manitou

Something else just came to me. In both cases, these people are offering you knowledge. The fact that the first person was a comedian is worthy of inspection on its own. I won't try to interpret that, you would know best. But he was handing you knowledge, and it's knowledge about yourself. The girl from school is handing you your work tools, to implement your self-examination. I really do think your higher self is telling you not to feel any better or any worse than anyone else. The character defect to look for here would be a certain type of arrogance, in which people judge themselves to be better or worse than others. To continue in this mindset will be a detriment to the enlightenment you seek.

Maybe it doesn't matter what the items are. Maybe the darkness, the black, is an indication that you shouldn't look down on people. We are all the same entity. To look down on anyone is to look down on ourselves. In that sense, it may very well be a gift, if you use the information to your betterment.

The Dao that can be spoken is not the true Dao.

My roommate is a self-saboteur. Tomorrow he is going into a detox. Only for one week, I don't think it will do a thing for him. I am the last house on the block for him. He has nowhere else to go. He was great for a long time - 2 years, in fact - but the old 'saboteur' has come back to haunt him. He has been doing absolutely everything he can do to get kicked out of this house. He is abusing his prescription meds, (snorting them, in fact), spends all day sleeping, and when he is awake he is a zombie and slurs his words. I do have a Plan B, and that will go into effect if there is not a serious change after this next week. Which I don't think there will be. There's no detox in the world that can fix him if he doesn't really want to be fixed. Because one week is not long enough to find the self-saboteur. He doesn't have the inner honesty to find him at this point. When he was a kid, he got no attention at all from his dad. He was a weird kid. He rode a unicycle to school, for god's sake. In order to get any attention at all, he had to act out in contrary ways - and this trend has apparently shown up his whole life. Just when things are going great, he has to mess it up. To prove to himself one more time that he is a real piece of work. This is the same dynamic that my husband had, although through lengthy recovery (30 years in the AA program) he took an inventory of his personality disorders, tying them to memories that would emerge, and was able to conquer this beast, a little at a time. He died an Enlightened one. The only suggestion I can possibly make for anyone who has to act out like this, is to notice any little memory that may emerge into the consciousness at the time that this anger, and acting out, is happening. I would guess that there is a little mental picture there - and it doesn't have to be anything big at all. Sometimes the strangest little snippets of memory will appear, and it's actually strange that that particular snippet will have lasted so long, to make its continual appearance so much later in life. But no doubt this little memory has reappeared over and over frequently, and it's for good reason. That's when the snowball started rolling down the hill. And now it's huge. Once the memory is seen, it can be re-imprinted. To the opposite direction. My roommate's (Steve) memory always has to do with his dad ignoring him, or pushing him away. If I were to do an imprint 'to the opposite' on him, I would have him picture me as his dad, and he would repeatedly run up to me (as a child) and I would hug him. I would do this repeatedly until he felt the softening of his own heart. I haven't done this because it hasn't been needed up to this point. But now it is. And that won't even work until he is willing to look at himself as he really is today. He needs to SURRENDER. A week in detox just isn't going to get it, I'm afraid. And of course he found the shortest possible detox to stay in; and even at that, he was supposed to check in today, but argued with them about what time he should get there. He still wants everything on his terms; obviously, he's not going to be able to grow under those conditions. And the strange thing is that he has worked in the Betty Ford detox out here in the desert. As a counselor. He knows full well that no detox is going to let you come in willy-nilly at your own convenience. That sets the stage for an unproductive week, right there. So a friend and I are taking him tomorrow. He can try this, but my hopes aren't high. It takes a lot of courage to try and see ourselves as we really are. None of us wants to think we're defective. But we are. It's just a question of degree. When I first got sober 40 years ago, my sponsor told me to assume I had every character defect in the world. That actually made it easy. I wrote down every character defect I could think of (pride, jealousy, greed, arrogance, on and on....) and from that, I looked within - with fearless honesty - to see how much of it I had. What an experience! It did more for me than any spiritual book I've read over the years. I got lighter and lighter as the years went on, and without having to react in a certain way (in my case, it was rebellion against every single thing someone told me - you couldn't tell me nuthin'. And this is a practice that will last an entire lifetime, if we're serious about this. Enlightenment can't be had unless and until we go within and remove these obstacles. It's by removal of these things that the Real is found. Not through the words of anyone else. It's just an inside job, that's all. As to Plan B, I will do it with as much kindness as I possibly can. I will rent him a motel room for a month, paid in advance. I will rent a storage room for a month, and hire someone to take his furniture and personal belongings there. I will change the locks. I will give him a couple hundred bucks, as he has none. No more unemployment checks coming. I will not be responding to calls or texts. But this will give him a full month to figure out his situation. I'm just not his mom, that's all. The man is 65. Oh, I'll attract 'em. I've finally surrendered to the fact that I apparently have a savior complex and the really needy ones land on me like lint on a little black dress. I'm 74, and if I haven't been able to lose this by now, I don't suppose it'll ever be different. So...I have to have Plan B's. That keeps me sane and on course.

