silent thunder

I lived the materialist mindset. I appreciate why it exists, why it persists and still recall the sense of why it was so appealing; but it dissolved for me in presence at some point and has never again been able to maintain its integrity in my paradigm no matter how often, how compellingly, or how angrily and forcibly it is presented. I'm not interested in opposing it, or arguing against it. I have no axe to grind against it. It simply cannot abide in my presence as a viable manner of declaring truth. Awareness melted its foundation. I was raised in it and I lived it, willingly saturated myself in it to try and fit in and please for a time, but the reductionist surety of it simply could not abide in the presence of vajra, just as the clouds cannot long abide in Sunshine... in the presence of awareness and in the process of life, it simply fell away. Not through fighting it, or desiring it to be gone, it just happened... it evaporated as naturally as mist in morning light. An effortless occurence with no value attached. That world view evaporated and no longer sustains itself in my presence and vajra. The hinge looking back, seems to lie in how awareness relates with my perceptions and my thoughts. I tended to believe I was my thoughts and I tended to believe my thoughts; for a time, even tried to believe when faced with their fallacy, back then... how violent and cranky I could become over it... but this too was a clue, for me anyway... an inroad to clarity eventually. Everything stems from source, even fallacy, so truth is unavoidable. I used to believe my thoughts and my perceptions. and now... I no longer do. Not out of any desire... it just happened... gradually, naturally. While some of my thoughts and perceptions still seem beneficial, I can no longer presume that they are 100% reality. Not inherently. Not even remotely. Yet there is functioning and beneficial interaction with them. Nope, there are more questions than answers these days. And that is wonderful... Questions are flowing and can be open, answers in my experience usually reduce down and down. Eventually, if followed to their extremes, answers for me resemble not absolute and reliable 100% sureties and reflections of reality as it is, but appear more like fabrics made of assumptions and projective biases that are required to stretch over absurdities and leave logical battlefields worth of unanwerable and unapplicable situations in their wake. It still seems to me, somewhat persistently that whatever i am, part of what i am is a functioning relationship between awareness and perceptions/senses... yet assumption based upon perceptions is no longer viable for answers... questions roil in the very space of every form I see... my father's body is now sand. My Father's body was replaced a dozen times in his life. Yet he remained my father to my perception. My Mother at the end of her life had a healthy body, but no memories of me, nor my childhood. While the body of my Mother was very much present... the essence of my Mother died four years before her body did... and there was no connection those qualities that made my Mother my Mom... there was a form, but no substance, so to speak... So what was essentially my mother? Where in her body did she start and where stop? My perception tells me she died in essence before her body died... but death is not death to me, it is decay... decay is the first step in the growth cycle... or the last... hmm I forget. maybe it depends how I perceive it... not sure... don't have an answer, but the question of what is essentially my mother remains... flowing. Where was my Mother when her memories were gone? It's as viable to me and as insistent a question as when I sit in silence and ask myself... where inside me, is the me part? Inside I am not made of me elements... my body is composed only non me elements... unless... na nevermind. so, ya, I don't believe everything I think, or perceive... and that's just how it is for me these days... I am ok with it. I don't recommend it... it's often not pleasant. Though the old answers weren't pleasant either, they only seemed so, so long as I didn't question, or critically engage and think... I just can't believe them any longer. Is this a good thing? Or a bad thing? My Grade School Science Teacher may have one answer and my Sunday School Reverend another... would either be wrong? I don't think so... but then that's just a thought and we all now know how much stock I put in that... Just because I thought something and felt strongly about it, doesn't make it true. Just because I experienced something and it made sense to my logical mind, doesn't make it real, or true, or even important. Perception is not truth... for me. I suspect it is not 100% accurate for anyone, but that presumption dies in direct proportional relationship to the square of the fallacy inherrentin my perceptive and cognitive apparatus. Awareness seems foundational... yet only where I am now and this too may flow into another realization and the current paradigm melt... if so, I welcome it. How about this...? If I assume that my perception is 100% accurate. Then based on my accurate perception... I would and logically could justify, with absolute surety declare to any who would listen that the Sun revolves round the Earth. It's obvious. It's measurable and repeatable. To deny that observation of perception and to counteract the reductionist ease of the answer supplied by the fabric of perception required centuries of assimilation of critical thinking... it took uncountable deaths... eventually it took the fabric of the assumption of the perception being stretched to the extremes of absudities, where the answer and the fallible perceptions the answer is woven from could no longer sustain itself before it melted. Though Naive Realism is a persistent bugger. Even now there is a growing movement of Flat Earth again... because perception is so convincing when it's an answer, instead of a question. Yet for me, it's effortless now and no longer has any teeth which bring anger or upset. It is simply that it cannot abide in the presence of my awareness and so whenever it arises in my sphere, it soon evaporates like mist in morning light... for me. All perception seems like a gamble to some extent. My relationship with any declarations, be they scientific or spiritual is altering lately. Science and Religion love to provide 100% answers. Yet what has happened to the answers provided by Physics or the Catholic Church, or Medicine over the last few hundred years? Answers that were presented and firmly held up as 100% have all shifted, inevitably... Its' natural too, it's wonderful in fact. My father is a great example, ( he was an engineer and inventor with a dozen patents to his name and as solid a Materialist as I have ever met in this incarnation) shortly before he died, he relayed to me his joyful dismay with Physics and how what he learned in College in the Sixties was mostly turned on its head and was now basically so much rubbish. He'd been brought up to speed in his retirement by some documentaries and articles... and it didn't upset him, or cause him angst. He just shook his head in astonishment and then finished his drink with a grin and a chuckle. Medicine used to be 100% sure that letting the bad blood out of a person would result in healing... and sometimes it did, which just further complicated things due to the fact that through our short term thinking, we reinforce our preconceived biases and only lash out when we are presented with information that points out the dissonance in the perceptive gambles. So, when folks declare the brain, or matter as the source of awareness and consciousness, it's understandable to me, I really get why they do... but it can't maintain itself... What I hear is someone declaring to everyone who will listen, that based on their perception... the source of the DJ, The Band, all their Instruments and the Music are the radio. I'm good with it... everyone views the gem from their facet of it. It's all good, provided that no one starts piling up kindling and grabbing flint stones anyway.

