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No problem, but I never quoted from a Wikipedia page. Which page are you talking about? I am looking forward to reading your perspective on these topics Because I disagree with the idea that Kether should be considered 'the One'. My studies have led me to believe that Kether doesn't exist individually in Atziluth, it needs the tension through Binah and Chokmah in order to maintain itself. One reason Kether is considered so incomprehensible by Qabalists is because it is a gateway between the force of Ohr Ain Soph, and the form it's molded into by the Unmoved Mover called Ain Soph. There really isn't anything there besides the vortex of the tzimtzum before 'Kether' splits apart to further manifestation. All manifestation is the result of a Trinity. Otherwise Ain Soph's dream of Kether dissolves back into what I would more rightly consider 'the One' of Ohr Ain Soph (Limitless Light), and then back into the 'sleeping dreamer' Ain Soph (Unmoved Mover/Limitlessness/the One/Small Face/YHVH/etc.), and finally back to Ain (the NOT/Vast Face/). This idea explains the hermetic Axiom of Maria: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." I agree with this perspective, the motion of the Unmoved Mover/Unchanged Changer is always inwards.

I like the feather in the wind analogy. When we talk about Dao, its sort of like our waking conceptualised view of reality, it's ok and helpful to discuss it as a form of fun and perhaps further understanding in words. To be one with IT, as you hinted at, is to drop everything and just be. More like a dream state than waking reality. That's why it can never be spoken of, at that stage there are no words or any ideas to compare it to. It just flows, and you with it In this sense, thoughts are indistinguishable from Yin and Yang, whereas Dao comes before these forces arise. The state of just being in harmony with whatever may be. Floating like your feather on the breath of the wind.

I awoke from a dream yesterday... I was driving my car in a caravan of vehicles as we entered a tunnel. It was apparently a long tunnel, that got darker as we got deeper inside. It was unlit and so eventually it got pitch black. At this point, I quickly tried turning my headlights on...but they wouldn't turn on no matter what I did! So, here I was trying to follow a car ahead of me and avoid crashing into the walls - all at full speed...without being able to see a damned thing! I was basically left to "feel" or "sense" my way through with practically no external guidance. What do I mean by "sensing?" Just imagine careening through a dark tunnel at 70 mph and trying not to hit anything! Now, that's "sensing!" Well after several hairy seconds of blindly careening through this darkness, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel appeared. Somehow, I had made it out alive. I rolled down my window to check my sideview mirror for any damage and there were just 2 small scrapes. Fairly unscathed, whew. We then drove down into an underground area where we all parked and deboarded. And left on foot to explore some subterranean passageways... I interpret this dream as meaning that I will have to use "sensing" to progress through less visible and deeper paths I am at now...that may lead inside myself to my very core. That there are times when you must follow a path you cannot even see. And how to walk...an invisible path.

Hi new guy Perhaps that is because of the way Waite approached things generally? His writings seem long winded, convoluted, full of excessive verbiage , pompous, concealing ... As far as it being childish, I think that is in the artist's style and execution. She may have been prudish, but I do get that from Waite's writing as well , concealing ? ... especially the text. It is a great example of Victorian English gentleman's occultism (care to join me in the library for a gin and tonic while we discuss Wallis Budge ? ) One thing I have noticed about it. Many people seem to like the pictorial images on the small cards as it helps them to discern or associate a meaning ... a very specific meaning and a more 'fortune telling' type of meaning: "You are about to go on a journey, strife and contention with others, you will wake up from a bad dream, in dispair and think; "Whatever on earth was I thinking when I chose this horrible wallpaper ? " Which brings me to a whole big question about this I would like to open up What do 'youse guys' think about the difference between; Symbol interpretation and symbol association ? In the R W tarot deck ? (and , if you want to throw it in too; the difference in reading it makes with a deck that has a symbolic or abstract set of minor cards as opposed to ones like RW that depicts a specific scenic image ? )

