at least one shared experience where it wasn't just me. Why not? That's for two reasons. One, I know where I am stuck. I know where my mind refuses to move how I want it to move, and I also know why it refuses. So before I start parading in front of cameras and crowds, I am basically busy with mind training, and the thought of validation doesn't even enter my mind, because I see a severe internal limitation to my psychic functioning, and until that's gone, there is no point in validating anything. Two, there is an interesting class of thought experiments that conduces me to thinking validation is not important anyway. Let's not forget that Einstein's thought experiments have changed how we all think about physics today. I've always been impressed with this fact growing up, and I myself enjoyed the idea of thought experiments. And here's one thought experiment from that class of experiments: Let's imagine I have lived 70 years, and on my 70th year I've contracted a fatal disease. I am laying in a hospital. The docs gave me 1 more year to live. One night during sleep I am dreaming that I am someone else in some other place that is not even this Earth. I end up spending 300 years in that dream. Let's say I appear in the dream as a 20 year old, and go on to the age of 320. I sleep in the dream world and dream inside the dream (I've done this already, so this isn't even theoretical for me -- dreams within dreams are possible). I go to sleep every dream day and wake up to the same dream world every dream morning. Thus the dream appears to stretch for 300 years of time. Lots of events happen. I meet people. I make friends and enemies. I have a number of careers and adventures. And so on. Among other things in that dream I am able to demonstrate all kinds of strange abilities and everyone present in that dream can witness me demonstrating those abilities, and everything is confirmed to be genuine in the context of that dream. But as we all know, even 300 years pass in a flash. I wake up in the hospital. I am very disoriented. "What the hell is going on?" I am thinking. It takes me a few days to get my old memory back. Ah... so I was this aging human in this world... and I have 1 more year left to live. I see. Well, I take my meds, watch some hospital TV and get on with my hospital life. The year passes and I die. Now the questions: which environment was objective and which one was subjective? Why so? Is the 300 year long dream the objective one because it's longer?

Much of what we consider magical or mystical could potentially be understood as science. But that's only the outlook of the rationalistic left hemisphere of the brain (Yang). If you make an absolute out of it, well, that's the left hemisphere claiming all the credit for itself. This is basically the stand taken by many modern scientists; they dream of finding a TOE (Theory Of Everything) soon. Despite the fact that they can't explain what about 90% of the universe is made of. But surely, it's only a matter of building an even bigger particle accelerator, or an even stronger space telescope... Contrary to this, I believe that the more we understand, the more new questions will be raised, and the more will the mystery deepen. Will there ever be an end to it? Maybe not. Maybe even the most evolved entities don't have all the answers. Except that consciousness which abides in Infinity... The more we learn, the more we will stand in awe in front of the mysteries of creation. And that's the perspective of the mystical right hemisphere of the brain (Yin). In other words: As mysticism becomes more scientific, science becomes more mystical.

Some powers came and went, especially the ones I didn't like or had no use for. Others are very handy and quite surprising. 1) the ability to see, as if through a telescope, a far away distance. It is activated by the heart with love. A hole opens up between the brows and in the hole appears the scene or person you are focusing on. 2) third eye or eye that looks like a golden orange eye. You can see people and the scenes in the world through it. You can drive with your regular eyes closed. Most people have a dark flame emanating from their abdomens. Normal reality appears somewhat vaporous and etheric. 3) ability to tell when someone is scrying at you or thinking about you. I usually see their faces on the screen behind the brow. Some times I see people whom I have been thinking about appear at the foot of my bed as I am drifting off to sleep. 4) knowing what will happen two or three minutes before it happens. Freaked me out when I started to know what going to happen 1 hour before it happened. 5) having the Kati crystal channel open up and experience the liquid light first as a gush of luminescent light in slow motion, then as it filled the whole scene, the experience of silence, bliss, radiance, love and the feeling that I was everything. Has occurred 7 times now. This is not really a controllable power, but I wish it was... 6) having people walk by me and then all of a sudden knowing all their thoughts. Yuk. 7) looking at someone and knowing what action they were going to perform next. 8) touching someone and be able to see what they were visualizing in great detail. 9) the ability to float on the ground for longer distances than you'd normally expect while running. Almost like gliding an extra few yards at a time with every step. Result of kunlun bouncing the legs. 10) feeling great empathy for someone and have the other planes become visible, superimposed over top of normal reality as my heart opened up. 11) the ability to start a dream, stop it and pick it up at a later time. The ability to push myself out of the third eye and into whatever scene I could visualize. The ability to turn a vision or third eye scene into a dream and then do whatever I want in it. Eventually, it becomes really boring... 12) the ability to focus behind the brow and experience ecstasy at will. 13) the ability to call the squirrel and let him know that there are more peanuts for his stash by using love and pictures (visualization). 14) realizing that past lives are stored in bubbles near the navel, and they appear when you focus on your heart and your presence while relaxing the lower abdomen. There are a few more but if I told you about them, I'd have to kill you after So, these are the more mundane powers and nothing really mind bending. They are byproducts and didn't lead to enlightenment, but, they do indicate that reality is not quite what it seems.. And am I worried about losing them? You can have them all, I don't care. It is kind of like finally getting that new car and then realizing it just gets dented in parking lots like every one else's cars..

