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Yep....thoughts erupt spontaneously as a result of exposure to stimuli.......no thinker needed. When the thinker comes into being and takes over, it creates its own set of thoughts apart from the senses reaction to stimuli. It's trademark is the constant jibber jabber that goes on incessantly in most of our minds.
I've been thinking;)
About thoughts. What is a thought? Where do they come from? The basics.
Thoughts seem to pop into our heads spontaneously and continuously as a result of the way we perceive our environment, and we then act upon those thoughts to navigate through our lives based upon how we have interpreted and organized those thoughts, giving meaning to them. So, it is our interaction with our environment really that is responsible for causing the thought to come into being, we then shape the thought out of the perception and make it our own.
The Thinker and Thought
Is there any relationship between the thinker and his thought, or is there only thought and not a thinker? If there are no thoughts there is no thinker. When you have thoughts, is there a thinker? Perceiving the impermanency of thoughts, thought itself creates the thinker who gives himself permanency; so thought creates the thinker; then the thinker establishes himself as a permanent entity apart from thoughts which are always in a state of flux. So, thought creates the thinker and not the other way about. The thinker does not create thought, for if there are no thoughts, there is no thinker. The thinker separates himself from his parent and tries to establish a relationship, a relationship between the so-called permanent, which is the thinker created by thought, and the impermanent or transient, which is thought. So, both are really transient.Pursue a thought completely to its very end. Think it out fully, feel it out and discover for yourself what happens. You will find that there is no thinker at all. For, when thought ceases, the thinker is not. We think there are two states, as the thinker and the thought. These two states are fictitious, unreal. There is only thought, and the bundle of thought creates the 'me', the thinker.
What Are You Doing with Your Life?....JK
Observing thought
There is no knowledge of tomorrow, only conjecture as to what might happen tomorrow, based on your knowledge of what has been. A mind that observes with knowledge is incapable of following swiftly the stream of thought. It is only by observing without the screen of knowledge that you begin to see the whole structure of your own thinking. And as you observe - which is not to condemn or accept, but simply to watch - you will find that thought comes to an end. Casually to observe an occasional thought leads nowhere. But if you observe the process of thinking and do not become an observer apart from the observed, if you see the whole movement of thought without accepting or condemning it, then that very observation puts an end immediately to thought - and therefore the mind is compassionate, it is in a state of constant mutation.
Saanen 4th Public Talk 14th July 1963
The years of hard training are only a preparation for the warrior's devastating encounter with whatever lies out there, beyond this point. What will happen in that encounter depends on whether or not you have enough personal power to focus your unwavering attention on the wings of your perception, so let's review what we've done.
The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world. Accepting that seems to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we know everything about the world. A teacher, from the very first act he performs, aims at stopping that view. Sorcerers call it stopping the internal dialogue, and they are convinced that it is the single most important technique that an apprentice can learn.
In order to stop the view of the world which one has held since the cradle, it is not enough to just wish or make a resolution. One needs a practical task; that practical task is called the right way of walking. It seems harmless and nonsensical. As everything else which has power in itself or by itself, the right way of walking does not attract attention.
Walking in that specific manner saturates the tonal , it floods it. You see, the attention of the tonal has to be placed on its creations. In fact, it is that attention that creates the order of the world in the first place; so, the tonal must be attentive to the elements of its world in order to maintain it, and must, above all, uphold the view of the world as internal dialogue.
The right way of walking is a subterfuge. The warrior, first by curling his fingers, draws attention to the arms; and then by looking fixedly, without focusing his eyes, at any point directly in front of him on the arc that starts at the tip of his feet and ends above the horizon, literally floods his tonal with information. The tonal , without its one-to-one relation with the elements of its description, is incapable of talking to itself, and thus one becomes silent.
The position of the fingers does not matter at all. The only consideration is to draw attention to the arms by clasping the fingers in various unaccustomed ways. The important thing is the manner in which the eyes, by being kept unfocused, detect an enormous number of features of the world without being clear about them. The eyes in that state are capable of picking out details which are too fleeting for normal vision.
Together with the right way of walking, a teacher must teach his apprentice another possibility, which is even more subtle: the possibility of acting without believing, without expecting rewards--acting just for the hell of it. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I told you that the success of a teacher's enterprise depends on how well and how harmoniously he guides his apprentice in this specific respect.
