manitou

He couldn't find a replacement because he wasn't looking in the right place. He should have looked in the most unlikely place, within himself. He would've found what he was seeking rather than come to the conclusion that because He couldn't find it, therefore nothing exists. He just didn't find it, that's all. When you talk about Beliefs you talk about something of the head, a left brain decision made from conscious evaluation of data that you've accrued 'out there'. When you speak of Realization it's a totally different thing altogether. Realization are gulps of truth we see about ourselves or life's patterns that are as a result of experience; a merger of the left brain organization with the right brain intuition and knowledge from experience. (Please forgive my oversimplification by referring to left and right brain, but I think it works for these purposes) this is called self-cultivation. I doubt that he did it.

Lao Tzu would say the utility of the pond was in its emptiness, lol.

Actually, Marbles, I'm in full agreement to the idea that God Is Dead. I fully agree with your Mr. N. But I think God is Dead in the sense that the idea of a god being "out there somewhere" directing traffic for the world is what he was talking about. Perhaps if he had lived a bit longer he may have evolved a bit further and gotten down to the golden fleece. Mr. N. "was" God, if you will - only he wasn't in awareness of it.

LOL, you darling thing. So that being the case, why bother with philosophy? the cells of the body are dead but the current of life that moved through the cells for 70 years is not dead. It's elsewhere.

I can only speak for my experience. I could be all wet, Marbles will second that When one reaches a certain point, the higher self merges with the lower self. It is my experience that we all share the same 'higher self'. You can feel it, physically actually, when the merger occurs. You find that your thoughts are not on the mundane during the day - and if they are, they are merged with Oneness and love, and the recognition that everyone is One. To look into the pupils of another is to look into the pupils of God, for lack of a better term. You are the same as he, and the only thing that differentiates you is what continent you were born on, what kind of input was hammered into you as a child; and a myriad of other differentiators like schooling, etc. My guess is that Buddha also felt some sensation via senses; even if it was only on the soles of his feet or his bum when he sat down. I think this concept is a question of degree. After all, we are still in this ****** body.

Where does he end up? And to do things with intent doesn't mean to bamboozle our will through the phenomena. To align instead with the Tao before doing something with intent is the essence of wu-wei. Let it happen rather than make it happen; to keep the concept of Love at the center of our actions. IMO, there is a difference between walking The Way and talking The Way. This very subject we're hitting on right now is the crux of it. To talk the Way and not walk it makes one a hobbyist. To walk The Way is to head toward adeptness. Does Nietzsche end up at the 10,000 or at the One?

I couldn't hate anything you said if you shoved it down my throat, V. Okay, the monkeys are avoiding the phenomenal. This is how the monkeys learn to quiet their minds. If there are streams of thoughts going through the monkey mind, being in the present isn't possible. It is by learning to quiet the mind that it is possible to go through the day with NO judgment, optimally. Quieting the mind is essential to No Judgment and letting the phenomena appear and disappear around us, wherever we are. I think one must come after the other.

I've read an awful lot of masters and my path seems to have aligned with theirs. Have you found a master yet who maintains there is nothing but the physical? Reversion to the One.

I see what you're saying here. Basically, unless you're in a state of meditation and your mind is free of all thought, we are not in the moment. To be truly in the moment is to be in bliss. But sometimes that involves senses too, I think. Driving down the road yesterday morning in this Ohio springtime, seeing all the robins, smelling the trees, feeling the sun on my face. This was total absorption of senses; yet, just for a moment it all came together and tears formed in my eyes and I felt absolute bliss. Maybe there is a way to be totally in the present (as Nature has a habit of doing to us when it displays its incredible beauty) and it involves complete immersion and comingling of the senses? Just guessing here. when you said 'when you are in time, you are not in the present. This reminds me of a visual metaphor I see in my mind's eye. An inner tube with a bubble on it, like a weak spot. The big inner tube is eternity, the Now, represented by the air inside, moving around the inside of the tube very slowly. But in the little bubble on the weak spot the air has to move around the inside of the bubble in a fast fashion to keep pace with the slower pace of the air within the rest of the inner tube. Linear time is represented by the inside of the small bubble, and it's this little world of distorted air that we're in. Until we're not. Of course the flaw in this metaphor is that 'eternity' or 'now' wouldn't be moving at all, theoretically. but it works for the metaphor.

Okay, Mr. Marbles. I'm gonna get all thinkey on your a**. We don't have free will - we are all the same entity. The entity thinks and manifests itself but it has to express itself in this particular sense through these darn filters we call a human brain and a human mouth.. We just think we think. After the internal channels have been cleared, the thinking gets straighter without having to go through all the contortions of character disorders. The manifestation is at the center of everything; we are its method of communication with itself, its 'idea' being expressed. Whatever the heck that idea is. Probably ultimate love, I would guess. And I think that VMarco had his finger on it when he posted above about the seeming reality of an object - but under further examination the particles get further and further apart, until at last we have nothing but Thought. Thought. That's all we are, anything is. One big honkin' idea.

Guilty as charged. It won't stop, lol.

I sometimes wonder if there aren't entirely different life scenarios being enacted around us that we can't see. Like we're inhabiting this planet along with others, only we have different sensory organs and don't get in each other's way. Especially given the fact that linear time is illusory an the potential is here for combinations of past, present and future all at once.

