silent thunder

Yea, I'm on the verge of purchasing one, with the intent, if that one works well, of getting two more, so we would have one in each bedroom and in the main living area.

I have experienced a few. All of them were spontaneous. None of them were by choice or intention. I have, through intentional work, come to the threshold a couple of times, i.e. the intense vibration state and the rushing/overwhelming sound phase... but then it shut down. All but one of them, were transitions from lucid dreams and the one that transpired while completely awake came while I was taking a shower and was doused in water. I'm thinking of trying to induce one again using a sensory deprivation tank that is available for rent nearby here.

http://www.theworldofmichaelparkes.com/cm/Home.html

Innsaei: The Power of Intuition My gal turned this one on and I found it had more than a few gems nestled in its basket. The ancient Icelandic word for intuition is “innsæi,” but in Iceland it has multiple meanings. It can mean “the sea within” which is the borderless nature of our inner world, a constantly moving world of vision, feelings and imagination beyond words. It can mean “to see within” which means to know yourself, and to know yourself well enough to be able to put yourself in other people’s shoes. And it can mean “to see from the inside out” which is to have a strong inner compass to navigate your way in our ever-changing world. https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/innsaeithepowerofintuition

Health care in America is financially predatory. They will try to help you... but they will also extract every possible ounce of gold they can in the process. Broken from within it is... ~Yoda

I have lived with several zen masters... all of them feline.

My wife fell down a long flight of stairs in our home in her early twenties. She broke her spine in two places and I revived her after her heart and respiration stopped. The young doctors in the emergency room, did not do a full spine xray and only diagnosed the broken coccyx, fully missing the broken T-7. She was bed ridden for a weeks initially, couldn't find any relief from the pain in the T-7, standing, sitting, laying, moving... nothing brought any relief from the relentless pain. It was grim. and then one day she just stood up through the pain and said "fuck this!". She walked straight over to our stereo and turned on one of my old favorite drumming/dancing cd's. She began to dance through the pain. She danced daily, sometimes for hours. She rmoved through pain into ecstacy. She moved from ecstacy to pain again. She healed through the repeated motions. Eventually, ecstacy and pain receded into balance. She then found a system of yoga poses that brought full range of mobility and strength and this maintains the balance in her system and she made a full recovery. It was years later at an exam for an unrelated issue that an astute chiropractor discovered the broken T-7 and inquired... she and I looked at each other and a flood of knowingness rolled over us as we realized what had occured. What I took from witnessing this process is that the body is a healing system and will be constantly attempting to replenish and repair itself to optimal status, if given the right conditions. for her the right conditions were, a constant supply of loving soups brought by our neighbors and friends (we lived in an artist coop at the time and had a tribal community) and her will to realize that her body could move in spite of the pain, couple with the understanding that with motion, would come revitalization. I have no idea if this would be right in your case. I share because her situation seems similar, was very extreme and she found complete and total healing through a determination to be whole again and her method was dance and yoga.

I am told I am human... and I get it. I'm human. I'm human in the manner of my mother and father and my ancestors and all humans... I grew as a human, yet where inside me is the essential human part? I can see humans around me and recognize them as human instantly, every time... well ok, sometimes it gets a bit grey at Walmart and Comic-Con, but when I look inside to find the source of that human recognition, all I encounter, is non human bits. When I look inside myself to find what is human, no matter what human bits I examine... my human teeth, my human nervous system, my human frontal lobe, my human opposable thumb, my human speech... no where is there any human element that this is comprised of... It seems I experience my humanity and any humanity only within a pattern. A human pattern that grows entirely from non human elements... so at what point does the non human become human? What is the essence of human? Where does it reside? When I observe a single human liver cell, I perceive one living being, in an environment, engaging in processes that affect its surroundings. It has a life span. It is a liver cell, living and engaging in what liver cells do. It is not alone, it works within a pattern of similar individuals that form into an organ I call my human liver. Yet if I delve inside the cell, even within the very human DNA, there is no human element. At what point does the transition occur, from individual liver organisms to a human liver? If I widen my scope I can see how the liver engages with the colonies of living cells in the heart, spleen, lungs, kidneys, bladder. Systems supporting other systems. Systems suppressing other systems. Patterns comprised entirely of individuals made entirely of non human bits... that somehow easily seems recognizable as human at a certain point. So where is the essential humanness? What is human and where is it? Where does it start and end? Often of late, I look around and perceive patterns. Patterns within patterns, as within, so without... Patterns comprised of individuals, individuals comprised of patterns, all naturally growing within frameworks so innately interwoven that in the end all patterns mingle fluidly into the whole. edit for spelling

and now I'm off to the mountains with the kings...