Stopping the internal dialogue is, however, the key to the sorcerers' world. The rest of the activities are only props; all they do is accelerate the effect of stopping the internal dialogue. There are two major activities or techniques used to accelerate the stopping of the internal dialogue: erasing personal history and dreaming .
Don Juan Matus....Tales of Power
From the known to the unknown
How is this transition from the denial of the known to the unknown to come into being? How does one deny? Does one deny the known, not in great dramatic incidents but in little incidents? Do I deny when I am shaving and I remember the lovely time I had in Switzerland? Does one deny the remembrance of a pleasant time? Does one grow aware of it, and deny it? That is not dramatic, it is not spectacular, nobody knows about it. Still this constant denial of little things, the little wiping's, the little rubbing's off, not just one great big wiping away, is essential. It is essential to deny thought as remembrance, pleasant or unpleasant, every minute of the day as it arises. One is doing it not for any motive, not in order to enter into the extraordinary state of the unknown. You live in Rishi Valley and think of Bombay or Rome. This creates a conflict, makes the mind dull, a divided thing. Can you see this and wipe it away? Can you keep on wiping away not because you want to enter into the unknown? You can never know what the unknown is because the moment you recognise it as the unknown you are back in the known.
On Education Talk to Teachers Chapter 4
The 8-Hour Sleep Myth: How I Learned That Everything I Knew About Sleep Was Wrong
By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on March 5, 2012, Printed on March 8, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/154424/the_8-hour_sleep_myth%3A_how_i_learned_that_everything_i_knew_about_sleep_was_wrong
I’ve always been at odds with sleep. Starting around adolescence, morning became a special form of hell. Long school commutes meant rising in 6am darkness, then huddling miserably near the bathroom heating vent as I struggled to wrest myself from near-paralysis. The sight of eggs turned my not-yet-wakened stomach, so I scuttled off without breakfast. In fourth grade, my mother noticed that instead of playing outside after school with the other kids, I lay zonked in front of the TV, dozing until dinner. “Lethargy of unknown cause,” pronounced the doctor.
High school trigonometry commenced at 7:50am. I flunked, stupefied with sleepiness. Only when college allowed me to schedule courses in the afternoon did the joy of education return. My decision to opt for grad school was partly traceable to a horror of returning to the treadmill of too little sleep and exhaustion, which a 9-to-5 job would surely bring.
In my late 20s, I began to wake up often for a couple of hours in the middle of the night – a phenomenon linked to female hormonal shifts. I’ve met these vigils with dread, obsessed with lost sleep and the next day’s dysfunction. Beside my bed I stash an arsenal of weapons against insomnia: lavender sachets, sleep CDs, a stuffed sheep that makes muffled ocean noises, and drugstore remedies from valerian to melatonin which cause me "rebound insomnia" the moment I stop taking them.
The Sleep Fairy continued to elude me.
Recently I confessed my problem to the doctor, ashamed to fail at something so simple that babies and rodents can do it on a dime. When I asked for Ambien, she cut me a glance that made me feel like a heroin addict and lectured me on the dangers of “controlled substances.” Her offering of “sleep hygiene” bromides like reserving my bedroom solely for sleep was useless to a studio apartment-dweller.
Conventional medical wisdom dropped me at a dead end. Why did I need to use a bedroom for nothing but sleeping when no other mammal had such a requirement? When for most of history, humans didn’t either? Our ancestors crashed with beasties large and small roaming about, bodies tossing and snoring nearby, and temperatures fluctuating wildly. And yet they slept. How on earth did they do it?
A lot differently than we do, it turns out.
The 8-Hour Sleep Myth
Pursuing the truth about sleep means winding your way through a labyrinth of science, consumerism and myth. Researchers have had barely a clue about what constitutes “normal” sleep. Is it total time spent sleeping? A certain amount of time in a particular phase? The pharmaceutical industry recommends that we drug ourselves through the night, which, it turns out, doesn’t even work. The average time spent sleeping increases by only a few minutes with the use of prescription sleep aids. And -- surprise! -- doctors have just linked sleeping pills to cancer. We have memory foam mattresses, sleep clinics, hotel pillow concierges, and countless others strategies to put us to bed. And yet we complain about sleep more than ever.
The blame for modern sleep disorders is usually laid at the doorstep of Thomas Edison, whose electric light bulb turned the night from a time of rest to one of potentially endless activity and work. Proponents of the rising industrial culture further pushed the emphasis of work over rest, and the sense of sleep as lazy indulgence.