decided to share less

My son likes to make up riddles. How can I go to sleep in my room, wake up in my room and not be in the same place? My answer was... The Spiral Path.

*nods* Extremes of expression in energy do seem to manifest their balancing energy inherently... I watch it every time I go to the beach. The yang energy in the wave as it meets the resistance of the shore, builds upward. The force of its mass and inertia carrying the mass of the wave up and up until the yang energy reaches its zenith and then the magic shift and yin spontaneously manifests, as the yang inertia can no longer support its own mass and the water settles in balance. All seemingly without effort. More and more for me, Yin\Yang no longer seem like opposites, nor even to oppose one another, rather they seem mutually beneficial and self balancing expressions of one energtic system. The drawn bow will settle in balance... or snap into balance... but balancing the spiral line as the expression of the constant flow of energies balancing.

for me, recently it's not... if I'm not me who am I? or even who am i? it's... at what point am I not me and you are you? at which point in the space between us, do I stop and you start? is there a line of demarcation? is this the infamous spiral line of the yin yang? i sometimes suspect i am that line and that i am you so you also are that line as are the 10,000... and none of it is static or solid, not one solid form anywhere all full of space that dances with vibration it is all flow, flow from form to form within space. form flowing in space while space is infused in the very core of the non solid and vibratory pattern that lends to the experience of the form

*deep bow of respect*

I recall sitting for a time in the presence of the Maitreya Relics. It was early in the tour some 16 years ago... they were hosted by one of the local groups here in Santa Monica, not long after my wife and I had arrived from NYC. It struck me at the time that coming to the West side had been a very, very good thing for me. Subtle and deeply, penetratingly pervasive... the influence of their resonance. I imagine the vibrations they now resonate after some 17 years of traveling the planet and now coming to rest in the statue...

instinct says none and also whispers... awareness is unavoidable

I'm human. and yet, look within... and what in me is made of the human element? This human being is made entirely from non human stuff. this question keep arising... where in me is the human part? at what point does the organization of all the different individual amino peptides and protein chains become human...

potent stuff and well said... again... oof.