I've been saving this story for several weeks now, until all the agitated energies of Christmas, New Year’s, the family gatherings and mini-feuds,… have all had a chance to subside. I've always found that in contrast, the space which reveals itself after all this ‘social dust’ has settled is a much quieter, clearer, more introspective place to be in. It’s mid January, the deepest part of winter. Everything in nature, all the plant world and most of our fellow animal inhabitants … are all conserving energy in slow, ‘tick-over’ mode. So, often my mind gets attracted to a different style of story – like the one below. It too, is slower. It was written at a time when the people’s view of the world and of human and societal relationships, were radically different than they are today. “A Pattern of Islands” was written almost exactly a hundred years ago, just before the First World War – the war which ended forever a world where half a dozen European imperialist countries battled each other to carve up virtually every country in the world into one of their empires. Today, few people are able to look back on that era without experiencing a 'slightly guilty' sense of shame. Yet from another, more detached, purely historical point of view, it was simply another phase of history no different than the Greek, Roman, Persian, or Ottoman Empires. Not intrinsically any more or less interesting than the times of Genghis Khan, or the settling of the American West or Australia, (both of which processes depended on first overpowering, then destroying, the native cultures which had lived in those areas for millenia beforehand). Nevertheless, despite the shocking cultural genocide our ancestors so freely engaged in, undeniably there was exactly the same range of people and personality types in those times as there are now. There were equally as many kind and highly admirable human beings out walking in the streets as there are now. They just happened to be born at a time when, one hundred years later, a future generation would heartily disapprove of them. Yet, can we who by chance find ourselves alive now in this ever-moving window of time, truly imagine ourselves to be free from the possibility of being held in a similar, (or even worse) regard by those who will be looking back at us a century further on ? Anyway, this an autobiographical story written by an exceptionally kind-hearted young man who happened to be born in the very last days of empire, and who went off to serve his country and fellow men in a post that turned out to be almost the embodiment of many people’s dreams: a cluster of remote, tropical, Polynesian islands. The book that these few opening chapters are taken from, I feel is an absolute gem. Simply by decoding the record left behind by Arthur Grimble’s words on paper, we are able to transport ourselves to a romantic world and time vastly different from our own – yet one which is seen through the eyes of a person who is surprisingly, not very far removed from our own nature. He too, was a fellow lover of humanity. * * * OLD MAN OF THE COLONIAL OFFICE I was nominated to a cadetship in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate at the end of 1913. The cult of the great god Jingo was as yet far from dead. Most English households of the day took it for granted that nobody could be always right, or ever quite right, except an Englishman. The Almighty was beyond doubt Anglo-Saxon, and the popular conception of Empire resultantly simple. Dominion over palm and pine (or whatever else happened to be noticeably far-flung) was the heaven-conferred privilege of the Bulldog Breed. Kipling had said so. The colonial possessions, as everyone so frankly called them, were properties to be administered, first and last, for the prestige of the little lazy isle where the trumpet-orchids blew. Kindly administered, naturally - nobody but the most frightful bounder could possibly question our sincerity about that - but firmly too, my boy, firmly too, lest the school-children of Empire forgot who were the prefects and who the fags. Your uncles – meaning every man Jack of your father's generation, uncle or not, who cared to take you by the ear - all said you'd never be a leader if you weakened on that point. It was terrifying, the way they put it, for Stalky represented their ideal of dauntless youth, and you loathed Stalky with his Company as much as you feared him; but you were a docile young man, and, as his devotees talked, you felt the seeds of your unworthiness sprouting into shameful view through every crack in your character. The Colonial Office spoke more guardedly than your uncles. It began by saying that, as a cadet officer, you were going to be on probation for three years. To win confirmation as a member of the permanent administrative staff, you would have to pass within that time certain field-examinations in law and native language. This seemed plain and fair enough, but then came the rider. I forget how it was conveyed, whether in print or by word of mouth; but the gist of it was that you could hardly hope to be taken on as a permanent officer unless, over and above getting through your examinations, you could manage to convince your official chiefs overseas that you possessed qualities of leadership. The abysmal question left haunting you was - did the Colonial Office mean leadership in the same sense as Kipling and your uncles? If it did, and if you were anything like me, you were scuppered. I was a tallish, pinkish, long-nosed young man, fantastically thin-legged and dolefully mild of manner. Nobody could conceivably have looked, sounded or felt less like a leader of any sort than I did at the age of twenty-five. Apart from my dislike of the genus Stalky, I think the only positive things about me were a consuming hunger for sea-travel and a disastrous determination to write sonnets. The sonnet-writing had been encouraged by Arthur Christopher Benson at Cambridge; the wanderlust had started to gnaw at my vitals at school, when I read that essay of Froude's, “England's Forgotten Worthies" - especially the part of it that pictured how Humphrey Gilbert met his end in the ten-ton "frigate" Squirrel, sitting abaft with a book in his hand, "giving signs of joy" to his fellow-adventurers in the Golden Hinde and roaring at them through the wild Atlantic gale that engulfed him, "We are as near heaven by sea as by land", so often as they approached within hearing. I tried at Cambridge to cram some of my feelings about that, and the sea's lure in general, into a sonnet of dubious form: She called them with the voices of far lands And with the flute-like whispering of reeds, With scents of coral where the tide recedes, With thunderous echoes of deserted strands. She babbled the barbaric lilt of tongues Heard brokenly in dreams; she strung the light Of swarthy-smouldering gems across the night; She wrung their hearts with haunting of strange songs. She witched them with her ancient sorceries And lo! they knew the terrible joy of ships Gone questing where the moon's last footstep is, And stars hold passionless converse overhead While mariners are drawn with writhen lips Down, down, deep down, among her voiceless dead. Arthur Benson was pained at the rhyme-pattern of the octave, but said the thing sounded sincere and showed promise. I was unwise enough to bring his kindly letter to the notice of some of my uncles. They only said he ought to have known better; after all, he had had every chance, dammit, as the son of an Archbishop ! So, Benson, as a moral prop, was out. But I had acquired at school and Cambridge some kind of competence at cricket and other sports, which kept them always hoping for the best. When I became, first secretary, and then, in the normal course, captain of my college cricket XI, they began to believe I really might be on my way to vertebrate life. But they could not have been more deeply mistaken. As secretary, I invariably took orders from the captain; as captain, I invariably took orders from the secretary, while the team invariably played the game as if neither of us was there. The worst of it was, I loved it. If ever I had previously entertained a notion that I might enjoy ordering people around, that experience certainly disabused me of it. The fear of being packed home from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in disgrace, after three years of probation, for having failed to become the kind of leader my uncles wanted me to be, began to give me nightmares. A moment came when I felt that the instant sack for some honest admission of my own ineptitude would be easier to bear than that long-drawn-out ignominy. In any case, I decided, someone at the top ought to be warned of my desperate resolve never to become like Stalky. It sounded rather fine, and lonely, and stubborn, put like that; but I fear I didn't live up to the height of it. I did, indeed, secure an interview at the Colonial Office, but my nearest approach to stubbornness with the quiet old gentleman who received me there was to confess, with a gulp in my throat, that the imaginary picture of myself in the act of meting out imperial kindness-but-firmness to anybody, anywhere in the world, made me sweat with shame. The quiet old gentleman was Mr. Johnson, a Chief Clerk in the department which handled the affairs of Fiji and the Western Pacific High Commission. That discreet title of his (abandoned today in favour of Principal and Secretary) gave no hint of the enormous penetrating Power of his official word. In the Western and Central Pacific alone, his modest whisper from behind the throne of authority had power to affect the destinies of scores of races in hundreds of islands scattered over millions of square miles of ocean. I was led to him on a bleak afternoon of February 1914, high up in the gloomy Downing Street warren that housed the whole Colonial Office staff of those days. The air of his cavernous room enfolded me with the chill of a mortuary as I entered. He was a spare little man with a tenuous sandy beard and heavily tufted eyebrows of the same colour. He stood before the fire, slightly bent in the middle like a monkey-nut, combing his beard with one fragile hand and elevating the tails of his cut-away coat with the other, as he listened to my story. I can see him still, considering me over his glasses with the owlish yet not unkindly stare of an undertaker considering a corpse. (Senior officials in the Colonial Office don't wear beards today, but they still cultivate that way of looking at you.) When I was done, he went on staring a bit; then he heaved a quiet sigh, ambled over to a bookcase, pottered there breathing hard for a long while (I think now he must have been laughing), and eventually hauled out a big atlas, which he carried to his desk. "Let us see, now," he murmured, settling into his chair, "let us see .. . yes . . . let us go on a voyage of discovery together. Where . . . precisely . . . are the Gilbert and Ellice Islands ? If you will believe me, I have often been curious to know." He started whipping over the pages of the atlas; I could do nothing but goggle at him while he pursued his humiliating research. "Ah !" he chirruped at last, "here we have them: five hundred miles of islands lost in the wide Pacific. Remote . . . I forbear, in tenderness for your feelings, from saying anything so Kiplingesque as far-flung. Do we agree to say remote and not far-flung ?" He cocked his wicked little eye at me. I made sounds in my throat, and he went on at once, "Remote . . . yes . . . and romantic . . . romantic ! Eastwards as far as ship can sail . . . up against the gateways of the dawn . . . coconut- palms, but of course ,not pines, ha-ha ! . . . the lagoon islands, the Line Islands, Stevenson's islands ! Do we accept palms, not pines ? Do we stake our lives on Stevenson, not Kipling? Do we insist upon the dominion of romance, not the romance of dominion ? I should appreciate your answer." I joyfully accepted Stevenson and ruled Kipling out (except, of course, for Puck of Pook's Hill and Kim, and the Long Trail, and others too numerous to mention) ; but my callowness squirmed shamefully at romance. He became suddenly acid at that: "Come, come! You owe perhaps more to your romanticism than you imagine - your appointment as a cadet, for example." The truth was, according to him, that I had been the only candidate to ask for the job in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. But for that . . . if, in fact, I had been up against the least competition . . . well . . . who could say ? As I, for one, could not, he leaned back in his chair and fired a final question at me: "I may take it, may I not, that, despite certain doubts which you entertain about the imperialism of Mr. Kipling and . . . hm. . . a great many of your betters, you still nurse your laudable wish to go to the Central Pacific ?" I replied yes, sir, certainly, sir, but how was I going to tackle this thing about leadership, sir. He peered at me incredulously, rose at once, and lifted his coat-tails again at the fire, as if I had chilled whatever it was. "I had imagined," he confided in a thin voice to the ceiling, "that I had already - and with considerable finesse - managed to put all that in its right perspective for this queer young man." "However," he continued, after a long and, to me, frightful silence, "let us dot our i's and cross our t's. The deplorable thing about your romanticism is that you display it as a halo around your own head. You seem to think that, when you arrive in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the entire population will forthwith stop work to stand with bated breath awaiting your apotheosis as a leader among them." The blend of venomous truth and ghastly unfairness in this bit deep into my young soul; I opened my mouth to protest, but he overrode me: "You permit me to proceed ? Thank you. Now, believe me, your egocentric surmise is grotesquely incorrect. You will encounter out there a number of busy men interested primarily in only one thing about you, namely, your ability to learn and obey orders. These will severely deplore any premature motion of your own to order them - or, in fact, anybody else - about. They will expect you to do as you are told – neither more nor less - and to do it intelligently. In the process of learning how to obey orders with intelligence and good cheer, you may, we hope, succeed in picking up some first, crude notions about the true nature of leadership. I say 'we hope' because that is the gamble we, in the Colonial Office, have taken on you. Kindly do your best to justify it." Though his tone had been as cutting as his words, the flicker of a smile had escaped once or twice, as if by permission, through his beard. I got the notion that the smiles meant, “You incredible young ass ! Can’t you see, this is the way round to put it to your uncles ?" But when I gave him back a timid grin, he asked me sharply why. I answered sheepishly that he had eased my mind, because truly, truly I didn't want to go ordering anybody round any more than he wanted me to. At that, his manner changed again to one of sprightly good humour. He began to tell me a whole lot of things about a cadet’s training in the field (or, at least, the training he thought I was destined to get in the Central Pacific) that nobody else had ever hinted at. As I understood the burden of it, it was that I would spend my first year or so of probation on Ocean Island, the administrative capital of the protectorate, where I would be passed from department to department of the public service to learn in successive order, from a series of rugged but benevolent Heads (all. of whom quite possibly harboured a hidden passion for the writings of R.L.S.), the basic functions of the Secretariat, the Treasury, the Magistrate's Court, the Customs, the Works Department, the Police, the post Office, and the prisons organization. I don't know what magic he used - he certainly never spoke above a chirp ; but he managed to make that arid list of departmental names roll from his lips like the shouting of golden trumpets upon my ear. I had a vision as he spoke: the halo he had mentioned burst into sudden glory around my head. . . . . . . It was dawn. I was hurrying, loaded with papers of the utmost import, through the corridors of a vast white office building set on an eminence above a sapphire ocean. I had been toiling all night with the Chief Secretary, the Treasurer, the Magistrate, the Collector of Customs, the Commissioner of Works, the Chief of Police, the Postmaster General, and the Keeper of the Prison. The job was done ! I had pulled them all through. Just in time ! There in the bay below lay a ship with steam up, waiting for final orders. I opened a door. A man with a face like a sword - my beloved Chief, the Resident Commissioner himself—sat tense and stern-eyed at his desk. His features softened swiftly as he saw me: "Ah . . . you, Grimble . . . at last !" He eagerly scanned my papers: "Good man . . . good man! It's all there. I knew I could trust you. 'Where shall I sign ? … God, how tired I am !" "Sign here, sir. . . I'll see to everything else … leave it all to me.'' My voice was very quiet, quiet but firm . . . … and remember this,"-broke in the voice of Mr. Johnson, "a cadet is a nonentity." The vision fled. The reedy voice persisted: "A cadet washes bottles for those who are themselves merely junior bottle-washers. Or so he should assess his own importance, pending his confirmation as a permanent officer." He must have seen something die in my face, for he added at once, "Not that this should unduly discourage you. All Civil Servants, of whatever seniority, are bottle-washers of one degree or another. They have to learn humility. Omar Khayyam doubtless had some over-ambitious official of his own epoch chiefly in mind when he wrote 'and think that, while thou art, thou art but what thou shalt be, NOTHING: thou shalt not be less.' Sane advice, especially for cadets ! Nevertheless, you would do well to behave, in the presence of your seniors, with considerably less contempt for high office than Omar seems to have felt. Your approach to your Resident Commissioner, for example, should preferably suggest the attitude of one who humbly aspires to 'pluck down, proud clod, the neck of God'." Who was I, to question the rightness of this advice? I certainly felt no disposition to do so then (I don't remember having felt any since) and, as he showed no further wish to pursue the topic, I passed to another that had been on my mind. A marriage had been arranged. My pay as a cadet would be £3oo a year, plus free furnished quarters. Did he think a young married couple could live passably well on that at Ocean Island ? I pulled out a written list of questions about the local cost of living. At the word "marriage" he started forward with a charming smile, light-stepping as a faun, whisked the paper from my hand, laid it on the mantelpiece, and turned back to face me: "Ah …romance . . . romance again," he breathed, "a young couple … hull-down on the trail of rapture . . . the islands of desire . . ' but there is method, too . . . let us look before we leap . . . the cost of living ! A businesslike approach. Very proper. Well. . . now. . . hmm . . . yes . . . my personal conjecture is that you should find the emoluments adequate for your needs, provided always, of course, that you neither jointly nor severally acquire the habit of consuming vast daily quantities of champagne and caviar. Remember, for the rest . . . in your wilderness . . . how the ravens fed Elijah . . . or was it Elisha ?" And that was that about the cost of living. I was too timid to recover my list from the mantelpiece. Thus finally primed in the Colonial Office for exploding as a bottle-washer upon the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, I sailed with Olivia from England on March 6th, 1914. PACIFIC TRAMP We reached Australia in a liner designed for the delight of passengers; we wallowed out of Sydney harbour, towards the end of April, in a craft of more romantic dedication. She was Burns, Philp and Company's steamship Moresby, a typical Pacific tramp of those days - 1,3oo tons register, thirty-three years old, but still A1 at Lloyd's and still game to plug her stinking way at the rate of six knots through any weather to any palm-green shore where pearl-shell or beche-de-mer, shark-fins or copra were to be picked up. By the time we met her, her battered hull, surviving god-knows-how-many hurricanes at sea and casualties by reef or shoal, had puffed with unconquerable patience across three-quarters of a million miles of empty ocean (by the captain's reckoning) and pushed its grimy nose through every remotest archipelago of the Pacific. The captain, a minute Cockney as way-worn but steadfast as his ship, would talk to us for hours about her achievements, his brown eyes tender with love; but the chief of all her virtues for him was her iron hull. "Look at those lovely plates!" he would exclaim, pointing to the incredibly buckled decks, "all bent to hell, but not a leak in 'em anywhere! Because why? They're beautiful soft iron, not this-here cheap steel. She can knock her way into lagoons through horse's heads-and coral mushrooms . . . crack-crack, like that, port and starboard, the dear old what-not, just taking a few more dunts in her old bottom but never springing a blanky leak anywhere." A sweet old lady she was, he always finished up, a sweet old lady. She must have been, in her fashion, for the memory of her still tugs somehow at my heart; but she had not been designed for the comfort of landlubbers like us, nor had her business occasions sweetened the smell of her for our kind of noses. She reeked of dead shark, putrid oyster and rancid copra from stem to stern of her aged body, and the ruinous wooden hutch on the forward well-deck where we tried to sleep was undoubtedly the chief concentrating-point of all her odours. Then, too, there were the cockroaches. Those three-and-a-half-inch monsters, fattened on the oily refuse that clotted every crevice of the holds, swarmed up at night into our bunks, looking for a change of diet. Pacific cockroaches eat feet. They would willingly devour any other exposed part of the human body, for that matter, if one let them; but the tickle of a dozen or so on a hand or face usually wakes a sleeper before they can get down to a meal. A foot, though, is a different proposition; the thick skin on the sole is insensitive, and the victim feels nothing until they have gnawed that down to the quick. When he does wake, the ball and heel have been stripped pink, and he hobbles for the next week or so, to the exquisite enjoyment of all true sailormen and shell-backs. I know, because it happened to me in the Moresby. It was then that I heard for the first time that side-splitting joke, so gloatingly reiterated by shell-backs for the comfort of greenhorns: "Take it easy, son: it's only the first ten years in the islands that's hell !" We did learn later to accept cockroaches as domestic pets (or almost) for, in the Gilbert Islands, whenever foul weather threatened, whole rustling clouds of them would come flying into the house for refuge. Once lodged, they stayed for weeks; so we decided at last to count them in as an essential ingredient of Pacific romance - it was either that, or die of daily horror – and our only incurable pedantry about them in the long run was to keep them, if or when possible, out of the soup. It was fortunate, nevertheless, that we did not reach this stage of civilization in the Moresby, because, but for our first maniac terror of the brutes, we might never have slept on deck. The captain had strong ideas about the propriety of such a thing for a young woman. Nothing but our most haggard entreaties persuaded him to let us, at last, drag our mattresses up to the boat-deck amidships. Once we were there, however, he gave us a tarpaulin sheet for extra cover against rain squalls. We needed it a lot at first, but the weather cleared as we slid past the Santa Cruz group; and then we found out what it was to lie at night overleaned by nothing but a firmament of flaming stars - for the tropic stars did fame for us, just as the travel books had promised. The nights were amethyst clear and cool. Eddies of warm air, loaded with earth scents and jungle dreams from islands beyond sight, enmeshed us and were gone again. The swing of the old ship was so quiet, she seemed to be poised moveless while the stars themselves were rocking to the croon of the bow-wave, back and forth above her mastheads, as we lay tranced with watching. There were Gilbertese deck-hands in the crew, copper-skinned boys, thick muscled and short in the leg but as active as cats in the rigging. They were shy with strangers, stern-featured and remote-looking when they worked alone. We thought them dour folk until we saw them get together. That was somewhere on the edge of the tropics, when the trousers and jerseys that had veiled the glorious moulding of their bodies had been discarded for the belted waist-cloths, trimmed to the knee, of ordinary island wear. They had been called to the forecastle-head to heave an anchor inboard for cleaning. We saw them cluster in silence, a group of bronze statues by the cat-heads, while the boatswain's mate, an Ocean Islander, interpreted the first mate's talk. There was hardly a move and never the hint of a smile among them until the officer walked away. We wondered why he had left them standing so unresponsive there; but "you watch 'em" said the captain. Magically, as he spoke, the tough masks relaxed and were turned with grins towards one man of their number - not their official leader, the boatswain's mate, but a massive, towering fellow, who still stood utterly smileless. The captain said he was their licensed wag: it was up to him and nobody else on board to start things humming. He had his joke all ready cooked up behind those brooding eyes. It was a crack, as we heard later, of the most joyous ribaldry about the ancestry of anchors; he delivered himself of it in a high feminine shriek, tottering towards the side in perfect simulation of senility. The air suddenly rang with answering laughter; the crew leapt alive; the anchor came aboard in no time to the accompaniment of hoots and horse-play. When the job was finished, they stood around holding hands and chattering for a while, to look at what they had done, like satisfied children or artists well pleased with their handiwork. Then, one by one, they drifted off to their separate tasks, each wrapped again in the cloak of his austere silence. One evening, we heard them singing on the forecastle-head. We could make out, from where we listened, a circle of sitting shapes, their torsos stippled in black against the night sky. Their heads and shoulders were bowed, their voices muted; the queer inflections of their chant were cadenced, even for our alien ears, with grief beyond bearing. We knew it could not be one of the ancient island sagas of war or wonder-voyage that we had read about. We were to hear many of those later, triumphally intoned, in the packed meeting-houses of the Gilberts; but this was a new song and a sad song made by one of the crew for love of his cruel lady. I got the words of it from Teburea, the boatswain's mate, before we left the ship. He wrote them down for me and I still have the paper; here is the ungarnished translation of them: I am sore-hearted for you, Do not make me kill myself How great is my frustration Because you give me no reward! I am sad, I am sad, But I can hide my sadness from you, If you will only say that one day Perhaps I shall have my reward. Teburea told me that the suffering poet could not, for shame of seeming boastful, himself join in the singing. His part was to teach his song to friends who loved him, and sit weeping in their circle while they sang it for him. They too wept as they sang, Teburea said, because they knew their tears would make their friend a little happy, and because the words were very beautiful, and because all of them were sick for their own sweethearts, over there across the sea to eastward. Or perhaps, if they were not sick for sweethearts, they wanted to see their father and mother again. "Me sick, too, for my old man," Teburea finished simply (I know now that he meant his adoptive grandfather), "he love me too much; me love him too much, too," and walked away. It began to dawn on me then that, beyond the teeming romance that lies in the differences between men - the diversity of their homes, the multitude of their ways of life, the dividing strangeness of their faces and tongues, the thousand-fold mysteries of their origins - there lies the still profounder romance of their kinship with each other, a kinship that springs from the immutable constancy of man's need to share laughter and friendship, poetry and love in common. A man may travel a long road, and suffer much loneliness, before he makes that discovery. Some, groping along dark byways, never have the good fortune to stumble upon it. But I was luckier than most. The islands I had chosen blindly, for the only reason that they were romantically remote, were peopled by a race who, despite the old savagery of their wars and the grimness born of their endless battle with the sea, were princes in laughter and friendship, poetry and love. Something in the simple way Teburea had spoken of that love song and the singing of it gave me a sudden inkling of things to come. I felt in my bones I was going to a place that, for all its remoteness, would prove to be no strange land for me. ISLAND OF DUST AND DREAMS We raised Ocean Island, via Solomon Island ports, on the morning of our seventeenth day out of Sydney. It was one of those burning days of the doldrums, when the sea is glassy but not still. The solemn swells that came pulsing up out of the south were unruffled by any breath of wind, but the huge heave of them told of storms far away. The ship swung dizzily from valley to burnished mountain-crest and back again to shining valley as she laboured her way up to the island. We heard the boom of the breakers from miles offshore as they crashed upon the reef. It was a sound new to our ears, a note of majesty once heard, forever remembered. It seemed unbelievable that the sweep of that thunderous attack could fail to engulf the tiny lump of land - not 2,ooo acres of it in all - so forlornly crouched between the vastitudes of sky and sea. The shudder of Ocean Island's narrow reef to the shock of the surf is familiar to people who live there. The old fishermen who used to dwell in the waterside villages would whisper to each other, when they felt it, "Behold, Tabakea moves a little !" Tabakea was the great turtle at the bottom of the sea, who balanced on his back the thin column of rock that carried their home like a coral mushroom-head on its top. One day, they believed, Tabakea would move too much, and Baanaba (The Rock-Land - that was their name for it) would topple over and be engulfed in the roaring waters. But the thought did not trouble them mightily, for they knew that their hero ancestor, the far-voyager, the all-conquering warrior and lover, Au-of-the-Rising-Sun, who had pinned Tabakea down when his people had made the place their home, would see them safely through the end. Every new dawn was his repeated guarantee of that. So, when