But there’s something else, which I learned recently while engaged in a bout of insomnia-driven Googling. A Feb. 12, 2012 article on the BBC Web site, “The Myth of the 8-Hour Sleep,” has permanently altered the way I think about sleep. It proclaimed something that the body had always intuited, even as the mind floundered helplessly.
Turns out that psychiatrist Thomas Wehr ran an experiment back in the ‘90s in which people were thrust into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. When their sleep regulated, a strange pattern emerged. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech would not have been surprised by this pattern. In 2001, he published a groundbreaking paper based on 16 years of research, which revealed something quite amazing: humans did not evolve to sleep through the night in one solid chunk. Until very recently, they slept in two stages. Shazam.
In his book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, Ekrich presents over 500 references to these two distinct sleep periods, known as the “first sleep” and the “second sleep,” culled from diaries, court records, medical manuals, anthropological studies, and literature, including The Odyssey. Like an astrolabe pointing to some forgotten star, these accounts referenced a first sleep that began two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
This waking period, known in some cultures as the “watch," was filled with everything from bringing in the animals to prayer. Some folks visited neighbors. Others smoked a pipe or analyzed their dreams. Often they lounged in bed to read, chat with bedfellows, or have much more refreshing sex than we modern humans have at bedtime. A 16th-century doctor’s manual prescribed sex after the first sleep as the most enjoyable variety.
But these two sleeps and their magical interim were swept away so completely that by the 20th century, they were all but forgotten.
Historian Craig Koslofsky delves into the causes of this massive shift in human behavior in his new book, Evening's Empire. He points out that before the 17th century, you’d have to be a fool to go wandering around at night, where ne’er-do-wells and cutthroats lurked on pitch-black streets. Only the wealthy had candles, and even they had little need or desire to venture from home at night. Street lighting and other trends gradually changed this, and eventually nighttime became fashionable and hanging out in bed a mark of indolence. The industrial revolution put the exclamation point on this sentence of wakefulness. By the 19th century, health pundits argued in favor of a single, uninterrupted sleep.
We have been told over and over that the eight-hour sleep is ideal. But in many cases, our bodies have been telling us something else. Since our collective memory has been erased, anxiety about nighttime wakefulness has kept us up even longer, and our eight-hour sleep mandate may have made us more prone to stress. The long period of relaxation we used to get after a hard day’s work may have been better for our peace of mind than all the yoga in Manhattan.
After learning this, I went in search of lost sleep.
Past Life Regression
“Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.”
? Heraclitus, Fragments
What intrigued me most about the sleep research was a feeling of connection to ancient humans and to a realm beyond clock-driven, electrified industrial life, whose endless demands are more punishing than ever. Much as Werner Hertzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams pulls the viewer into the lives of ancient cave dwellers in southern France who painted the walls with marvelous images, reading about how our ancestors filled their nights with dream reflection, lovemaking and 10-to-12 hour stretches of down-time produced a strange sense of intimacy and wonder.
I’m a writer and editor who works from home, without children, so I’ve had the luxury, for the last couple of weeks, of completely relinquishing myself to a new (or quite old) way of sleeping. I’ve been working at a cognitive shift – looking upon early evening sleepiness as a gift, and plopping into bed if I feel like it. I try to view the wakeful period, if it should come, as a magical, blessed time when my email box stops flooding and the screeching horns outside my New York window subside.
Instead of heading to bed with anxiety, I’ve tried to dive in like a voluptuary, pushing away my guilt about the list of things I could be doing and letting myself become beautifully suspended between worlds. I’ve started dimming the lights a couple of hours after dusk and looking at the nighttime not as a time to pursue endless work, but to daydream, drift, putter about, and enter an almost meditative state.
The books I’ve been reading in the evening hours have been specially chosen as a link to dreamy ruminations of our ancestor’s “watch” period. Volumes like Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body or Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors provide the kind of reflective, incantatory experience the nighttime seems made for. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams would be another excellent choice, and I know from experience that reading it before bedtime triggers the most vivid mental journeys.
In sleep, we slip back to a more primitive state. We go on a psychic archaeological dig. This is part of the reason that Freud proclaimed dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious and lifted his metaphors from the researchers who were sifting through the layers of ancient history on Egyptian digs, uncovering relics and forgotten memories. Ghosts flutter about us when we lie down to rest. Our waking identities dissolve, and we become creatures whose rhythms derive from the moon and the seas much more than the clock and the computer.