oof... realizations of this nature and magnitude strike my awareness like a full kick to the chest oof. Was just talking with my son on our walk this morning, about circadian rhythms and mechanical time and how recent the idea of 5pm on friday is... how it has nothing to do with how our species developed, or how we naturally operate. It's been overlayed on our experience and because it happens now, before the age of critical process, it slips into the background and is often never even noticed, let alone interacted with, or questioned. and the magnitude of the energetic influence and fall out effect of that one adjustment in our human process... oof. I stopped and stood there just saturating in the magnitude of it... for eons... sleeping and waking... following the cycles of seasons. now, beep beep, up and attum... all so hideously 'normal'.

Ack... milk. Not in my body. No longer a good thing for me, although I used it as a young person... loved the flavor. But these days it seems to complicate the system. After all, it's a reproductive enzyme from another mammal's endocrine system. Milk is hormonal baby cow growth fluid designed to take a baby cow, to a six hundred pound adult in a couple of seasons. Even adult cows aren't set up to process their own milk. But this is only my take on it and my experience...

Well worded, thanks for sharing. and wow did your last phrase ring the bell of old recognition for me... the space between... the space between... this mantra was central to my process for quite some years so much benefit I derived from saturating in this very concept for years my path was creating and occupying space between the space between thoughts the space between me and other the space between concept and form the space between solid surety and awareness of constatnt flow the space between the concept and sense of individuality and the absolutely complete intertwined experience and cross=saturated nature of all the fluid nature of even the most solid seeming objects... the ship of theseus... One of the first verses of the Tao that really had gravity for me, was verse 11. We form spokes into a wheel, yet the empty space in the center is the source for the wagon's motion. We shape clay into a pot. But it is the emptiness inside that allows us to make use of it. We form wood into a house. But the space inside is where we live. Form provides a framework for the uses of emptiness. That verse resonated with such intense gravity for me, that it sparked the subsequent curiosity to explore Taoism further and not be run off by its inherent contradictions and anti-logical truths. It's always been a pivotal point for me, the interplay of form and emptiness, walking the path between, that spiral path of the line running through the yin and yang. I think the mysterious nature of the flow and constant, fluid interplay is what is so alluring about it and also, frustratingly ungraspable and un-tie-downable in left brain manners... yet the pursuit is always pleasant, so long as everyone remains well intentioned and open hearted. I had an intense experience of sammadhi while sitting and sketching in the courtyard of the Getty one afternoon. Full expansion of awareness out beyond the limits of the complex onto the hillside of the hill surrounding the entire Getty complex. I had been sketching the courtyard and was intently focused on the shape of the negative spaces created inbetween the various buildings and then in a moment, my awareness shifted from seeing the forms, to experiencing vividly the space between the forms and then awareness shifted again and my body became the emptiness... and I experienced the space between forms as if it were my body. I tried to put this experience into words some years ago and then left it... I'll go dig it up and perhaps share it now. I do recall though, one of the most vivid points was the exquisitely intimate knowledge of the shape of the space inside of the keyholes of the doors that led into the buildings... I could just feel it, it was me... also... space between reminds me of this song... one my wife and I often share one of my favorites... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvzWRzTh7jg edit: to clarify an idea

*nods* the whole notion of teams stirs nausea... a deep, visceral revulsion. Human race. Earth and Space. One as above so below as within without

I agree... I am my body, how could it be otherwise... but my body is not all that I am. that's the only distinction to this I will add.

dang... those ladies were glowing!