someone whispered, "Tabakea moves a little", it was enough to answer, "The Sun rises !" for everyone to be comforted again. And, awaiting the end, they treated the imprisoned giant as a friend and helper, as was only proper, because he too was an ancestor; the Turtle had been the god of the men whom the People of Au had overwhelmed, and so also the god of their widows and daughters. These had been taken to wife by the womanless invading horde for the raising of a new stock on Baanaba. But their subjection had not made them false to the faith of their fathers; their constancy saw to it that the children they bore to the invaders should inherit the cult of the Turtle not less than the cult of the conquering Sun-hero. Though Au remained the triumphant Lord of Heaven (Tau-karawa, the Holder-of-the-Skies), Tabakea sidled his way through the nurseries at sea-level, so to speak, into the daily life of the people. He became Tau-marawa, the Holder-of-the-Ocean. It was to him that the new generation turned to Pray for good fishing, and, above all, for safe goings and comings through the dangers of Baanaba's terrible reef. The fishermen's notion that the land was perched on a column of rock was not so very wide of the truth. Ocean Island is nothing but the tip of a vast pinnacle upthrust out of the depths. At two cables' lengths out from the reef in Home Bay, there is a little ledge a hundred fathoms down, over which ships can- tie up in fine weather to colossal buoys that carry the world's deepest moorings. Only a bare half-dozen cables' lengths farther to seaward, the bottom has plunged to nearly two thousand fathoms. In other words, the hundred-fathom mooring-ground is a mere niche by the pinnacle's crest, chipped out of a two-mile precipice that soars almost sheer from the ocean's abysses. It may be not even a niche, but a cornice of reef-coral overhanging the black deeps. If that be so, it follows that the island's cliffs have slipped six hundred feet lower today than once they stood, for the polyp that builds reef-coral is a creature of the light - its extreme living depth is within one hundred and twenty feet of the surface. It is sure, it any case, that the towering pinnacle has been the plaything of vast movements in the ocean's depths. Aeons ago, its crest must have lain under water, yet just near enough to the top for the reef-building polyps to live there, for it was capped in that age with a platform of coral rock. Perhaps, when the reef broke surface after countless centuries of growth, the grinding of the surf for countless further centuries of disintegration formed a bank of coral sand upon it; or perhaps there was simply a sudden upheaval of the peak to tremendous heights above the sea. Whichever it was, that solitary perch in the midst of the mighty waters became the sanctuary of unnumbered sea birds. There were so many of them, and they stayed for so long, that their droppings covered the coral platform with a bed of guano forty feet deep and tens of millions of tons heavy. That was the age of birds; it was ended by a subsidence; the island disappeared, and the age of fishes began. One relic that remains for man out of the era of engulfment is the fossil tooth of a shark so enormous that a motor lorry could be driven through its reconstructed jaws. The heaped bird-droppings, overlaid by the rich refuse of the depths, suffered a sea-change from guano into phosphate of lime. Then again the ocean's bed was convulsed, and the coral platform with its load of precious phosphate was pushed three hundred feet above the water. It did not sink again. Now generations of polyps got to work to build a cornice of reef around the island's foot; birds flew in from places afar bearing seeds in their feathers; the land was covered in scrub that rotted, and grew, and rotted again, to form a topsoil of black earth; a forest of great calophyllum trees appeared on the heights. Maybe it was not so very many millions of years after the last upheaval that seafaring men - the People of Tabakea, the People of Au, and who knows what other land-hungry swarms before them - arrived and built their villages above the south-west facing bay. Only a few score centuries more were to pass from then until the Pacific Islands Trading Company, scouring the archipelagos for cargoes of guano, chanced upon the vast deposit saved on Ocean Island out of the gulfs of time. The Company, never a very rich concern, was tottering towards financial collapse in the late eighteen-nineties. Its old ship, the Ocean Queen, sailing out of Melbourne, Australia, had helped to rake all the known guano-islands of the Western Pacific clean of their deposits by that time; persistent search had failed to discover any worthwhile new sources; a day came when the directors knew that a single speculative voyage would probably land them in the bankruptcy court. They decided to go out of business before worse happened. It was a bleak look-out for everyone at the table. They called in young Albert Ellis, the super-cargo of the Ocean Queen, and broke the gloomy news to him. But Albert had a bright bee in his bonnet. Their sad looks only made it buzz the louder. "'Wait a minute ... wait a minute !" he shouted, dashed out of the room and returned at a run carrying in his hand a queer-looking chunk of putty-coloured rock. Everyone recognized it. He had used it for several years to prop open the door of his office. "This," he said, "was given me by a friend, who picked it up at Ocean Island. I believe. . . ." "Yes, yes," they cut him short wearily, "you needn't go on." He had said the same thing before, a dozen, a hundred times. He believed the rock might have phosphate of lime in it. But they believed otherwise. They were so certain he was wrong, nobody had ever even thought of having the thing analysed. They scoffed at his plea for an analysis now, at the eleventh hour. "Fortune doesn't play fairy-godmother tricks these days, boy," they said: "Now drop it and hop it." But he was not to be put off this time. He could ill afford to pay for an analysis himself, but he rode his hunch and took the rock to an expert. A week or so later, he stalked into the directors' room again and reported what he had done. "I'm not asking for a refund of the fee," he told the astonished board, "because I think you're going to raise my pay quite soon." "My poor boy," answered the fatherly managing director, "you shall certainly have your money back. Foolish as you were, you acted in our interests and you shan't lose by it. But we can't raise your pay. The firm is closing down." "Oh-no-it's-not!" shouted the irrepressible Albert. "You just take a look at this report," and slapped the paper on the table. The analyst had recorded a ninety per cent phosphoric acid reaction to his tests. The rock was made of the purest phosphate of lime yet discovered in a natural state by man. On the strength of that report, a Melbourne bank granted an overdraft that enabled the Company to send the Ocean Queen prospecting up to Ocean Island. She returned, her holds crammed with the putty-coloured rock, bought piecemeal from the Baanabans in exchange for tobacco, beads, knives, prints, and calico. The profits from this first yield paid for a better-fitted second voyage; and so on; the business never looked back. The Pacific Islands Trading Company became the millionaire Pacific Phosphate Company; this, in its turn, was converted into the British Phosphate Company, which again, a few years later, became the British Phosphate Commissioners, a nationalized industry owned jointly by the governments of Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Albert Ellis finished his career as Sir Albert, a Knight of the Order of the British Empire and Phosphate Commissioner for New Zealand. The romance of the Company, however, was far from being the first point to strike us as the old Moresby brought us lurching into Home Bay. What stood out initially was a dreadful, corrugated-iron factory building above the water-front, from which enormous clouds of dust were being thrown sky-high. It was the crushing-mill of the Company, busy pulverizing its daily quota of a thousand tom of phosphate rock for the export market. The dust it flung up drifted heavily down the still air, to load all the greenery of the island's flank with a grey pall. Its belchings seemed to us as grossly out of place as a series of eructations in the face of the infinite. Yet the major impertinence was ours; the unmannerly monster we saw before us was helping to keep a million acres of pasture-land green in Australia and New Zealand; and, but for its disfiguring industry on Ocean Island, there would have been little enough revenue to maintain services for the thirty thousand Gilbertese and Ellice folk who lived by their bright lagoons in the atolls to east and south. But, though the first shock of our disappointment was tempered by no such mature reflections, we did not have to stand nursing our peevishness for long; a boat was riding the mighty procession of swells a mile offshore, awaiting our arrival. The ship swung to give it a lee, and Methven came aboard. Stuartson Collard Methven was the Officer-in-Charge of Police, Ocean Island. It was not his business, as such, to board ships for the Customs, or the Post Office, or anybody else. But there were Ellice Islanders in the police force, and no race in that ocean of sea-princes ever produced a more superb breed of surf-riders than theirs. So it was a hand-picked crew of Ellice Island policemen who manned the Government's boat for every purpose, and where they went Methven went too, in whatever weather. That is the sort of man he really was; he and his wife Ruby were to be our very dear friends a little later; but he was not actually bursting with bonhomie that day. The mails from the Moresby were, of course, worth coming our for, but the idea of hoiking ashore a curio called a cadet – a phenomenon until then most happily unknown in the Central Pacific - and his wife (heaven pity her whoever she might be), and their frightful luggage scratching the boat's beautiful paintwork to hell . . . well, I ask you, he said. We know he said it, because Ruby told us so in due course, and anyhow, we saw it sticking out of every angular Scottish inch of his six-foot-three, as he walked up to us like a one-man procession in resplendent ducks. "I am Methven," he opened, and added after a pause, "the Police Officer," with the courteous grimness of an executioner announcing his functions. "If you are the new What's-It from England, I'm to take you ashore, Will you please introduce me to your wife, . . . Thank you. . . . And is that your dunnage down there?" When I explained that there was still a big box to come from the baggage room, he exclaimed, "Oh, my God !" in a high, shaken whisper, and walked away to give some orders. On his return, he said, "I suppose you've seen to the Way Bill," and when I asked what the Way Bill was, he whispered "Oh, my God !" again, falsetto, but allowed me to gather that the thing was a kind of receipt for the mails, which I should have saved him the trouble of signing. So I went and did it at once, and that was my very first official gesture in the service of His Majesty overseas. I felt the job had been done with considerable éclat until Methven asked me if I had counted the mail-bags I had signed for. When I said I hadn't, he exclaimed "Oh, my God !" yet again, but this time on a bass note strangled with suffering. The top end of a Jacob's ladder hung over a ship's side is the only part of it made fast to anything. It follows that, when the ship rolls towards that side, the bottom end swings gaily out over the depths, only to crash back against the plates when the roll is reversed. The terror of the landsman at the bottom end is the greater or less in proportion to the extravagance of the rolling. Olivia was near the bottom when the prize-winning outward swing happened. The accompanying downward plunge caused an uprush of air beneath her skirts which lifted them over her head. Skirts were worn voluminous in those days; Olivia's got so firmly entangled with her hat that the downward draught caused by the following upward rush failed to dislodge them. She groped her way blind after that, through a series of sick swings and crashes, until her questing feet found no more steps to step upon, and she was left dangling in the void by her hands only, for somebody to do something about. It was Methven who did it. He grabbed at one of her wild legs as they swung out at him, and gave a good strong jerk. She came apart from the ladder like plucked fruit, and hurtled down upon him. I saw him crumple under the impact and collapse beneath her in the stern sheets. His only remark when I got into the boat was that women ought to be careful to wear bloomers for occasions of that sort in the Pacific. I agreed with him cravenly. Olivia either did not hear him or was past caring, for she was being sick into the deep blue waters. The swells got steeper where the bottom rose towards the reef. As their racing slopes snatched up our stern and tossed it high, the oarsmen fought to keep pace with the forward 'scend of them, and the boat drove on, impossibly tilted, into valleys that forever fed away from under the plunging bows. But the bronze giant at the steer-oar stood easily poised on the tiny locker-deck behind us. His bare feet braced against the gunwales, he swung in lovely rhythm to the heave and thrust of the seas upon his oar, and sang aloud for the joy of his mastery as he brought the boat swooping like a gull towards the boat harbour. His voice cut across the crashing diapason of the surf with the gay challenge of a clarion. When we came to the very edge of the reef - so near it seemed nothing could stop our onrush into the maelstrom - he called of a sudden, "Easy !" The crew lay on their oars and waited. The passage into the boat harbour, a narrow channel blasted through the reef was a few lengths ahead, its entrance wide open to the giant seas. The lesser surfs were breaking short of the entrance, and the back-suck from the brimming basin - we could hear it snarling - fought their furious invasion to make a hell's cauldron of the passage. No boat could live in that raging battle of waters. The only safe way in was to ride on the crest of a wave so big that it would sweep the boat well down the passage before being undercut by the back-suck. We lay rearing and plunging while the steersman picked his wave. It came, house-high: "Pull !" he yelled as its forefoot lifted the stern. 'We shot forward; the crest swung us towering; the crew spent their last ounce of strength to hold it; we held it – we were riding Leviathan - we were flying - we were halfway down the passage. The crest began to topple and foam overside. The wave hollowed itself for breaking, and the boat's nose was pushed out into the void over its forefoot. There was a sizzling downward rush through ruin as it collapsed; the sea came boiling in over the gunwales ; the life went out of the boat; we were labouring, half waterlogged. But we were safe in the still water of the boat harbour. Methven had sat bolt upright through all this, with a look of petrified correctitude upon his countenance. It somehow emanated from his total silence that the people of his clan regarded the demeanour of a royal mummy as the only proper one to adopt in the presence of the sea's contemptible nonsenses. Nevertheless, we supposed he actually had noticed something a bit out of the ordinary that day, because he did turn to the happily smiling steersman and murmur, "Nice work, Sergeant Kaipati, very nice indeed !" before we tottered up the steps of the boat jetty. From the boat jetty we climbed again, up the steep incline of a narrow-gauge cable-way which handled all the Company's imports in those times. The first terrace in the island's westward slopes was at the top. There stood the Company's trade-store and office. Strung out farther to the left, above the curve of Home Bay, were the electric power house, the machine shop, the crushing mills, the drying plant, the cold storage works, and the locations of the thousand or so Gilbert Islanders, Ellice Islanders and Japanese who worked under indenture as mechanics or boatmen, carpenters or miners for the Company. The bungalows of the European staff -forty or fifty of them maybe - straggled up the hillside above, pleasantly scattered among trees. But along the fragrant quarter-mile of factory buildings and workshops, hardly a green thing was to be seen. We passed through the brazen heat and clamour of it ridiculously perched upon minute flat-cars furnished with benches far too high for safety. These were pushed by poles in the manner of punts - but at breakneck speed - along a narrow-gauge railway line. The benches were built to suit the length of Methven's legs, but not ours. He was propelled ahead of us alone, sitting purchased by his heels, whatsoever the angle or velocity of his car, as firm and majestic as a monument of Caledonia. We rocketed after him together, legs flying, and clutching at each other despairingly for lack of any other hold. Fat, apricot-coloured children near the line laughed with delight as we went whizzing by. I mention the journey because it was the occasion of my first considered resolve upon a matter of dignity in the service of His Majesty. I decided that, if it was given me to survive, I would have the height of at least one bench lowered, so as to accommodate it to the length of my own particular legs, not Methven's. But the pace slowed as we took the slight gradient beyond the locations; suddenly, too, we were out of the torrid glare and running in the latticed shade of palms. The din of machinery was magically snuffed out as we rounded a bend; the dwellings of a Baanaban village over-arched by palms came in sight on the seaward slopes below us. We caught glimpses, through twined shadow and sunlight, of crimson and cream hibiscus, of thatches raised on corner-posts, of neatly matted floors beneath them, of bronze bodies in brightly coloured loin-cloths. We heard the chatter of laughing women and the shouts of children across a murmur of surf that rose muted through the trees. Scents of gardenia and frangipani floated up to us mixed with savours of cooking. The grim civilisation of Home Bay lay forgotten, as though a thousand miles away. The village was gone again in half a minute, but its spell stayed with us. We felt we had passed, in that flash of time, through a miraculous gateway opened for us into the real, the homely heart of the Pacific. We reached the government siding and got down from our cars. A hundred yards up-hill from there, we came upon a squalid-looking wooden bungalow, without side-verandahs, perched among rocks. The rear edge of its floor squatted up against the hillside; the front edge was propped, visibly sagging, on concrete stilts. Part of the space between the stilts had been boxed in, and the hutch so formed, said Methven, was the Post Office. On the top side of the floor were all the other offices of the Headquarters Administration of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate, a total of three rooms. A typewriter had been installed in one of them. Nobody yet knew how to use it. It awaited introduction to me, but the pleasure would have to be delayed until Monday, as this was Saturday afternoon. So this was the vast white office building with corridors, etcetera, of my vision in London. But no - Methven must be pulling my leg. How could all those departments that Mr. Johnson had reeled off -the Secretariat, the Magistracy, the Treasury, the Customs, the Public Works, the Police Administration, the Prisons organization, not to speak of the Resident Commissioner's personal group of Secretaries and so forth – I mean to say, I said how could so many senior officers with their senior assistants, their junior assistants and all their respective clerical staff possibly be crowded together into three little rooms ? It clearly pleased Methven to answer that one. This wasn't a rabbit-warren like the Colonial Office, he explained. People worked here. There was first the Old Man (in other words, the Resident Commissioner) who operated as his own Chief Secretary, Private Secretary, District Officer and Magistrate, except, of course, when his wife interfered. The Secretariat, as I had called it, consisted of a Clerk. Presumably, when I spoke of the Treasurer, I meant the Accountant, who comprised the entire financial personnel, besides being the Postmaster General, the Collector of Customs, the staff of Landing Waiters, the Immigration Officer, and what-not-else of the kind. That made three Europeans, then came himself: he, as Police Officer, was in charge of the Prisons too, and, as the prisons supplied a labour force, it followed that he also functioned as Superintendent of Public Works, Chief Sanitary Inspector, Conservator of the Water Supply, and manager of about a million other things that pertained to the upkeep and welfare of the government station. Fifth, there was myself who (as everybody hoped) would be fairly divided between all of them from the word go, and not merely collared as a private slave by the Old Man. I gathered from his tone that there was a good deal of local feeling about that. We learned, further, as we trudged past the Police Barracks and Prison, up the steep mile to the Residency, that the rest of the Protectorate's European staff consisted of a doctor employed on Ocean Island by the Company, but subsidized by the Government for public health duties; another doctor in charge of a government hospital in Tarawa, 25o miles to eastward; and four District Officers scattered singly, at distances ranging from three to five hundred miles away from us, up and down the chain of the Gilbert and Ellice groups. It came to me then that, however else we might be maintaining dominion over palm and pine in this particular corner of the Empire, we certainly were not doing it by weight of numbers. This, in some strange way, easily compensated for the loss of my dream-office teeming with busy bureaucrats. And, besides, there was the music of the lovely island-names that had rolled from Methven's tongue -Butaritari, Tarawa, Abemama, Funafuti - Abemama above all, where Stevenson had lived a while and written. I mentioned his piece on the Gilbert Islands to Methven; "Never seen it," he replied (Oh, sprightly shade of Mr. Johnson !). "Here's the cricket field and there's the Residency straight ahead." 'We had reached an open plateau overlooking the tremendous emptiness of the ocean to South and West. The northern edge of the cricket ground lay cool beneath a green bank fringed with coconut-palms. Behind the palms stood the Residency, a pleasant white bungalow, backed by a towering forest of calophyllum trees. A slim white-clad figure was waiting for us at the top of the broad front steps. "That's the Old Man," said Methven: "he won't ask you to tea. Come and have some with us when he's finished with you." His voice was warm of a sudden, but he left us to go forward alone. OLD MAN OF OCEAN ISLAND Edward Carlyon Eliot, the Resident Commissioner, was struggling at the time of our arrival to improve the conditions that governed the mining of phosphate on Ocean Island. His aims were to secure for the Baanaban villagers an increase of the tonnage-royalties paid into a trust fund for their phosphate and to set up guards against the premature encroachment of the diggings upon their villages. He won his fight eventually in the teeth of much official misunderstanding. Fifteen years later, as Resident Commissioner myself, I was called to add a little to the foundations he had laid, and others added more after me. But it was mainly due to his courage and foresight between 1913 and 1920 that the Baanabans of 1945 found themselves in a position to buy an exquisite new home for themselves in the Fiji group and to migrate there in their own good time. I was greatly fortunate to have him as my first chief, for he was a personification of the protective spirit which did inspire the best servants of autocracy with benevolence in the field, whatever may be said today about the system of their allegiance. He was healthy for me in another way, too, though the pleasure of it was at the time not so obvious. The prospect of having a cadet to lick into shape did not entrance him. There were reasons for this. His parents had not been rich and, as a youth, he had been obliged to forgo for the sake of a brilliant elder brother in the Diplomatic Service a number of things that it hurt him to miss, including his hope of a university education. I never heard him complain of it, but the handicaps he had suffered and the very success with which he had overcome them had affected his attitude towards beginners. He had started his own official career, while still in his teens, as a clerk of the fifth grade in the civil service of a Caribbean colony. From that "back-stairs entrance to the Colonial Administrative Service," as he bitterly chose to call it, he had fought his way up by the time he was forty-one to be Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. His achievement had shown him that a university degree was by no means an essential preliminary to getting on in his profession, which was all to the good; but it had also left him with a basic contempt for beginnings less difficult than his own. His generosity, so ready in other directions, was not predisposed in favour of young men like myself, who came out from Downing Street (so he said) with reach-me-down official futures all ready packed in our suitcases. Another neat thing he used to shoot off about my species was that we thought we had been despatched across the starlit foam with special warrants in our pockets to dispense celestial wisdom direct from the Colonial Office to the benighted inhabitants of the Empire. As a matter of fact, there was a good deal more in this than an ironic twist of phrase. We were not at that time sent out trained in advance for liaison-work in the field, as cadets are trained today. Nor were the senior administrative officers in the Colonies who had themselves started as cadets always careful to bludgeon us into habits of co-operation with other departments. On the contrary. The result was the spread of a poisonous kind of snobbery throughout the administrative branch, which encouraged its members, young and old, to regard themselves as unquestionably superior, clay for clay, to the members of other branches. The internal frictions engendered by this attitude militated heavily against the effectiveness of inter-departmental collaboration in the field, often to the incalculable cost of colonial populations. A good many years were to pass before a system of pre-service training designed to avoid these evils came into being. But pending that kind of improvement from the Downing Street end, my Resident Commissioner was certainly taking no chances with the likes of me. He did not, of course, cram everything down my throat at our first talk; nor, as far as I know, had he any prepared series of deflationary utterances laid up in pickle for my education over the weeks and months to come. He proceeded, rather, by the catastrophic method. His most instructive sallies - I mean the ones that sank in deepest - always leapt out of him impromptu under the goad of my many stupidities. Nevertheless, he did give me quite an insight into his feelings on the day of our arrival. While Mrs. Eliot talked to Olivia on the front verandah, he took me into his office and sat me before his desk. He was a neat, slim man of medium height with the very black hair and rather Phoenician features one sometimes sees in Cornwall. His slightly close-set dark eyes, overhung by thick, straight brows that almost met above the narrow nose, were as watchful and veiled as a poker player's. He had a habit of twitching his toothbrush moustache and sniffing twice, staccato, from time to time as he examined people or things. Going with his saturnine looks, it always struck me as strangely sinister. I remember he asked me first if I played cricket. When I said I liked it, he replied, "'Well, that's one good thing, anyhow !" in a way that left me wondering what next. I did not have to conjecture long. He went on, with irritation in his voice, "You know, Grimble, you ought not to have been sent here really. This isn't the sort of place for a cadet. I didn't ask the Colonial Office for one. I asked for an experienced man - someone who knew about men and affairs." There wasn't much I could say to that. I sat sweating while he gave me his ideas about the right man for the job. What he wanted was someone who had knocked around . . . not an official . . . preferably a fellow who had done a bit of trading and planting somewhere. A sahib, naturally . . . right kind of breeding, right kind of school . . . all that. But definitely not a cub from a university. Above all, not a heaven-born selection from the Colonial Office. I forget what I replied to this (if anything), but I recollect asking him if I could get lessons in Gilbertese from someone on the island, and the request seemed to brighten him for a little. He said the Government would pay the official interpreter to teach me. He turned gloomy again, though, in the course of wondering how the Colonial Office thought he was going to train me in other ways. He supposed he would have to take me to sessions of the Magistrate's Court and the Native Court, for one thing; and then I could learn a bit about correspondence from the clerk at head office, and book-keeping from the accountant, and police and prisons stuff from Methven, and so forth and so on. They could doubtless teach me a few odds and ends not yet revealed to either Cambridge or the Colonial Office; and outside the Government staff there were, of course, plenty of other people on the island aching to teach me what was truly what. I remember that his last words gave me another of those sudden visions I used to get. It was not as sanguine as the one I had had with Mr. Johnson. I saw myself standing (for some peculiar reason) on the sun-smitten railway line above the crushing mills, hemmed in by a circle of Company's men with hairy forearms and noble looks enhanced by the walrus moustaches of my uncles. They held themselves erect in silence, arms folded, looking at me with contempt in their eyes for my gross ignorance of everything a real man should know. As a matter of fact, I could not have been more mistaken about the Company's staff. Olivia and I were to find out almost at once that our ignorance could not have fallen among friendlier neighbours; only the vision was depressing in its moment. But for all that, there was a lot of comfort, too, in what Mr. Eliot had said. He obviously had no ambition to collar me as his private slave; I wasn't to suffer the strain of continuous proximity to the deity, and there wasn't going to be any fighting over my body. What with the relief of this thought, plus the fulfilment of Mr. Johnson's promise that I would start off as a washer of bottles for bottle-washers, plus the happy spell our first sight of a Baanaban village had laid upon both of us, I left the Residency reflectively, perhaps, and somehow not game to tell Olivia quite all the Old Man had said, or the way he had said it, but by and large a reasonably happy young man. *