As we learn more, we may realize that giving sleep and rest the center stage in our lives may be as fundamental to our well-being as the way we eat and the medicines that cure us. And if we come to treasure this time of splendid relaxation, we may have much more to offer in the daytime hours.
Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet contributing editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of 'Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.' Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.
Everything that I've done with you was done to accomplish one single task, the task of cleaning and reordering your island of the tonal . I've told you countless times that a most drastic change is needed if you want to succeed in the path of knowledge. That change is not a change of mood, or attitude, or outlook; that change entails the transformation of the island of the tonal .
Once that transformation has been accomplished a teacher would usually say to his disciple that he has arrived at a final crossroad. To say such a thing is misleading, though. In my opinion there is no final crossroad, no final step to anything. And since there is no final step to anything, there shouldn't be any secrecy about any part of our lot as luminous beings. Personal power decides who can or who cannot profit by a revelation; my experiences with my fellow men have proven to me that very, very few of them would be willing to listen; and of those few who listen even fewer would be willing to act on what they have listened to; and of those who are willing to act even fewer have enough personal power to profit by their acts. So, the matter of secrecy about the sorcerers' explanation boils down to a routine, perhaps a routine as empty as any other routine.
At any rate, you know now about the tonal and the nagual , which are the core of the sorcerers' explanation. To know about them seems to be quite harmless. We are talking innocently about them as if they were just an ordinary topic of conversation. But before we venture beyond this point a fair warning is required; a teacher is supposed to speak in earnest terms and warn his disciple that the harmlessness and placidity of this moment are a mirage, that there is a bottomless abyss in front of him, and that once the door opens there is no way to close it again.
Don Juan Matus.....Tales of Power
Your Struggle is the Human Struggle
A total, an enriching revolution cannot take place unless you and I understand ourselves as a total process. You and I are not isolated individuals but are the result of the whole human struggle with its illusions, fancies, pursuits, ignorance, strife, conflict, and misery. One cannot begin to alter the condition of the world without understanding oneself. If you see that, there is immediately within you a complete revolution, is there not? Then no guru is necessary because knowledge of oneself is from moment to moment, it is not the accumulation of hearsay, nor is it contained in the precepts of religious teachers. Because you are discovering yourself in relationship with another from moment to moment, relationship has a completely different meaning. Relationship then is a revelation, a constant process of the discovery of oneself, and from this self-discovery, action takes place. So, self-knowledge can come only through relationship, not through isolation. Relationship is action, and self-knowledge is the result of awareness in action.
What Are You Doing with Your Life?...JK
"Relationship is self-revelation; it is because we do not want to be revealed to ourselves that we hide in comfort, and then relationship loses it extraordinary depth, significance and beauty. There can be true relationship only when there is love, but love is not the search for gratification. Love exists only when there is self-forgetfulness, where there is complete communion, not between one or two, but communion with the highest; and that can only take place when the self is forgotten."
- Krishnamurti, First and Last Freedom
Heat wave for you guys! A city park or sidewalk cafe would be
nice;)
Yes....moment to moment is more accurate.
Speaking of moments.....it's 65 degrees here today. Gonna have to go out and enjoy it.
I've never read the book or seen the movie but, I've always been fond of the title....."The Unbearable Lightness of Being". It's the stillness in the eye of the hurricane.
Learning how to not rush to "conclusions" and judgements seems to take a lifetime of effort, lol.
Sigh.....I know what you mean.
Those are the types of conversations we should be having.
A warrior is, let's say, a prisoner of power; a prisoner who has one free choice: the choice to act either like an impeccable warrior, or to act like an ass. In the final analysis, perhaps the warrior is not a prisoner but a slave of power, because that choice is no longer a choice for him. He cannot act in any other way but impeccably. To act like an ass would drain him and cause his demise.
An immortal being has all the time in the world for doubts and bewilderment and fears. A warrior, on the other hand, cannot cling to the meanings made under the tonal 's order, because he knows for a fact that the totality of himself has but a little time on this earth.
A warrior cannot be helpless, or bewildered or frightened, not under any circumstances. For a warrior there is time only for his impeccability; everything else drains his power, impeccability replenishes it.
Impeccability is to do your best in whatever you're engaged in. The key to all these matters of impeccability is the sense of having or not having time. As a rule of thumb, when you feel and act like an immortal being that has all the time in the world you are not impeccable; at those times you should turn, look around, and then you will realize that your feeling of having time is an idiocy. There are no survivors on this earth!
