liminal_luke

Question for any of our resident jing experts who care to reply, @dwai @freeform @Taomeow. Suppose a Bum has modest aims (health and happiness) and wants to relate to their jing in an optimum way -- what advice would you give?

This bit belongs in your Best-of-the-Bums anthology.

Add daily to my word collection of favorite words. Recognize that feelings are just feelings. They won´t kill me and no feeling necessitates the eating of a chocolate chip cookie. Stop glomming onto my partner energetically. (I´ll know I´ve succeeded when I can feel happy when he´s sad.)

a fantasy story A woman intuits that something went terribly wrong with humanity thousands of years ago and she wants to set things right. So she makes herself powerful and expansive and gathers together alchemical energies from the far corners of the universe and far back in time. The energetics involved are impossibly huge but somehow she manages to condense them on her person in such a way that nobody notices the transformation. Perhaps the energies go into an amulet in her purse or into a piece of jewelry she wears. Perhaps they are integrated into her body but in a hidden way. She is disguised. Walking around living a perfectly normal life while carrying around the seeds of worldly transformation. Nobody knows. That part is important, the hiddenness. Perhaps she has conjured up a retrodactyl to help in an aspect of this process. Perhaps she has herself become, in some sense, a retrodactyl. She continues to live out her ordinary life waiting for the right moment to put the energetic elements she has gathered to some beneficial use.

OK, I´ll take another flying leap backwards and just throw out some associations. My sense of you, Taomeow, is that you are someone who is deeply concerned with all things retro. And I don´t mean retro as in the sixties. I mean retro as in pre-civilization. Retro as in dinosaur days. Witness your Sumeria thread, for instance. You are someone who is unusually in touch with the energetic echo of humanity as it existed before the dubious benefits of "civiliation." Perhaps you are homesick for that precivilized world, a world where retrodactyls roamed the planet. So I´m wondering if the retro in retrodactyl has anything to do with the idea of returning or recapturing what was pristine and uncorrupted about that time.

Forgive me if I´m treading into an area where you don´t want to go salaam123, but I have an observation. Often it´s the people who self-identify as addicted to porn or sex who are most sex-negative. Who would think that the people who use porn the most are also the people who are most judgmental of porn use and masturbation? Strange but true. I think it´s possible that to really come to terms with your use of porn you´ll need to reexamine how you feel about sexuality in general.

I´ll take a stab. Just this morning I got a chuckle over your post in the What Made You Laugh Today thread about reading "Fuck Off" backwards. Could retrodactyl refer to a poem which has dactyl meter when read backwards?

Who makes dessert in Burger King´s family? Dairy Queen

You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others. -Katherine Whitehorn

Me too. Is this a good sign?

Hugs are OK, though I prefer the conventional in-person variety. I´ll take a pass on the holiday greetings but gladly accept offers of eggnog. This constellation of preferences doubtless reveals something about my personality and spiritual level. If you´re a highly involved being with special insights into my process, no offense, but please don´t tell me: I´m heaven-bound but taking the scenic route.

I´ve been finding the 5 rhythms of Gabriel Roth quite therapeutic.

Silent Thunder, Holy Rain All is calm, life´s alright. He walks barefoot in the early morn. He won´t judge you even if you watch porn. So...sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace. Silent Thunder, Holy Rain Reading him, never a pain. He lives in the now, says connection is king. Not afraid to die or let go of anything. So...sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace.

Interesting distinction between practices that build the self and those that destroy the self. At first blush, these would seem to be diametrically opposed goals but I see them as complementary. You´ve got to make the batter before ya can grill up the pancakes. Actually, this isn´t quite right. It´s not such a linear process, not one thing happening after another. It´s more like breathing in and breathing out, complementary activities that support each other. A healthy sense of self makes dissolution possible and vice versa. Or at least this is what I think.

Mixing practices and looking for advice? Earl Grey tells it like it is, he doesn´t care about nice. Chia says be celibate, get your immortal peach. Freeform says be careful, you´ll become perverted leech. Taomeow knows her yin and yang, she´s a genius cat But if you try to fight her, she´ll swat you like a knat. Guys come here to get power, attract all the girls It´s a real Taobum bummer, why aren´t you casting pearls?

Earl, If I was more clever with song lyrics I´d try my hand at composing a nice roast over on your toasting & roasting thread. As it is, suffice it to say that if I ever thought spiritual people didn´t "get angry" or were "party-poopers" you´ve disabused me of that notion.

My practice advice? (1) Don´t fight with Earl Grey. Ditto for Freeform. You don´t have to take everything they say as gospel or choose to follow their path. I don´t. Freeform has explained at length and with great passion why males shouldn´t engage in a certain practice that shall go unnamed, but do I listen? I do not. But I don´t challenge him either. Believe it or not, both of these Bums are disciplined, knowledgeable, practiced, and helpful. Warring with people on the internet is a big distraction from your practice. (2) Cultivate humility. (3) Embrace boredom. There´s no need to chase after alledged high-power practices. Often it´s the simple things, so often overlooked, that turn out to be the most potent. You won´t always recognize the magic when it´s happening. Sometimes you´ll be bored doing the same basic practice for the uumpteenth time and won´t know till later how deeply it´s transforming you.

I did! Part of me rebelled against the idea of sharing an octopus body with a certain Bum. In my defense, said Bum is unlikely to want to share an octopus body with my either. Maybe someday I´ll gain an experiential sense of Manitou´s mystical vision but for now I am still struggling in the hell pit of illusory separation. C´est la vie. Unlike Taomeow´s hungry cat, who really did need caring attention, my interpersonal squabbles can safely be forgotten.

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Hear that bell? That`s the ring of truth.

Sounds wonderful! It goes without saying that I wasn´t raised like that. The whole of my spiritual practice boils down to an attempt to return to that sense of innocence, ease and safety. (If you´ve got suggestions in this regard, I´m all ears. Maybe I´ll check out the book.)

Yes. I think truth is always paradoxical, beyond language. Perhaps this is why you so often post in pictures and prefer feelings to words?

Even the Dalai Lama feeds his cat. (I just made that up. Maybe he instructs an underling to feed his cat. Maybe he doesn´t have a cat so that feeding rituals and vet visits won´t get in the way of meditation. Nah...I prefer to think of him with a cat, a stubborn mewling tabby, that he feeds himself.) I don´t have a cat but I do have taxes to pay, healthy meals that aren´t gonna cook themselves, a partner who needs encouragement to get out of the apartment. If only "letting things be" meant that I didn´t have to do any of those things, I´d stay in bed reading all day. To me, letting things be means something akin to the Breema Bodywork principle of No Extra. In Breema they say it like this: to express our true nature, nothing extra is needed. What is extra? Extra is all the extraneous thoughts and feelings we needlessly add, conceptual grit obscuring the stillness that would otherwise shine through our movements. It´s possible to feed the cat with all the awareness and grace of a master performing a tea ceremony. No extra. Can we feed the cat without making up stories about the feeding? No resentment about how much work it is. No excitement about how healthy the cat is going to be with his new tuna fish diet. Can we feed the cat in a way that is naked and pure and beautifully spare? To me, that´s letting things be. The cat gets fed; we express our cat-owner nature; the tao flows on.

True. Then again, he "reserved the right to be wrong."