Interesting question Dream Bliss ! I have addressed self harm and suicide in a thread about cutlural devolution. But in regards to ego I thought this; In our group of animals ( humans and their cultures. The prime directive is survival of the individual unit. yet the forces that seem to direct our evolution, as a species, (well , all species) works through a 'cycling' (death and birth) of those same individual units. Just a thought. I haven't read all the posts yet.

While I think you hit the nail on the head, Gendao, I want to follow up on this thread for the benefit of anyone else who might encounter their Shadow in dreams or in waking life. It took a day of passive contemplation to get at what this interpretation means to me, and I think I've reached some conclusions. The truth is, I do have an esoteric megalomaniac laying dormant in my body/ego. I thought about this and recognized that knowing this is in no way a threat to my sense of self, so I just let it in and accepted it. It's just a fact - I've seen it. That the Shadow would try to infiltrate my home during sleep and kidnap my dog, indicates that this part of my personality is interested in coming out (of dormancy) right now, particularly since I've recently joined a forum (this one) full of incredibly interesting and impressive thinkers. It probably wants to keep up with some of the more "well-developed" personalities here. By being here I have felt an uneasy self-awareness grow, and I'm learning that I have so much developing left to do, so it makes sense that this uneasy megalomaniac character would sneak into my home with some fake magic weapon (the pretense of a legitimate skillset or understanding) and steal my dog (perhaps a symbol of creeping in through my mammalian brain?) I want to tell anyone who encounters their shadow like this, that it is okay to accept the shadow. It takes some self-honesty and confidence to accept that we have less than perfect parts of ourselves, and a bit of discipline and awareness to not become our shadows, but these characters are really just manifestations of feelings we've buried, like inadequacy or fear. After that confrontation in the dream, I've slept very well and have had no fear come up when going to sleep anymore. I've been down the road of the seeker pretending to be realized before and it frankly cracks me up, and I don't think my conscious mind would allow for such a take-over to happen again. This forum has really been a blessing to find and participate in, and I recognize that humility and honesty are much more powerful qualities that synergize better with my current personality than the pretense of esoteric wisdom ever could. I'm really passionate about learning, not necessarily in having all the answers, so I think this part of me can take the hearse back into the lower subconscious and R.I.P.