Turn off your internal dialogue and let something in you flow out and expand. That something is your perception, but don't try to figure out what I mean. Just let the whispering of the nagual guide you.
Don Juan Matus......Tales of Power
A Problem that Thought Cannot Resolve
The self is a problem that thought cannot resolve. There must be an awareness which is not of thought. To be aware, without condemnation or justification, of the activities of the self - just to be aware - is sufficient. If you are aware in order to find out how to resolve the problem, in order to transform it, in order to produce a result, then it is still within the field of the self, of the 'me'. So long as we are seeking a result, whether through analysis, through awareness, through constant examination of every thought, we are still within the field of thought, which is within the field of the 'me', of the 'I', of the ego, or what you will. As long as the activity of the mind exists, surely there can be no love. When there is love, we shall have no social problems.
What Are You Doing with Your Life?....JK
Wasn't it?....on all kinds of levels.
That was interesting;)
In order to be an average tonal a man must have unity. His whole being must belong to the island of the tonal . Without that unity the man would go berserk; a sorcerer, however, has to break that unity, but without endangering his being. A sorcerer's goal is to last; that is, he doesn't take unnecessary risks, therefore he spends years sweeping his island until a moment when he could, in a manner of speaking, sneak off it.
To be a perfect tonal means to be aware of everything that takes place on the island of the tonal . It takes a gigantic struggle to clean the island of the tonal.
The whispering of the nagual will come at times and then vanish. Don't be afraid of it, or of any unusual sensation that you may have from now on. But above all, don't indulge and become obsessed with those sensations.
Don Juan Matus....Tales of Power
Your Struggle is the Human Struggle
A total, an enriching revolution cannot take place unless you and I understand ourselves as a total process. You and I are not isolated individuals but are the result of the whole human struggle with its illusions, fancies, pursuits, ignorance, strife, conflict, and misery. One cannot begin to alter the condition of the world without understanding oneself. If you see that, there is immediately within you a complete revolution, is there not? Then no guru is necessary because knowledge of oneself is from moment to moment, it is not the accumulation of hearsay, nor is it contained in the precepts of religious teachers. Because you are discovering yourself in relationship with another from moment to moment, relationship has a completely different meaning. Relationship then is a revelation, a constant process of the discovery of oneself, and from this self-discovery, action takes place.
So, self-knowledge can come only through relationship, not through isolation. Relationship is action, and self-knowledge is the result of awareness in action.
What Are You Doing with Your Life?......JK
The only way to fend off the nagual is to remain unaltered. The nagual is only for witnessing. So, we can talk about what we witness and about how we witness it. You want to take on the explanation of how it is all possible, though, and that is an abomination. You want to explain the nagual with the tonal . That is stupid. We make sense in talking only because we stay within certain boundaries, and those boundaries are not applicable to the nagual.
We interpret any unknown expression of the nagual as something we know. The nagual might be interpreted as a breeze shaking the leaves, or even as some strange light, perhaps a lightning bug of unusual size. If a man who doesn't see is pressed, he would say that he thought he saw something but could not remember what. This is only natural. The man would be talking sense. After all, his eyes would have judged nothing extraordinary; being the eyes of the tonal they have to be limited to the tonal 's world, and in that world there is nothing staggeringly new, nothing which the eyes cannot apprehend and the tonal cannot explain.
Don Juan Matus......Tales of Power
What Is the Self?
Do we know what we mean by the self? By that, I mean the idea, the memory, the conclusion, the experience, the various forms of nameable and unnameable intentions, the conscious endeavor to be or not to be, the accumulated memory of the unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all, whether it is projected outwardly in action or projected spiritually as virtue; the striving after all this is the self. In it is included the competition, the desire to be. The whole process of that is the self; and we know actually when we are faced with it that it is an evil thing. I am using the word 'evil' intentionally, because the self is dividing: the self is self-enclosing: its activities, however noble, are separative and isolating. We know all this. We also know those extraordinary moments when the self is not there, in which there is no sense of endeavor, of effort, and which happens when there is love.
JK
The History of the Devil - Network Ireland TV
The nagual can perform extraordinary things, things that do not seem possible, things that are unthinkable for the tonal . But the extraordinary thing is that the performer has no way of knowing how those things happen. The secret of the sorcerer is that he knows how to get to the nagual , but once he gets there, your guess is as good as his as to what takes place.