Personally, I think 'there' refers to knowing who you really are.

I think they can be, if they pimp a particular mindset. Any religious text, as I see it, that emphasizes that 'theirs is the only way' is by nature exclusionary and can't possibly be the Truth. I think the Truth must encompass everyone and everything for it to be True North. They can be a great conveyance, and I've read books of most all religions and philosophies, including Freemasonry - which will also get you 'there', but in an arduous fashion. There is one little book that absolutely set my previous concept of 'a God' on its head. It's The Impersonal Life, channeled by an anonymous person (later determined to be Joseph Benner, I believe he was a Jesuit priest). An odd title, not real understandable until one sees what he means. The words speak directly to your heart, and there is no doubt upon reading that the words ring true. The book was written long ago, in the early 1900's. The book is a small one, but the channelled words have an incredible amount of impact, I have bought this book over and over for different people over the years. In fact, I'm re-reading it again right now - I usually read it once a year or so. Since about 1982! One caveat. The book, in the first chapter, has a Christian feel to it - maybe because he's trying to bring Christians along further on their path, I don't know. But this is quickly eliminated by the second chapter or so. Another caveat - it's one of those great old books with kind of archaic and schmaltzy language. Stick with it anyway. This book laid out a non-dogmatic path that my particular soul took, because apparently it recognized the truth as spoken. It takes you to the place of the I Am, the place where all paths sooner or later turn to the metaphysical truths common to all spiritual paths. It is the path that takes you out of the vessel you came in on, if this is desirable to you. For me, it is the answer to everything.

velcro

The planets, including ours, are rotating. Without rotation, there would be no Time. Surely it does affect us, if you think about it. Actually, you don't even need to really think about it.

por favor?

Does scoffing render you incapable of driving? I can drive and scoff at the same time.

Bliss to me is the absence of negative thought. The absence of worry, the realization that it's Already Happened because linear time is an illusion. That takes a lot of the foreboding out of anything. I am in bliss every morning walking the pups, looking at the mountains, the sky. The head is turned off, the birdies are talked to. 'Now' is immediate and present. I think the most profound realization to have along these lines is to know that the person walking towards you is actually You. The way you feel inside, the emotions you may feel - any other person on earth has the same make-up prior to conditioning. Our eyes tear up when we are sad. We tremble when we are angry. Our heart swells when we love. The similarity of the physical emotional responses in everybody hit me like a ton of bricks one day. It showed me that we are all the Same Entity.

Scofflaw.