could be more than a dream

I heard Phasing is very effective (from AstralPulse). Briefly, one should focus with a keen but calm, warm interest at the darkness behind closed eyes. Notice how random patterns appear and change, watch passively but with keen interest. Remain alert and aware, keep watching, and then eventually you'll just instantly find yourself phasing into something like a lucid dream. Or so they say... I've never had luck with AP, probably because you need to energize the lower and middle dan tien centres to have enough psychic energy to remember an AP afterward. So I'm starting from the bottom, with dual cultivation of essential nature and eternal life. AP is just a distraction in the marathon of internal alchemy.

im saying if any one has any questions , like Brain has , Im willing to talk . can you add more context to this statement . Rails against ? perspective and dimensions are both illusions but if I just come out and tell every one. its meaningless. Goes right over their heads so to speak. Theres another issue. Awareness has levels all the way up to absolute and all the way down to death or zero. In order for me to communicate with a person , I need to lower mine to meet theirs. LITERALLY and when I do I become just as unaware as they are and I end up saying things and seeing the same illusion they do and we get nowhere. So I need to be slightly higher and pull them up to me and not down to them . This is exactly how I get tripped up with the same illusions as they do . I cant tell you that , you must do the exercises and "get it " then you'll know . Only half the world is an illusion and the other half reality . The purpose is to vanish the illusions and see just the reality . You'll be twice as aware as everyone ont he planet . But awareness is not fixed. It goes up and down like a pendulum. Some days all the traffic lights go green and you zip right on through . NOTHING can stop you and other days , you'll hit every red light and traffic jams, long lines and delays that will drive you insane. The object that goes up in the gravity field and then returns downwards, is nothing more than a wavelength of yang and yin . The negative force that generates gravity in compounded as it increases velocity temporarily . The illusion is that it stops motion at the peak when in reality it does not ever stop. Just like a baseball it travels up and continues down . south is an illusion . The reality is that there is only up><down Left >< right Front ><back . You can add all the names or perspective and dimensions you like but they are all illusions. You "See" that when you raise awareness levels . not gonna work . Perhaps with a very intelligent physicist who willing to be patient and is not compulsively playing games. YES MAYBE . But even then hell have a ton of questions and the video does not speak back in an interactive way . Brain seems like he knows a thing or two but his attitude with me prevents us working together. He needs to just listen and observe and set aside the things he doesnt get and go with what he does . Sooner or latter he will " get it " too . The exercises I have seem so insignificant , they may appear to be useless and leading no where. So they abandon it before they even start. What we need is SEAN to set aside some time and whip up a program like a computerized chess game with all the correct perimeters and criteria . Then feed it questions and see if it spits out the correct answers. If so , it can then be used to answer all questions we can dream up about life and the universe. It the program gets just one question correct , it will get them all correct. Perhaps even spirituality . There is no god particle . That is the biggest joke in the universe. But there is in fact spiritual life and you can call it what ever you want. Its a hot topic and people die over this subject in wars . But that is another subject . Just more yang and yin in opposition. The universe is so simple and yet it appears to be so complex. WHY ? illusions. When you vanish the illusions, the universe shows its true simple colors and the more who see it the better off the world becomes. On the Yin side? Who give a crap? . Im gonna die and Im not taking any of this with me and why try to fight the birth life and then death cycle. blah blah blah blah . Is it a mute point ? Yes in the end but now while you're alive. We live life to experience life. If you prefer to experience it well and balanced, its best you understand how. You'll understand that too when you get to the top of the top .