Let's say that the warrior learns to tune his will , to direct it to a pinpoint, to focus it wherever he wants. It is as if his will , which comes from the midsection of his body, is one single luminous fiber, a fiber that he can direct at any conceivable place. That fiber is the road to the nagual . Or I could also say that the warrior sinks into the nagual through that single fiber. Once he has sunk, the expression of the nagual is a matter of his personal temperament.
One of the aims of the warrior's training is to cut the bewilderment of the tonal , until the warrior is so fluid that he can admit everything without admitting anything.
Don Juan Matus....Tales of Power
Action without idea ?
What do we mean by 'idea'? Surely idea is the process of thought, is it not? Idea is a process of mentation, of thinking; and thinking is always a reaction, either of the conscious or of the unconscious. Thinking is a process of verbalisation which is the result of memory. Thinking is a process of time. So, when action is based on the process of thinking, such action must inevitably be conditioned, isolated. Idea must oppose idea; idea must be dominated by idea. There is a gap then between action and idea. What we are trying to find out is whether it is possible for action to be without idea. We see how idea separates people. As I have already explained, knowledge and belief are essentially separating qualities. Beliefs never bind people, they always separate people. When action is based on belief, or an idea, or an ideal, such an action must inevitably be isolated, fragmented. Is it possible to act without the process of thought; thought being a process ?of time, a process of calculation, a process of self-protection, a process of belief, denial, condemnation, justification? Surely it must have occurred to you, as it has to me, whether action is at all possible without idea.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
Nothing that we may have gained in the course of our lives can reveal to us the designs of power. A warrior must struggle like a demon to shrink his tonal ; and yet at the very moment the tonal shrinks, the warrior must reverse all that struggle to immediately halt that shrinking.
After the tonal shrinks, the warrior is closing the gate from the other side. As long as his tonal is unchallenged and his eyes are tuned only for the tonal 's world, the warrior is on the safe side of the fence. He's on familiar ground and knows all the rules. But when his tonal shrinks, he is on the windy side, and that opening must be shut tight immediately, or he would be swept away.
As a rule the tonal must defend itself, at any cost, every time it is threatened; so it is of no real consequence how the tonal reacts in order to accomplish its defense. The only important matter is that the tonal of a warrior must become acquainted with other alternatives. What a teacher aims for, in this case, is the total weight of those possibilities. It is the weight of those new possibilities which helps to shrink the tonal . By the same token, it is the same weight which helps stop the tonal from shrinking out of the picture.
Don Juan Matus.......Tales of Power
Begin Here
A religious man does not seek God. The religious man is concerned with the transformation of society, which is himself. The religious man is not the man that does innumerable rituals, follows traditions, lives in a dead, past culture, explaining endlessly the Gita or the Bible, endlessly chanting, or taking sannyasa, that is not a religious man; such a man is escaping from facts. The religious man is concerned totally and completely with the understanding of society, which is himself. He is not separate from society. Bringing about in himself a complete, total mutation means complete cessation of greed, envy, ambition; and therefore he is not dependent on circumstances, though he is the result of circumstance, the food he eats, the books he reads, the cinemas he goes to, the religious dogmas, beliefs, rituals, and all that business. He is responsible, and therefore the religious man must understand himself, who is the product of society that he himself has created. Therefore, to find reality he must begin here, not in a temple, not in an image, whether the image is graven by the hand or by the mind. Otherwise, how can he find something totally new, a new state?
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
"Goodness without wisdom always accomplished evil." --- Robert A. Heinlein - (1907-1988) American writer - Source: "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Nice.......
If there are too many unnecessary items on your island you won't be able to sustain the encounter with the nagual . No one is capable of surviving a deliberate encounter with the nagual without a long training. It takes years to prepare the tonal for such an encounter. Ordinarily, if an average man comes face to face with the nagual the shock would be so great that he would die. The goal of the warrior's training then is not to teach him to hex or to charm, but to prepare his tonal not to crap out. A most difficult accomplishment. A warrior must be taught to be impeccable and thoroughly empty before he could even conceive witnessing the nagual.
The island of the tonal has to be swept clean and maintained clean. That's the only alternative that a warrior has. A clean island offers no resistance; it is as if there were nothing there.