Raven figures prominently in our spiritual life. For years they have been calling to my wife, so I'm going to share a bit of my insight into their medicine, since it was brought up. Sorry for the tangent folks. From Druid Lore: Bran, or Raven Medicine brings Deep Healing, Initiation and Protection. Bran offers initiation, protection and the gift of prophecy. What is meant by Initiation may be as formal as an actual initiation ceremony into a new school or practice, or as mundane as an inititation into the mysteries of a new post, or profession. Bran medicine usually portends change and death. Death of one aspect of life that creates space for birth and shift. Bran is often avoided and shunned due to its proximity and affinity for navagating the realms of battlefields... yet watch closely and you will see they also cleanse these places and so bring clarity and space for the healing of new life to come. Always growth and decay are one, not two... they do not oppose, they mutually benefit. The power of Raven can also initiate the deepest levels of healing, referred to by the Druids as the 'resolution of the opposites', guiding awareness to conditions where there is the possibility of resolving conflicts that have long lain buried in the unconscious, or in deep memories of the past. Bran also hovers and moves through and with destructive forces with ease and in balance and so Bran is calling us to become aware of the destructive forces in our own personal sphere. Unresolved, and unacknowledged energies that lie in our unconscious mind, can exert great and often unwanted influence on our actions and reactions in every day life. However much we may wish that destruction and decay were not part of our life, Bran reminds us, without this, the entire world would be a charnel house of dead bodies. Decay is the first step in birth and Raven speaks succinctly about the truths in the dark and difficult aspects of life. How they provide the nourishment and power for new life to emerge into the complexities of the world of form. It is often not acceptable to us, or even acknowledgeable that to continue to grow, aspects of us, or our way of life, must disintegrate and fall away in decay. Raven reminds us of this, but also brings the message that with this process of darkness there is the promise of new light and another day dawning. To a great extent Raven reminds us as well, that what we fear is waiting for us in the dark and in this letting go of existing patterns to disintegration, is often far worse than what actually awaits us. Raven invites us to come to terms... accepting and acknowledging our own destructive forces. A rage perhaps, whose source has lain buried for years. Raven medicine brings then also brings the integration of the unseen, forgotten and disregarded or avoided aspects, which is where the decay of Raven medicine brings the deepest levels of healing. The resolution of the opposites.

11:11 for me for decades 11:11... used to be just clocks, few times a week. now, it's just comical how often and in how many places I am drawn to become aware of it.

The other day, I went to work for the first time in about seven weeks. It was just a quick 3-4 day project. As I was riding in a little before 5am... the image of a well loved workmate 'Chichotka' jumped prominently to mind and I smiled.. hadn't seen him or thought of him in months so I sent him some love and then got back to breathing and driving and listening to my morning music. When I got to work, the second sentence out of my boss' mouth after... "hey good to see you, you handsome devil!" was... "oh and good news, Chichotka will be here today too, we called him in to be your partner on this one." I just smiled all the wider and nodded while chuckling.

fun! as I was rereading that, this just occured to me: so if a biased media tree falls in the digital forest and I'm not online is the other 'team' still wrong?

*wonders* is there still bias in the media I don't consume...?

fingernails and hair... kind of give me a clue that my body is not my true essential self. they are integral parts of my body and hence part of my self... yet when they are cut off, I throw them away without much consideration and with no sense of loss (actually with some sense of satisfaction and relief usually)... these bits that were just a few moments prior a direct and connected part of me... but once cut off, become trash. of course... the toe and fingernails I confess I do tend to keep around just a bit... while they're still pliable. I nudgy them and squish them a bit, if they're being clipped while reading something... then set them aside in a small pile to be thrown away when they are dry hard and brittle... (I mean, who wants unpliable, nonfresh toenail clippings... ? not me!) And I never go looking to reclaim my old shuffled off skin cells. In fact I diligently scrape them off in the shower and rejoice in their loss... nope, my body is not my essential self, yet it seems central to my experience of this life. I get the sense that my essential nature is a field of awareness, shaped much like my avatar pic... and my body is a dense manifestation within the core of that field... my body manifests within my awareness, not the other way round. But that's just my current sense of the situation. I reserve the right to change my perspective on this, if my perspective changes that is...

For me, sin is only possible on the level of the relative... in the midst of duality. From universal, foundational awareness... there is no sin... all is spotless, untaintable, raw and pure.

I just love California and Los Angeles... 17 years almost to the day that I arrived here and I dearly love it... it is a stunning incredible mix of culture, people, topography, surfing, skiing, camping, sailing, entertainment, museums, but really just the mad mix of cultures and people and their food and art... it. is. incredible. Though I am always being called by the long, deep, quiet of the groves of ancient trees and the moist earth up north and when I retire from the hollyweird machine, my wife and I have tentative plans on heading a bit further north to Oregon to finish our days of this incarnation up there... however that may be, by bear, bullet or bus.