HH Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche details here the process by which delusion arises, remains, is reinforced, and also, how it can be cut at the root. (courtesy of L. Thundrup) "The most primary basis for clinging to the notion of self is the aggregate of form—that is, the body. When this body undergoes various experiences, we perceive some things as pleasant and desire them. Other things are perceived as unpleasant, and we want to get rid of them. This corresponds to the second aggregate, feeling. The third aggregate is discrimination. We start to discriminate between what is pleasant and what is unpleasant. The fourth aggregate is impulse. Once we have identified something as being pleasant, desire for it arises. At the same time, we want to get rid of whatever is unpleasant and try to accomplish this in various ways. What actually experiences the ensuing feelings of satisfaction or misery is consciousness, the fifth aggregate. Consciousness itself has five aspects, related to sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Prior to these five aspects and underlying them at all times, there is a basic, undetermined ground consciousness, which corresponds to a vague perception of the outer world and of existence, an awareness that “there is a world out there.” It is to all these aggregates coming together that we attach the notion of a self. As a result the aggregates become intimately linked with suffering. However, when we try to investigate these different elements, one by one, they cannot withstand analysis. They have no shape, no color, no location. We cannot determine where they come from, where they remain, and where they go. In no way do they constitute autonomous entities. In truth, the notion of self we attach to the aggregates is a mere mental fabrication, a label put on something that does not exist. People who wear tinted glasses or suffer from a visual impairment would see a white conch as yellow, even though the conch has never been anything but white. In the same way, our deluded minds attribute reality to something that is utterly non-existent. This is what we call ignorance: not recognising the void nature of phenomena and assuming that phenomena possess the attribute of true existence although in fact they are devoid of it. With ignorance comes attachment to all that is pleasant to the ego as well as hatred and repulsion for all that is unpleasant. In that way the three poisons—ignorance, attachment, and hatred—come into being. Under the influence of these three poisons, the mind becomes like a servant running here and there. This is how the suffering of samsara is built up. It all derives from a lack of discernment and a distorted perception of the nature of phenomena. Because of this distortion, some people perceive samsara as quite a happy place. They don’t realise that it is pervaded with suffering. They imagine that the body is something exceedingly beautiful and desirable. They don’t see that when investigated, it is found to be composed of rather foul substances. In this erroneous ways of seeing things, we take suffering for happiness and perceive the impermanent world as permanent. We thus labour under four main misconceptions: believing that phenomena are pure when they are not; misconstruing suffering for happiness; considering phenomena to be permanent when they are transitory; and imagining that there is a self abiding in the midst of all this, when there is none to be found. These are the roots of afflictive mental states, the kleshas. To counteract them, we have to establish clearly the empty nature of the eight consciousnesses [the all-ground consciousness, the defiled mental consciousness, the mental cognition, and the five cognitions of sight, sound, scent, taste, and touch], the five aggregates [the physical and mental constituents of a sentient being: form, feeling, discrimination, impulse, and consciousness], the five elements [earth, air, water, fire, and space], and all phenomena, so that we correctly perceive their true nature, which is devoid of intrinsic existence. There are different ways to come to such a conclusion and experience it directly. We may undertake a whole course of study, reflection, and meditation, which gives rise to a clear understanding of the relative and absolute truth. Or we may apprehend it directly through contemplative practice, and recognize through our own experience the dream-like nature of phenomena, which is the way of the yogis. These teachings help us to progress in both ways, through a logical investigation of mind and through experiencing and integrating the result of this investigation through meditation. Let’s now examine this object. If we begin by examining a human body to which we are attached, we acknowledge that it is made up of the five aggregates (skandhas) of form, feeling, discrimination, impulse, and consciousness. The first one, the aggregate of form, is the foundation for the other four, just as the earth is the supporting ground for all the mountains, forests, and lakes upon it. There are several aspects of this aggregate of form, but here we will investigate the one related to the human body. It is because we cling to the entity of a body that even a tiny prick from a thorn makes us miserable. When there is warm sunshine outside, we feel comfortable and the body is pleased. We are constantly preoccupied with the comfort and attractiveness of our body and treat it like the most precious thing. Clinging to the body is the reason we experience such reactions to the pleasant and the unpleasant. To eradicate this clinging, we have to examine what the body is really made of. Let’s imagine that like a surgeon, we cut a body open and separate all its major constituents—the blood, the flesh, the bones, the fat, the five main internal organs, the four limbs. If we consider these components separately, not a single one looks clean or pure. Taken one by one, each of the components does not seem at all appealing. The whole body is just a collection of rather disgusting parts, formed of the five elements. The flesh corresponds to the earth element, the blood and the other fluids correspond to the water element, the breath corresponds to the wind element, our body warmth corresponds to the fire element, and the cavities within the body correspond to the space element. One of the main ways to decrease or eliminate our attachment to the body is to examine the various parts of the body one by one. When we conduct such an examination of a human body, where has the object of our attachment gone? What is left for us to be attached to? We should keep examining each part more and more minutely until we reach the point where we cannot find the object of our attachment. At that point, the attachment itself just vanishes. Unavoidably we come to the conclusion that the body does not truly exist. We have then recognised the void nature of our body and of all forms. When this state of understanding is reached, we simply rest for a while in the equanimity of this recognition. When a thought arises within this state, we repeat the same investigation. Once it has been fully grasped that this “body” is empty of true existence, we can easily understand that it is the same with our “name” and with the “mind” made up of the thoughts that go through our consciousness. In investigating the nature of phenomena, there are Four Seals or main points we should understand: (1) All things are compounded; that is, they are an assemblage of multiple elements instead of being unitary entities. (2) They are therefore impermanent and (3) are linked with suffering. (4) They are devoid of self-identity. As for impermanence, we have a very strong feeling that our body, our mind, our name, and our ego are all permanent. This leads to strong clinging. So to gain certainty in the realisation that all phenomena are utterly transitory is very important. It is like when a thief is unmasked and everyone learns his identity: he then becomes completely powerless to fool anyone, since all are aware of his mischievous nature. The thief can no longer harm anyone. In the same way, if we recognise that everything is impermanent—the universe as well as our thoughts—then naturally we will turn our backs on the objects of our grasping and embrace the dharma as the only thing that can really benefit us. Regarding the truth of suffering, we need to recognise that suffering is the condition of all phenomena pertaining to relative truth. Whatever is linked to the five aggregates is intimately connected with suffering. This is because grasping at the aggregates leads to the arising of the five mental poisons (kleshas)— hatred, desire, delusion, pride, and jealousy—which themselves are the causes of nothing but suffering. Even though we may enjoy some kind of temporary happiness in samsara, close inspection reveals that we have often achieved this happiness at the expense of others, or even through harming others, by cheating, stealing, and the like. In behaving like this, although we experience a fleeting happiness, at the same time we are creating causes for our future misery. It is like eating plants that are tasty but poisonous. We may savor them for a few moments, but soon afterward we will die. It is the same for all enjoyments that are linked with negative actions. Once we realise this, we no longer take pleasure in samsaric life, and our desire for it is completely exhausted. This leads to a strong wish to renounce our attachment to worldly affairs and our addiction to the causes of suffering. The final one of the four points is about the negative consequence of clinging to the self and the recognition that phenomena are devoid of self-identity. All of the first three points boil down to grasping at self, the main cause of suffering in samsara. Once we latch onto the concepts of “I” and “mine,” anything that seems to threaten that “self”—or an extension of it, such as friends and relatives—is identified as an “enemy.” This leads to craving, hatred, and lack of discernment, the basic causes of samsara. How did this happen at all? It happened because of our mental process, the chain of thoughts. For instance, the thought comes to your mind, “I shall leave my retreat and go into town,” and you follow it. You go into town and perform all kinds of actions there, accumulating a great deal of karma. If, at the moment the thought first arose, it had occurred to you, “There is no point in going to town,” the sequence of thoughts would have been interrupted and all the impulses that followed would have never have occurred. Nothing will happen at all. The cause of delusion is the linking of thoughts, one thought leading to the other and forming a garland of thoughts. We need to free ourselves from these automatic processes. This is the reason for these teachings, which are like a spinning wheel of lucid investigation of the nature of discursive thoughts and the ego. After paying attention to the teacher’s words, we should also put them into practice and investigate thoroughly our thoughts and our psychophysical aggregates, until we gain a true certainty about their nature. Until now, we had the strong conviction that the self exists as a separate entity. With the help of these teachings, we can now achieve a strong and firm conviction that the ego has no true existence. This will lead to the gradual disappearance of afflictive emotions and thoughts. In turn, this will lead to mastering the mind. In our ordinary condition, when a thought of hatred arises, we have no idea how to deal with it. We let that thought grow and become stronger. This could eventually lead us to seize a weapon and go to war. It all began with a thought, nothing more. Look at the succession of thoughts that lead to full-blown hatred: The past thoughts are dead and gone. The present thoughts will soon vanish. There is nothing graspable in either of them. So if we examine the thoughts in depth, we cannot find anything truly existing in them. Under scrutiny, they vanish like a big heap of grass set ablaze. Nothing will be left of it. We really must verify for ourselves that whatever thought comes into our mind has never acquired any true existence: thoughts are never born, they never dwell as something truly existing, and they have nowhere to go when they disappear from our mind. Unless we come to a clear understanding of this, why talk about things like the “primordial purity of the Great Perfection” or the “innate wisdom of the Mahamudra”? None of these will help, so long as we perceive phenomena in a deluded way. We have spoken of the main ways in which we distort reality: by assuming that conditioned phenomena are endowed with true existence; that fleeting phenomena are permanent; that samsara is generally imbued with happiness despite the pervasiveness of suffering; and that there could ever be such a thing as an autonomous, truly existing self. Now we have to replace these distorted perceptions with accurate ways of thinking. Instead of being convinced that there is a self-entity, we realise that self is a mere concept. We should get used to this and impress it on our minds. To achieve this, we must investigate with determined effort the nonexistence of the self until we have covered every aspect of the analysis. Then, like someone who has finally completed an exhausting journey after painstakingly walking over a long distance, we can completely relax in the natural, open state of mind. Without entertaining any thoughts, we simply rest in equanimity for a while. After we have recovered our mental strength, thoughts will return. Instead of falling under their influence, apply the same investigation over again, and remain clearly mindful of the nonexistence of the self. This will result in a genuine and powerful realisation of the absence of a truly existing self. There are two aspects of mindfulness: first, to remember what causes suffering and needs to be avoided, and what brings happiness and needs to be accomplished; and second, to be constantly vigilant lest we fall under the power of delusion. If we mechanically follow our wandering thoughts instead of remembering to investigate our mind, afflictive emotions such as craving and hatred will rise up strongly. Whenever these assail your mind, you should react just as if you had seen an enemy coming at you: Lift the weapon of mindfulness and resume your investigation of the mind. Simply by turning on the light, you can instantly destroy the darkness. Likewise, even a rather simple analysis of ego-clinging and afflictive emotions can make them collapse. By suppression we may temporarily subdue our afflictive emotions, but only an investigation of their true nature will completely eradicate them. The Measure of Progress Once this is accomplished, a great happiness will settle in the mind. As soon as we notice deluded thoughts arising in relation to conditioned phenomena, generating the scorching heat of samsara, we will recognise the unsurpassable, supreme, unconditioned nature of nirvana, which bestows a cooling, pacifying shade. Following our analysis, we should check whether or not the practice has taken birth within us. Having pursued this investigation over and over again, we naturally arrive at a genuine understanding that all our aggregates, like all phenomena, are molded by numberless fleeting causes and conditions. They are compounded things, so that if we take them apart there is nothing left such as a “body” or any of the other entities whose existence we are so convinced of. We will know without doubt that there are no permanent phenomena, since everything changes at every moment. We will also know that all phenomena are linked with suffering, and that various ways of assuming the existence of a “self” are all groundless. Thus we will have thoroughly integrated these Four Seals of the Buddha’s teaching into our understanding. From then on, our mindfulness will come naturally and we won’t have to exert so much effort to maintain it. This achievement comes from the power of gaining confidence in the fact that phenomena are devoid of true, inherent existence. A great master once declared that the solidity of the phenomenal world will start to collapse even if one simply begins to doubt that phenomena truly exist and merely glimpses the fact that emptiness is the nature of all phenomena and appearances. When we begin to win the struggle to free ourselves from the waves of afflictive emotions, the mind will become like a calm and vast lake. This peaceful state, the natural tranquility of mind, will lead to deep samadhi [concentration], which is the pacification of wandering, deluded thoughts."

Not sure if you're reading and understanding what people have posted here. I think CT's post sums it up best. Beyond our love of greens, browns and blacks, do you see any relevance it might have for you? Cause you seem to be launching off into rants and messianic complexes. C T, on 01 Jan 2015 - 19:37, said: Almost everyone at some point in their lives dream of being a hero, or a saviour of some form or other. Its a sort of on-off complex, isn't it, and not exactly one based on realistic premises. Sometimes the feelings, boosted by external events, can get very charged, and people read all sorts of things into these feelings, but only a special breed of people can actively & effectively engage their inner resources to mobilise something tangible in themselves that will contribute positively and significantly towards making a difference in the world. Its easy to shout slogans and proclaim one's vision, but to be resolutely focussed on a primary objective with unwavering commitment and patiently setting the stage right, and holding the same values for 20 or 30 years with no guarantee of any progress is no easy task. Altruistic, authentic Change masters are few and far between - however, vessels of sound, these are easily shaped, used and then discarded like paper cups. What these sound carriers call heavy, the Masters would call 'opportunity'.

O yes, some dream of being pies too.