Don Juan Matus....Tales of Power
When Evidence Isn’t Enough
Posted on Feb 26, 2012
In the face of ever-increasing contradictory evidence, millions of Americans believe God created humans as they exist today and that Earth is just thousands of years old. Why?
Salman Hameed, assistant professor of integrated science and humanities at Hampshire College, says people often cling to improbable explanations of their experiences and the world around them because abandoning them means losing their sense of themselves and the relationships, comfort and other benefits that come with belonging to a community.
How best to advance the causes of knowledge and reason then? By showing believers what they stand to gain, he says. —ARK
Understanding the mind
It seems to me that without understanding the way our minds work, one cannot understand and resolve the very complex problems of living. This understanding cannot come through book knowledge. The mind is, in itself, quite a complex problem. In the very process of understanding one's own mind, the crisis which each one of us faces in life can perhaps be understood and gone beyond.
JK
Time speeds up as we get older it seems.
There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them ~ Jim Croce (Time in a Bottle)
Ya think...?...lol. Sometimes it seems like yesterday or that it was a dream that's turned into the present nitemare.
We must be getting nostalgic in our old age;)
It is......the "Dude", lol. I like almost all the Coen Bros. movies.
LOL! Looks like it could be some laughs;)
The nagual is only for witnessing. When one is dealing with the nagual , one should never look into it directly. The only way to look at the nagual is as if it were a common affair. One must blink in order to break the fixation. Our eyes are the eyes of the tonal , or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that our eyes have been trained by the tonal , therefore the tonal claims them. One of the sources of an apprentice's bafflement and discomfort is that his tonal doesn't let go of his eyes. The day it does, his nagual will have won a great battle. Your obsession or, better yet, everyone's obsession is to arrange the world according to the tonal 's rules; so every time we are confronted with the nagual , we go out of our way to make our eyes stiff and intransigent. I must appeal to the part of your tonal which understands this dilemma and you must make an effort to free your eyes. The point is to convince the tonal that there are worlds that can pass in front of the same windows. Let your eyes be free; let them be true windows. The eyes can be the windows to peer into boredom or to peek into that infinity.
All you have to do is to set up your intent as a customs house. Whenever you are in the world of the tonal , you should be an impeccable tonal ; no time for irrational crap. But whenever you are in the world of the nagual , you should also be impeccable; no time for rational crap. For the warrior, intent is the gate in between. It closes completely behind him when he goes either way.
Another thing one should do when facing the nagual is to shift the line of the eyes from time to time, in order to break the spell of the nagual . Changing the position of the eyes always eases the burden of the tonal . This shifting should be done only as a relief, though, not as another way of palisading yourself to safeguard the order to the tonal .
Don Juan Matus....Tales of Power
Thinking Begets Effort
How can I remain free from evil thoughts, evil and wayward thoughts?" Is there the thinker, the one apart from thought, apart from the evil, wayward thoughts? Please watch your own mind. We say, "There is the I, the me that says, 'This is a wayward thought,' 'This is bad,' 'I must control this thought,' 'I must keep to this thought.'" That is what we know. Is the one, the I, the thinker, the judger, the one that judges, the censor, different from all this? Is the I different from thought, different from envy, different from evil? The I which says that it is different from this evil is everlastingly trying to overcome me, trying to push me away, trying to become something. So you have this struggle, the effort to put away thoughts, not to be wayward.We have, in the very process of thinking, created this problem of effort. Do you follow? Then you give birth to discipline, controlling thought - the I controlling the thought which is not good, the I which is trying to become nonenvious, nonviolent, to be this and to be that. So you have brought into being the very process of effort when there is the I and the thing which it is controlling. That is the actual fact of our everyday existence.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
With Madelbrot there is a stability in that it is always the same pattern with the changing of perspective giving the illusion of change. The motion is all in our minds.
I put that poorly. You can see stability when you empty your mind during a walk....the interconnectivity of it all. I think that's what K was referring to.
To do one of those Mandelbrot things.....you better sit down, lol. You goin' for a ride on a roller coaster. Stable wouldn't be the word I'd choose.
"Truth is a Pathless Land".
"Take a ride to the land inside of your mind
Beyond the seas of thought Beyond the realm of what.
Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not".
Is the thinker different from the thought?
"Is it possible to love without thinking? What do you mean by thinking? Thinking is a response to |
Before we can answer those questions, we need to understand the nature of the mind that is asking them.
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Join Us In The Exploration Of The Mind.
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