I wake up most mornings and there is a song in mid refrain in my mind... Today it was Los Lobos and Kiko

I like this one, though it's a bit tongue in cheek. The difference between the teacher and the student. The teacher has failed more times than the student has attempted.

for me, the action of returning to source is of letting go, releasing into natural being... sinking into presence and awareness and dropping all else. silence, breath, emptiness and clarity are deeply healing, free and ever present. use what presence, focus and energy I have to heal, nurture and love. retribution is a useless exercise that amounts to little more than spiritual self immolation, forget/drop/release wrongdoings and cultivate authentic presence now... this leads naturally to healing, nurturing and love. there is no external validation, or secret knowledge beyond my sense of my self that is closer to source, than what naturally occurs in every interaction in this soup of life. don't chase, release and be. life is soup, it's fluid. i too am a fluid, a flowing verb, not a static noun... there are no accidents. there exists no thing that is independent of other things... nothing anywhere is independent. one life. all in all. things are very suspect as things... solid is an illusion of perception suffering is a crisis of perception i don't believe everything i think... just because i thought it and even felt strongly about it, doesn't make it real, true, or important... they're just thoughts, let go, release and be when sensory input is available, it will tend to want to dominate awareness, cultivate effortless being, silence, radical acceptance let go, release and be as is natural. there is no need to chase external validation, or secret knowledge, such things are inherently valueless, circular, self feeding loops. cultivate the whole of the self, to transition to the self of the whole the only authentic thing i have, is my authentic presence and awareness. it is the only real thing I can offer to anyone. it is valuable beyond measure. edited: to change the word valueless

I stood, staring at a trickle of water as it wound its way along the pavement and gutter of a parking lot. Picking up debris as it flowed and carried along with it, disregarded bits of paper and plastic, leaves, clumps of dirt, a few hapless ants and a healthy portion of dog turd, recently deposited with rather remarkable precision. It flowed along effortlessly, neutral to turd and flower alike, into the sewer and off to the ocean. Tao in motion. To me anyway, in that moment and now upon reflection... somewhat.

Yes! Both please, thank you. Simultaneous absorption/expulsion... contraction/expansion permisiveness/temperance saturation/distillation presence/emptiness being/awareness

game. set. match!

whoa

hmm... i sense that i could make a strong case that it's really the year of the EGG! every year...

He sure seems to be, looked into him a bit more. He's a local boy here... artist. I've been going to the Getty Museum for 16 years and never noticed that quote etched in sidewalk of the entrance into the garden. I likely would have continued to walk past it indefinitely except this time, I was lingering nearby and overheard an elderly chap reading it to his wife who couldn't make out the words. How intricately interwoven that her loss of sight should bring me a gift of wisdom, through her husband.

Nice! I'll share my reminder list I use when work is challenging me or I'm getting butt hurt... Don't take the place, the work, or the people personally. Cultivate enthusiasm. Show up early. Listen attentively. Give full effort.

Ever present Never twice the same Ever Changing Never less than whole ~Robert Irwin

This deeply resonates with me and a relatively recent realization of my process. Both Zhou Ting-Jue and Wang Li Ping talk about inertia and in the early stages... establishing and gathering inertia. There was an intial building period. Learning forms, perfecting forms, incredible attention to hand placement and breath depth and all manner of details and minutea... Zhou often says. "Practice every day. Miss one day is missing ten days" and I did that for some years... and then a point manifested and I became aware that from this point on and indeed for some time prior to this moment of realization, no matter what I did, or did not do, all I had done and whatever I would engage in from this point on... it would all be grist for the mill... nothing would be, or could be wasted. Inertia had been established and its presence manifested in all sorts of areas of my life... in silence or speaking, in motion or stillness, paying attention or zoning out... never is it possible to be disconnected from, or even a hairs width away from source. Tao is everpresent, yet indistinguishable. Impenetrable and utterly yielding. Looking back now, I seem to sense how the inertia was really there long before the word, probably all along, driving me into these teachers presence with the awareness that they were resonating with something deep inside of me, perhaps before childhood even... yet the work was and is still, irreplaceable as a means to crystallize the realization and the relationship with the inertia from the fog of pre-aware practice.

My son sleeps often out on one of our sofas in the living room instead of his room. So he wakes up while I'm setting up tea and such the other day, he opened his eyes, rolled over to look at me and said: "just be yourself... it's the only thing you're perfect at..."