Almost everyone at some point in their lives dream of being a hero, or a saviour of some form or other. Its a sort of on-off complex, isn't it, and not exactly one based on realistic premises. Sometimes the feelings, boosted by external events, can get very charged, and people read all sorts of things into these feelings, but only a special breed of people can actively & effectively engage their inner resources to mobilise something tangible in themselves that will contribute positively and significantly towards making a difference in the world. Its easy to shout slogans and proclaim one's vision, but to be resolutely focussed on a primary objective with unwavering commitment and patiently setting the stage right, and holding the same values for 20 or 30 years with no guarantee of any progress is no easy task. Altruistic, authentic Change masters are few and far between - however, vessels of sound, these are easily shaped, used and then discarded like paper cups. What these sound carriers call heavy, the Masters would call 'opportunity'.

Hi Spotless, I'm confused. In your first post in this thread you said that you have experienced this pressure between the eyebrows for over 40 yrs, yet in this post today you say "I have never personally experienced intense uncomfortable pressure between the eyebrows". http://thetaobums.com/topic/36844-dharmawheel-pressure-between-the-eyebrows-bad-advice/?p=591298 In that post you said this: Your statements are confusing. In your response to Dawei, are you addressing the pain aspect instead of the magnetic pull? There is a difference. I have never found the pressure from the magnetic pull between the eyebrows to be painful. Intense, yes, but not painful. Your post comes across like it is addressing pain from the magnetic pull between the eyebrows. What I have found is that trying to maintain a point of view during meditation becomes very painful after a while. An example of this is when I decide to do a meditation and maintain the point of view that reality is a dream, an illusion. The act of trying to maintain a conceptual conglomerate is a constructed endeavor, one which requires energy and focus. This focus and accumulation of energy can become very painful. One clue the Dawei mentioned is that a single thought can bring the pressure/pain back. The magnetic pull is not produced by effort, it is produced by relaxation, by releasing any tension in the forehead, in the eyes and around the nose. Even sambhavi can be very painful if you tense up. The method that activates the magnetic pull between the brows that works for me consistently is to gently inhale through the nose as if one were trying to smell a very subtle aroma, while focusing on the point at the top of the sinus cavity, just behind the center of he eyebrows. Then, relax. There is no force or tension nor is there any pain. It is all very subtle. It works best when both sinuses are clear and the in breath and out breath are balanced. I will agree that incorrect head posture will also produce pain, but that particular pain occurs at the base of the skull, somewhere near the medulla?

cool ok lets see if I get get this across . The benefits are the so called " unspoken " You cant just tell someone about it like Ive been trying to do . Its way over their head . Ive already mentioned the benefits many times on a couple of my threads. Ill look for them and post the links. Basically, we are in a dualistic Matrix but we don't know it . Its degenerative in that all things start and then end and there no exceptions to that . Even the universe itself which is in itself a big yang yin and allt of smaller yang yin's within. EVERY THING has yang and yin . the only " thing " which is truly a NO thing is life the create of the yang yin universe. ITs within all of use and there is no exceptions to that . THE more you can "See" the universe the more you will separate your spiritual self " from it . I call it out of body awareness and that's exactly what it is . Nobody goes looking for spirituality in the physical universe. They look away towards spiritualistic values. Take a look at the Yang and Yin attributes on my PP page . Those are just a few but the list is endless . When you increase the yang , any yang attribute the others go up with it and the yins goes down to the same degree. when you increase understanding you increase knowledge, control, responsibility, happiness , smiles, laughter, intelligence, sanity, logic , warmth, love , compassion etc etc . All of these are from LIFE spiritual life who is operating their body . Spiritually you WILL become one with all life in the universe. Nirvana. Ive been there and I can get there with ease now . Then I come back to the center between future and the past . Let me tell you it hurt like hell coming back too when you consider and compared it to Nirvana. The difference is like heaven and hell . But you simple can not tell another about it or "take them " there . they need to make the journey on their own . It doesnt take long . Its like when you understand the logic of how a complicated video game runs . Then you can beat it but at first itl will whip you but every time. Once you understand the logic and apply that to your life , your life both physically and mentally will improve in ways that are literally OFF THE CHARTS. Its not a Theory. ITS total actual FACT . PERIOD. ok suit yourself , You have nothing to lose by using the exercises and becoming more logical . You can apply it to your other spiritual practices as well and do them both . I don't know who this Laz guy is and Ive never read his materials. But I know you have respect for him and thats why im in this forum and not the Christ or Scientology or Muslim forums. My exercise is as raw as raw can get . Its ancient wisdom and knowledge in present time without any distortion that happened when its carried forward from history . Just this morning I myself was WOOOOOOOOOW . IN FN Credible . Ive ben to the top like MLK saw his promised land and says hes been there. But I used the basic law of duality to get there and I know exactly how to get back . I actually went back to the top this morning . It was like I was walking in the Matrix from the movie. I was real but every thing and every one ...... ok, Im not gonna go there YET . It was cool . Once you " GET IT " the logic that is , your sanity will increase and your awareness and all the yang attributes. That's all I can tell you , the rest is unspoken . But you will not want to leave it once you "get it " You wouldnt even dream of doing anything else . BTW , when you get " there " let me know . I need your help in getting others there too . Ill be spending the rest of my life showing every one " the way " even Brian . Its a good cause and good causes attract other goodness from others too . Good luck , lets git this done !!!

thanks for the good question, the more the better . answer: Truth and illusion are the same item . Its better understood if its presented this way . But if you still don't get it let me know and I'll present more examples. Or parables. The correct package is actually reality+ ><- Illusion . Reality is also truth . . Truth is related to reality . They are both yang . Correct , real , true , all Yang error, illusions false lies all yin . The whole universe is divided on 2 parts and its not E=MC2. Close but no cigar . Boston marathon bomb was an illusion . Sandy Hook too and that's all I'm say-in on that . ok 911, I said it . lets not go there . ............OK just for a second. They were all real events yes. They were are used to direct attention as a means of convincing others to go in a certain direction. Its a lie, but a true lie. And its a tail tail sign that the government is about to end. The events were all real but it was in part, an illusion . It said the illusion was real . It was a lie . Ya the towers fell and the bombs went off and the school was on the news with police cars and sad parents neighbors etc etc etc. See the illusion ? most people don't and they think is was real . It was real , just not all of it . Real actors, police news , school, people, pictures of crying children. it was both real and an illusion. here's another when you remove the clothing you'll see solid steel under the guy on the ground and it goes up toward the guy on top through the pole to where the 2nd guy sits above . He too is sitting steel framework . It goes through his clothing. it appears they are defying gravity but when you look through the clothing , and see the steel , the illusion will vanish and it will seem normal . All real as it is . When you see the illusion it will vanish and become 100% true. there much much more but im not gonna go there yet . The more one becomes aware in life the less hes fooled by illusions. Ill show you the way it works and you can answer your own question based on the logic I'm presenting, hows that ? Illusions are true too , but they direct your attention to things about it that make the truth seem unreal or not real . hot and cold for example. Hot is the truth and cold is the illusion . We live between hot and cold at warm and cool and null , neither hot nor cold. That is where null is . Magnets are also null between their poles. when you lean towards the future it gets hotter and brighter and went you lean towards the past of present time it gets colder Present time is the horizontal line that seems like its left and right but its actually a spiral line between future which comes first and past which comes after. Its a dot with a spiraling tail in its wake called present time . Yeah baby. When you remove heat you go downwards in temperature. when you add heat you go upwards in temperature. you can not add cold you can only remove heat . coldness is an illusion . and "science" knows this very well . the illusion is that cold exists but in reality its a matter of less heat until it gets to zero heat and the temperature vanishes as a thing. The ONLY 1 who can remove that last particle of heat is you and me and we do it every split + - second of every day from the beginning of day until we go to sleep at night .That's an illusion I see and no one else on the planet does. NO ONE. You can even divide a second into + and - too . It has a beginning and an end . Then the next second start and ends. If its a particle of any sort, its real no matter what . If you can see it feel it smell it, hear it..... its real . What you decide to call it or describe it is you doing . The mental image you dream up is just as real as a lead basket ball or the new world trade center. The only difference is that its so transparent only you can see it . But you can animate it very easy and put up images of anything you can imagine. Life can Animate particles too . Life forms are an example. Part solids and part thoughts. You look as good as you feel and that's a very true statement . Mental images particles are no different than any other particle in the universe. Its just has more space between each + and - particle and the particles next to those. and its also non dimensional too for most people but I can make my mental images dimensional with sound and smell and very solid so that others can see and feel them too . They look at me very hard after I send them off and they get it. They know it came from me too . I just smile back . Its an ability . I can do much more than that and I can see others images and concepts as well too . The more we increase one yang attribute the more the others go up with it . When yang goes up, yin goes down. Like the water in the empty glass logic . NOW there are exceptions and chi dragon pointed that out with his example. Exceptions happen when you get right on the edge of present between the past and the future. +Future>I<past- . when you work at the edge between the past and future , in the NULL zone , You use the word typical and when you work at the outer edges you use absolute. I use the words "no exception". and "typically " + and - . Its a legal issue based on the law of duality . Its like a shiver but the further you move away from the null point of present time , the less exceptions there are . I know I've put this up before but ill do it again for anyone who doesn't want to read the whole thread. Future+>present time<-past reality +>present time <-illusions Hot +>present time<-cold Know+>present time <-Not know in present time there are things we know and things we don't know and we cross that line many times each day . In present time we feel warm some days and cold other days in present time we see reality and are fooled by illusions in present time we see the future and we see but are fooled if we think we see the past . We only see mental images of the past and they are all put there by us LIFE the creator of all things . Ya that's right, we are life in life forms baby Yeah you can apply this rule to everything in the universe. the universe has a beginning and an end its not infinite but universes are like any other life forms, they are born , grow larger and die. Then another universe is generated . by life the creator of all things. The generator is yang first and then yin every thing in the universe is a mini universe in its own right . I need to " back out " of a statement I made about transgenders too . I said a transgender male who has breast implants , genitals removed, hormone shots , wigs make up etc and are Yin. In strict reality they are simply men who have had transgender surgery , and appear to be female. Its an illusion and its real . My Bad Cant be right all the time without being wrong sometimes , right ? or is that wrong ? Both . He started as yang are is still yang but has been modified to the point of appearing to be YIN. You simply can not be perfect without imperfections until you eliminate all imperfections . I still have them but im also living in present time with Y'all too. anyways , I hope this helps . Its better to do the drills on ones own rather than me tell everyone whats what . I live in the present time with everybody here too and I make mistakes. Very few but when you raise you're awareness you'll understand for yourself what Im truly up against. You cant tell people this stuff or you can only tell some people this stuff. The best I can do is show you how to show yourself and that's by doing the exercises. Its how I did it . I'm not a Christ advocate or any other religion. Nor am I associated with any groups or clubs or religious groups. Just some guy that goes back and froth from present time to Nirvana. Over and over and over . Ive been doing it from the start to the end and then again and again . Im just a guy who knows allot of stuff about life and the universe. I now how it works. Ive got a high IQ and im very aware in general . More than most. most of it came from my Yang and Yin exercises. About half of us both males and females can do it with excellent results too but the other half will fail . When the first half completes the exercise and hits the top at nirvana, the other 50% will split off and 50% of the 50% will make it up and out . Then half again until its back into the future 100 % This includes all life forms , We came from the future and we leave the way we came in from the future . the past is a complete illusion . The future is real. I am the master of all masters of the universe. Im thee original TAO master . I can show YOU the way .