But what if all the suns were the same essence? That suns everywhere are the very same substance and thereby part of the All? That the Idea is the same in each universe, only in some universes there does not 'appear' to be life. And what if there is life all over the place but our particular sensory set-ups just don't see, hear, or smell it? God, I love this stuff. This is the only place you can conjecture stuff like this and not get locked up.

Thanks, Cat, for the information on Dieter Broers and the Solar Revolution. The clip didn't play when I tried (copywrite problems?) but I did get on his website. If All Is One and reversion is the action of the Tao, then perhaps the sun is the very thing we 'revert' to, as part of the One. If the sun is acting up in some different ways, then who's to say this isn't affecting our mentality? All I can speak for is myself. There are new neural pathways being created, I can feel them being created, and they lead to some interesting places. My guess is that you are experiencing the same.

Fascinating. That the surface temperature of the sun is an illusion?

What a quagmire, lol! yes, do become a degenerate now so that you can recover later. Worked for me. I think what I was trying to say is that it's just a way of discovering your own character. Not all steps would pertain to someone on TTB's that didn't have an alcohol or addiction problem. Step 4, for example, is the one where we make a list of our character defects. Step 5 is where you communicate those defects to someone you trust, a humbling experience to be sure. One of the later steps (can't remember which) one must make amends to the people we harmed (that we uncovered in step four). Step 11 is to continue to take personal inventory and when wrong promptly admitted it. That's it. Nothing about alcohol. But a powerful and organized tool it is. And yes - red whine would be a good place to start.

And is there any reason to believe that our sun is different in any way from the other suns in the universe or beyond? That the Awareness extends Everywhere and some pieces of cooled sun become suitable for evolution of physical life? P.S. Love your brain, Marco!

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the 'flushing' program you seek is the 12 steps of recovery - it will give you a great start on removing your character defects so that truths can be more easily seen. This was a magic pill for me, my head was where yours is now - nothing but negative thoughts, and mine were hateful and homicidal as well. I was having daytime lucid dreams about going into the police station I worked at and blowing away everyone I saw with an M16. This 12 step framework changed the negativism forever within my mind. It has worked for countless people - it would be a simple thing for you to try, and if it doesn't work, go to the next thing. But the steps have been working for folks since 1935 and the Oxford Group before that. It doesn't have to be used merely for recovery from addiction. They can be employed by anybody with a will to uncover their own character flaws. And the more character flaws we can remove, the more clarity we achieve because our visual 'lens' is no longer contorted.

I guess it depends on whether a person thinks it's all Matter or all Mind. Your points are beautiful - I love the apple growing, falling from the tree, reproducing. But this is the realm of the 10,000 things. Don't forget that the Tao is reversion to the One, from the 10,000. It all starts at Source. It is to Source we must return to fully See. It is Source that is the tree and us humanoids are one branch of it.

I knew an enlightened old man who spent most of his hours in spiritual libraries, etc. I ran into him once by chance as he was looking up from a heady scripture of some sort and just at that moment he had the most amazed look on his face. He looked up at me and said "Do you know there are souls in the sun?" This old fellow wasn't the fool-around type, he really had a realization at that moment. I've never understood what that meant, but there was a certain resonance in his words that I couldn't deny. This was perhaps 25 years ago, Herb is long gone, I'm sure. At the bottom of my soul has always dwelt this odd statement from Herb that I never cut loose, for some reason. The more I dwell in the metaphysics and mergers of paths, the more things seem to point to what he is saying. Perhaps the sun signifies the original Idea; a piece of the sun lies at the center of the earth too. A piece of the sun seems to be ignited inside my soul as well, which is synonymous with kundalini awakening. The one time Joe and I experienced an incredible tantric event it seemed that we had a shared experience within the sun, or some place equally as glorious, golden, warm, and a place where there is no passage of time. It was the closest thing to feeling like we were 'in' the sun that you can imagine. So the more my brain struggles with Herb's odd words (that won't go away!) I just try to keep my mind open about it. Perhaps there is a 'physical counterpart' to the resting place of souls and it happens to be the sun. I'm just sayin', lol.

Have you figured out your truth yet, hehehe?

that's very quantum of you, lol.

Have you found a master yet that does not end up in the place of oneness? Where there is no distinction form to form? I think we are all the same zillion-eyed Intelligence temporarily dressed up in different dust.

Sometimes I think the sun is the containment of souls. But I can get pretty far out there.

I totally understand what you are saying here. As to going within and purging the undesirable (the judgment of other people and other situations) this must be done with judgment. No argument here. I spent years doing this. I judged myself relentlessly, then went back and made amends to everyone I could remember that I had ever harmed. I judge my own actions to this day; this is referred to as 'tracking' ones' self within a shamanic sense. No, I'm speaking of a different type of judgment. I think we're saying the same thing on two different sides of the coin, Marco. I had to judge myself in order to gain the ability to not judge others. This truly can be done. It often involves changing one's thoughts the moment after they've been thought. This is how I have made my corrections over the years; to gain control over the thoughts I desire and to eliminate the ones I don't want, the judgmental ones. I must remember always that there is no person on the face of the earth that is not contained within me. Whether that person has lived in the past, lives now, or lives in the future. It's all here and now, and We are It. To try and truly love every person we come across, even a horrific criminal, is to have compassion as large as the sky.