Beyond Fear: The Teachings of Don Miguel Ruiz same guy who wrote The Four Agreements Toltec lineage, some seriously powerful discussion about the Judge and Victim we all carry around inside us as we dream the fear of our culture. Powerful and concise.

Well, there are 3 ways to look at dreams. Dreams can be the reflection of your daily lives or relating to your daily activities. Dreams can be manifestations of your suppressed thoughts and feeling. In that case, they have nothing to do with your daily lives. Dreams can be precognitive and this is when getting a good interpretation is highly, highly difficult. That's one aspect of dream interpretation I always have issues with. For your buddha statue symbol, I would be very weary of it because it may represent a false sense of personal connections to the Buddha. Buddha taught us that we should not even grow attached to himself or his form. Can you associate any feelings with this Buddha/shovel symbol? If the shovel represents death, well, you may feel uneasy about the dream. If the shovel represents "to work harder," you may experience a sense of anxiety or the urgency to get on top of the situation. Obviously, are you perusing any cultivation practice or experiencing anything remotely "spiritual?"

I also like dreams and over the past two weeks have had a couple which I have really enjoyed. Dream 1. I was on a number 82 bus(familiar bus)into Garston, and exited the bus at the stop where Garston swimming baths used to be. I then entered what appeared to be a train station on the outside, but when I entered the building it changed into a sports complex. I then went through a number of changing rooms, the final one is where I met an elderly Tibetan Lama who was training a 59 yr old grandmother with anger issues; he was training her to do a gymnastic routine, she seemed pleasant as she spoke briefly with me. Then the Tibetan Lama came over to me and we had a most enjoyable conversation about the Oneness of It All. I had the feeling that we were old friends. Wish I could remember more of what we spoke about! I woke up in a really pleasant and uplifting mood. Dream 2. I was in a house with my wife and her sister. I went upstairs and entered a bedroom, I went over to a chest of drawers and opened the top drawer. In the drawer were a number of esoteric books but before I could open one of the books a mystical man of Indian appearance appeared in front of me. So I was unable to check what the contents of the book/s were. We spoke for a while but I can't remember what was said. As for the meaning of your dream, as has already been said you'll have to probe deeper into the symbols that appeared in your dream. Spend time in meditation and all will be revealed.

Most often the dream carries multiple meanings. Dreams are so creative and provide us with excellent information about ourselves and our paths.

tribals dont have debt. that's the highest pinacle any society could ever dream to achieve.

Maybe the shovel has something to do with work. Work/dig hard and you will find the Buddha (within)! Or you can have the buddha (enlightenment..), but you have to have the shovel too (work for it). Cool dream!

Feeling that we belong to one divinity (we can call it Source, or God, or Toiletbrush), it is quite absurd to see that we/I are fighting ourself/ourselves. At the same time it seems that cruel shocks are needed to wake us up from that dream that we call reality.

I think in common parlance words like "truth" and "reality" will be used interchangeably because most peasants mean "phenomenal reality" when they say "reality." Most run of the mill people also consider phenomenal reality to be the ultimate reality at the same time, albeit unconsciously. So how your question should be answered will depend on perspective. From my perspective the answer to your question, since it pertains to the phenomenal contents of a dream, is truth, which is a reliable conceptual formation. Since the past is no longer taking place, there is no way it can be real by my definition of reality. So when you're a detective who is looking for what must have happened in the past, you're trying to piece together a backstory, basically. That kind of work is 100% dreamlike. Narrative construction and narrative validation. That's what dreaming is all about.

"Joyas Voladoras, " by Brian Doyle Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests. Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery- tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled. Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old. The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles. Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside. So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.