Shapes shift, light and shadows alternate, facades appear and disappear as Love plays the masquerade of hearts and souls, lips and fingers, forms and faces. From Her oceanic depths a flowing dream of waves arises in Love’s disguises born of water. Still, as bedazzling as Love’s masks may be, we won’t stop at any liquid image – we’ll go further. When our desire becomes as urgent as that of a drowning man gasping for air, we will become available for Love’s true revelation, which is not at all what any might imagine, believe, hope, or even fear. Until then, Love is mostly an empty word for those who are still deaf to the transmission emanating from the depths of their own Heart’s yearning. Most who come this way stop at the Image, worshipping an Icon, carved by conditions, sanded by time, polished by devotion to a yet tyrant mind. All the while, Love’s arrow buries itself deeper, burrowing further, until, in the abundance of graces, Love recognizes Itself in our smiling faces! Just so, my Pearl, tonight let’s get fetal with each other; let’s curl up in that wooing womb of emptiness, wound together in the wild wonder of our loving, afloat in the amniotic fluids of Love’s supremely cuddly satisfaction, dizzy in the vernal perfume of our unborn bliss, the simplicity of the blessed revelation that we are This, our dharma of desire flowering into letting go of what’s gone, gone beyond any letting go of whatever never was, just rolling in the gone-ness of non-getting, grasping for nothing, clinging to same, just smiling that smile we smile when you see me, I see you, and only Love is Seeing, being Seen, loving . . . See — Love is the Midwife of our Delight, attending this Mystery of innocent Light! Yes, Love is the cause and result of Love, Mother of the radiant Children of Love, the conception, womb, and labor of Love, and there is nothing in the beautiful Body of Love that is not the perfect expression of Love. All form is but the dress of Love, the wondrous random design of Love, though seeking it only postpones true Love. When we die to that search we arise in Love; when we empty ourselves we are filled by Love! All glory, praise, and thanks to Love – this is our song and it’s sung by Love!

Collected Poems of Langston Hughes Call of the Wild/White Fang, Jack London Jeeves Compendium vol 3, PG Wodehouse The Dynamics of Standing Still, by Peter den Dekker Yijing, Moran/Yu and Wang Bi/Lynn Dao De Jing, Gunther Debon and DCLau Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, as mentioned above (was a Christmas present, not really my thing) Decoding the Dao, Tom Bisio Bagua Neigung, Tom Bisio The Internal Structure of Cloud Hands, Robert Tangora (sleeper of the decade, it's good stuff)

My first experience aware of the Present,..which occurred as an unexpected consequence of surrendering during a difficult occasion,...had an urge to follow the brilliance of everything,...it was my first experience seeing life this way, the vibrant perfection of the duality's illusion,...all one thing,...and yet beyond oneness. Anyway,...it was dawn,...the sun had not risen,...and I walk around an open zoo. In the 60's and early 70's, Alamogordo had a zoo accessible 24/7,...nowadays it has a no-see-thru fence, and one pays admission. The zoo housed lobos, eagles, ostriches, mountain goats, bobcats, etc.,...and the experience was one of no boundary between us,...just love. In 40 years of spiritual experiences,...for me,...the purpose of life is to bring more love in,...which happens effortlessly just by being Present. Being Present obliterates the conditions of the dream of life's situation,...which always arise from the past or future,...thinking, the other 5 senses, are always in the past. If hot tubing triggers it for you,...awesome. My first was a NDE,...thus I didn't necessarily want to physically die each time to access it. I later found, that for me, the quickest way was Connected Breathwork,...and, through the years, short sayings would initiate it. Then, I stumbled on non-meditation,...probably a result from years of not thinking. “Mind is the basis of samsara and nirvana. Once you realize (its nature), rest in the ease of non-meditation.” Saraha "In a state of non-meditation, you attain Mahamudra." "The state of non-meditation is born in the heart...." Jigme Lingpa

the way i see it is that there is never equal balance between yang and yin more yang generates forward motion and less yang , ( more yin ) generates backward motion . Thats the basics of motion . when ever you have perfect yang yin it lasts forever and no thing i know of ever lasts forever . so that means yang and yin can not have perfect balance . It only takes one single particle to be off balance or lop sided so to speak . Its what keeps the planet spinning . If you view the planet we are on front the top down it rotates clockwise YANG but when you view it from the bottom up its counter clockwise. TOP is yang and yin is bottom . counter clockwise is yin . it can happen almost instantly together but it need not happen simultaneously . Remember, yang and yin are the SAME dual item. Ive been knocked out many times . motor cycle accidents twice and some medical procedures too . When i was " out " or unconscious ( yin ) here was no light and no dark . No time elapsed. I got knocked out and came too instantly it seem but later i found out i was out for much much longer . I dont recall any light or dark . The worst time was when i was out for over a day . . Kind of like when we sleep and don't dream , yet time passes anyways . There's no light and no dark and no time , no nothing . its the absence of both light and dark . Many will say " ah no its dark when i sleep but that's mainly because its the last thing they remember . My hearing shuts off too to a certain degree as well . I bet yours does too . We can be woken from sound but not the gentle or soft low volume sounds . so when light is brought into existence it needs some form of yin to hold it there . Other wise iy will continue to shine outward instantly into infinity and vanaish from perception instantly. if you imagine a happy face mental image , and then take your attention off of it it will vanish from existence until you bring it back . The yin attention you place on the mental image is all that holds it in place . its the yin and the happy face is the yang . light is held in its location by yin . Without yin its goes outward in all directions and vanishes there after . Like an explosion . There's lifeforms in water but sometimes I use water as an analogy when explaining LIFE the creator to another . because like life , water is almost everywhere and makes up 90 percent of our bodies. I think its 90 . but spiritual life the creator is not water . You know that this planet is a life form like a plant. it needs light and water to survive like any other plant . It got its water from outer-space and it gets its photons from the sun . The sun is yang . Its has more light than anything else and .its also very massive but then size is relative to other sizes. From a far distance the sun does not exist . if you look at a drop of water under a microscope . its has lifeforms in it already . single and double celled life forms. water is basically hydrogen and you can find it all over the place in the vacuum of outer space . Hey that rhymes , im a rap star . When you ad water to a planet next to a light source you'll get growth and more life forms. the planet started small like all life forms do and grows bigger . Its basically a flaming seed . cooled with a crust or eggshell like surface. As it grew, it broke apart to form continents . Like blowing air into a balloon it grows in all directions at the same time . Water or hydrogen hits its warm crust over longer periods and it began to grow,cool off and accumulate the oceans we have today. they are all over outer-space but we cant see them very well from here. Too far in the distance . There are many many many and youll find them all near a sun or star so to speak . Im not a fan of Newtons theory's . I go with what I know to be true for myself from my own life experiences mostly but I do consider the opinions of others very much . If they align with my points of view, I agree , if not I don't . It may seem there's an equal reaction but I doubt any thing is equal . If that is true the " thing "would last forever and no thing lasts forever there's a huge difference between life the creator of all things and life forms. So it matters, when you read my posts to make sure you know the difference as well . I gain more understanding about life when others challenge my points of view on life , than not . I think we can both benefit from each others point of view.

I didn't think you would . Some parents beat their kids when they don't like something . Some will be patient and have a conversation with that will help them understand. That's me and my kids. light preceded the ( pre sense,) ( present ) presence of every thing including the absence of light . You don't get that I understand that . Its a personal problem that you will need to solve on your own but I'm here to help you with it too . Darkness is the absence of light just like the lie is the absence of truth . You cant have a lie without the truth first . If you look only at the darkness , you see no light and if you at the light only you see no dark imagine ( if you are able ) to not see any light nor any dark . That's right no dark . Probably not so easy because you are SOOOO use to having eyeballs that see both black when eyes are closed and light when they are open . when you sleep ( yin ) sometimes you dream sometimes you don't . But when we sleep some nights we don't see light or dark , You go to sleep , close eyes its dark but then even the darkness goes away and time too . You see neither. Ive been knocked out a few times on the operating table , motorcycle crashes , sleeping etc and I didnt see nothing. Many times while I was out it seemed like no time had elapsed ( TIME is YIN its a lie ) I was awake one moment and then I was awake again 29 hours latter after a motorcycle crash . I didn't see perceive light nor dark . When life ( creator ) made light there was no dark yet . THAT'S the yin of the Yang Yin duality It came after light Bro . I swear . And I don't assume anything............. THAT... ( "assumption" ) is a yin attribute I know it + or I don't know it - Life the creator of all things starts off with all the yang attributes and many more. Life can know anything , do anything lets look at yang and yin for a second. yang><yin awake >< sleep sight>< blind hear>< deaf standing up>< laying down active>< motionless talk>< hush day ><night start ><finish begin ><end refreshed>< tired walk><rest notice any thing about the two columns ? I can go on if not. They are not absolutes, Typical at best . There can not be absolutes without exceptions, It violates the basic law of duality Bro . Yin is the variable Its yin . Anyways Yin is the lie always will be and always has been . Everything comes from the future and is met with the past that generates the present . Like when you turn a garden hose and direct it at a wall . It goes out in all directions at the center. The water is yang and the wall is Yin . Its an analogy . For the sake of understanding . Not to be taken literally or that water and the wall are yang or yin . Just view it for what it is as an analogy that right there, my friend, is the truth . the left side is yang and the right side is yin . Im very very very good at this stuff , Its Nobel prize stuff We should team up and go get one for our self. I went to Nobel Jr high school .( interesting at that ) I know you read my post on the -1 nano-kelvin subject and the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). I know exactly what im talking about Its a yang attribute too . Heck I even amaze myself some days . But I still like your comments . I like em all on a good day . Not so much on a bad day . We all have em ( good and bad + and -) Today's a good day Have a nice day

Every last single paradox you can dream up is a lie..... its Yin baby. Yeah There simply are no paradoxes in the universe that are true. Ah geez im laughing so hard right now . The chicken egg paradox is just some paradox created by who knows who at some point in time in the past . The past- YIN is also a lie but that's a different subject as well .

Hello, I came across this board and have found some interesting discussions going on here. I have trouble finding legitimate conversations with people in my immediate circle. Most think I'm "weird" or I "do not communicate well". A little bit about me. I had a sexual experience probably about 5 years ago now. As best as I could describe it was akin to being born again as taught in John 3 in the Bible. The orgasm I had was 1000 times stronger than I ever experienced. From there I had rather extreme psychosis and saw the lotus or the Ezekial wheel within a wheel open up to me. I've been on and off psych meds mostly antipsychotics. I've been hospitalized 3 times for psychosis but never diagnosed with anything official like schizophrenia. Usually it has to do with sleep troubles. The antipsychotics will help me sleep but also block up my energy channels for sacred sex practice and meditation. I'm doing fine right now. Usually if my sleep is ok I can blend in like anyone else. My hobbies include sacred sex practice, music, studying sacred texts, writing, bitcoin, World of Warcraft, yoga, tai chi/qigong, kung fu. I also am a big believer in natural health products and cleanses. I often will do long one hour sauna sessions followed by going in the cold then taking a hot salt bath to keep my energy channels clean. I often orgasm without semenal emission. By often I mean 1000's of times. I think there is something off in my practice because I want to draw the carrier fluid back in too but lately I'm thinking it's just waste. I didn't really read any book on sacred sex I'm just sort of self taught in that regard. I'm really celibate other than I transmute it upwards to my brain. I could probably go celibate but I'd just lose it in a wet dream. I'm a big believer use it to transmute or lose it. Anyway, I am big into Christian teachings. But moreso the more esoteric collections like the nag hammadi library and dead sea scrolls. I feel I do some weird practices and this whole kundalini awakening has been scary for me with next to no help. I at one point had come in contact with the author of Kundalini Biology and she helped me out greatly some of her teachings on practices to deal with kundalini energy and some of the weird symptoms that seem to present themselves. When I get scared though, I think of this gnostic passage: "Follow, therefore, first, only the laws of the Earthly Mother of, which I have told you. And when her angels have cleansed and renewed your bodies and strengthened your eyes, you will be able to bear the light of the Heavenly Father. When you can gaze on the brightness the noonday sun with unflinching eyes, you can then look upon the blinding light of your Heavenly Father, which is a thousand times brighter than the brightness of a thousand suns." So, that's really what I use for my gauge if I am pleasing God or am not pleasing God. I don't believe this passage I know it to be true from personal experience. Thanks and hope to get involved in some good conversations here.

This one is tricky for me too but I'll take a stab at it. To abide in the Reality that is always attained... I think this means continuously attained which implies that it is not permanent, it's a constant movement. Being in that state of not attaining/accumulating it is the only thing to Attain. All achievements, 'rewards', abilities etc. are illusory like our dreams. They further the though of the permanent self. When we're in the dream it seems real, when we wake up we see that it was just a dream. So can they appear real to someone who has woken up from sleep? No in the sense that it's not 'real', what is True however is that the attainments are illusions but the illusions themselves are not Reality. Can those that are established in Reality be deluded by them? I would suspect not... I think the message here is that attaining an achievement, ability, etc. is not the same thing as being established in Reality. I also think Ramana is trying to tell us that if we're deluded by attainments, if we see them as Real, then we are not abiding in Reality. Anyone else?