I find that staying in remembrance of All being One is extremely helpful. When the Nazarene said that 'whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me' says it all. Money, to me, is the most pointed way to prove this to one's self. Money, as I see it, is nothing more than stuck energy. It takes energy to make it, it takes energy to spend it. When it's sitting there in your wallet, it's stuck. How much is that little piece of paper really worth? 1/100th of a mill? The whole money thing is a mind construct, symbolized by a figure being printed on that worthless piece of paper. If you see others 'as yourself', the answers appear. The money is to be spent liberally for the betterment of all of the Whole. And when you start thinking that way, money will reappear in some fashion, often from out in left field. In my particular case, since I've been liberal with money, it truly is coming from left field. I recently took a nasty fall on the roads of the mobile home park, the roads in the back where I live are horrible. they photo this area for funding requests when they want to pave elsewhere in the park. When I found that out, the intentionality of leaving that area intact for photo purposes, I decided to take it further. I am now aligned with a law firm whose phone number is 88-SHARK, lol. I broke my elbow, but just barely. the osteo told me that if you've got to break anything in your body, the radial head of the ulna is the very best bone to break! My teeth almost went through my lip, but not quite. My nose was bloody, but not broken. The enormous bruise on my chin is now gone. the point is, that this 'almost' tragedy is turning into the possibility of truly having some funds with which to really make some changes. If it's a sizeable settlement or award, I will contact the city managers in this area and see if there isn't something we can do to help the homeless population. Maybe feeding stations or something, or chits for motels. I don't know, but I'm thinking. But it's not just money, it's everything. Everybody is You. And History and Future are happening Now, as someone said earlier.

papyrus

I'd say probably not, if you're referring to the same 'fear of death' that the human has. But it is very interesting to see a dog come up on a dead thing - their posture is so curious and yet hesitant. Like they almost recognize it but not quite.

You little dickens you.

It isn't a belief, helpfuldemon. It's what remains after everything else has been taken away. The past conditioning is a thing that must be dealt with if you seek ultimate clarity. It isn't so much that we're all stuffed into one, it's more like the intelligence that's contained in a developing embryo. When an embryo develops, each cell is identical to the last one that is produced. However, the thing that determines whether a cell is going to be part of an eyeball, or a fingernail, or a blood cell....is how they line up next to each other. That's where the Intelligence comes in. This intelligence is the intelligence of creation. It is built into the cells. They know their mission. So the intelligence I'm referring to is captured by the phrase 'the oak is in the acorn'. the template is there, the template is passed on over the generations. But the blueprint of the adult tree is contained within. How do those little cells know, when they're forming an infant finger, to line up 14,000 times for a pinkie, and then return. And then line up 16,000 times for the ring finger, then return. (No, I've not counted, it's an illustration). To honor the individual within us, as you suggest, is to reinforce the separation. We honor the individual body as a conveyance for this experience, but to honor the individual personality is to cling to patterns. Beloved patterns, but patterns nonetheless. If we honor our own accomplishments and dwell in them, this is doing nothing more than bolstering ego, which is a big pitfall. The conditioning must be removed.

One of our members, Ilumairen, gave me a woo-woo method for selling my house. She had me place acorns in the four main corners of the house. There was something else too, I can't remember. So I tried it. That night, there was a horrendous storm. The lightning took down a huge tree, and all of my electronic equipment took a dive. I had to buy new everything. I immediately removed the acorns. The house sold anyway

The exact number I think you're talking about is 99.9999999999999 (13 nines) to 1. Not much in there at all, but what's there is apparently spinning pretty fast

It probably would not be interpreted as spam on a Daoist website

It seems likely to me that the dark matter could be the Void. The original idea pushes out, once thought. The universe is still expanding as the thought expands. When reading something like the Avatamsaka Sutra or the Lotus Sutra, there is much mention of zillions of 'Buddha lands' which exist, but not on this plane, apparently. How could it possibly be, that there are so very many atomic combinations; our life, our galaxy operates on a particular formula. but who's to say there aren't other atomic combinations happening right now, even in this very spot? That 'matter' is composed of different ratios and therefore don't appear to exist on our plane?

It was just as good the second time

sandwich

It is mind boggling. This is why memories can be used and reversed in healing, because of the non-linearity. When done from that place and that mindset, it can happen if you find the right dynamic. And the right memory.

You're rife with raccoon vids. Anything on iguanas?