Zigzag Idiot

My homemade starter kit for for mindfulness Years ago after reading some Vernon Howard, I was struck by the powerful effect on my state of mind or Consciousness that the words - being deliberate- had on me. Just by remembering the word 'deliberate' oftentimes my attention becomes more concentrated and less disperse. When my actions become deliberate, however simple they may be. I'm not trying to do 5 things at once and my efficiency for getting things accomplished increases dramatically. If I'm buttoning up my shirt, I'm all there while doing it. Then maybe I,m tying my shoes. When my actions are done in a very deliberate manner, I observe that a natural result is that I'm much more mindful and my movements are more efficient in carrying out a task. This may not be as a dramatic a trigger for everyone else as it was/is for me but I bet for a percentage of those reading this and who are working on themselves some will definitely observe, feel , and understand this coorelation between being deliberate and mindfulness. Im listening and following along now to Leo's latest. Actually it's paused at the moment as I type this out. Goodnight,,

@TripleFly Are you sure Martin was talking about 5 meo dmt and not nn dmt? 3 hits or inhales of NN dmt sounds about right but it takes so little of the 5 meo dmt that one hit can capture all that's needed. With the synthetic anyway. I've just used the natural 5 meo dmt from the frogs one time. I just remember that it had a horrible taste to it and it's been so long I've forgotten its potency compared to synthetic. @herghly I'm not following on what you mean by 3 rounds per session. Could you elaborate? Please don't take my questions as being adversarial. I'm just trying to figure out what everyone means,,,

I did this last spring/summer with synthetic 5 meo dmt. Twice actually Stayed out for quite a while both times. I had taken the hit and then lay back on the bed. I must have convulsed some because I woke up both times on the floor with furniture knocked over. Broke 1 ? and I pair of eyeglasses. Be careful to not overdo it and also stay on top of keeping your scales accurate everyone. My scales were bad off from being accurate. It was a waste. Got nothing out of it those 2 times. Only busted eye glasses and Tv and a loss of dignity.

I remember Jana Dixon touching on the subject of unrequited love in her book Biology of Kundalini. I happened to find it just now. It was in her chapter titled Projection. This is about the 9th paragraph down from the top that I plucked out, if you wanted to read more of what she wrote. "What about the ultimate gamble of loving and finding it unrequited? Loving someone who doesn't love us back is not such a bad thing, if we are able to use that love to grow and not react in self-destruction. The pain from such an event can help us to open and be ready for a deeper love, And more grateful when it arises, in awe of the miracle and the precariousness and the rareness of it all. Romantic longing for another is synonymous with longing for the unity of one's own Self. Unrequitted love can result in metamorphic initiation, for the energy that would have been used in relationship is then used in the opening of the inner flower of Self." From: https://www.biologyofkundalini.com/article.php@story=Projection.html

It could be,,, Although I haven't really taken them apart and studied them side by side. There is a lot in common. Thanks for spending the 2.99. AI's answer to both questions were impressive. If that's what causes a loss of a post,,, at times yeah,or no,,, me too. When spending a lot of time in choosing my words and composing a post, it's become a habit for me to copy and paste it to notes and save it before I hit the send button.

This thread is being created for those interested in learning more about and/or discussing The Fourth Way. Below is a short bit from a Wikipedia description followed by 2 bookmarked links in High Consciousness Resources which are 100% relevant to the subject. I'll add more commentary, links, and articles periodically and try not to leave any redundancies from those threads except for the following introduction video to The a Fourth Way. I recommend this guy's channel but most of his videos are found on the Gurdjieff Thread, which are very concise and usually only 2-3 minutes long. In the Fourth Way, having a big personality is usually seen as only being a detriment to the discovery of one's True Nature which is ,,,, (pause for dramatic effect) -Being. Which produces or is synonymous with presence. The Fourth Way[1] is an approach to self-development developed by George Gurdjieff over years of travel in the East (c. 1890 – 1912). It combines and harmonizes what he saw as three established traditional "ways" or "schools": those of the emotions, the body, and the mind, or of monks, fakirs, and yogis, respectively. Students often refer to the Fourth Way as "The Work", "Work on oneself", or "The System". The exact origins of some of Gurdjieff's teachings are unknown, but various sources have been suggested.[2] The term "Fourth Way" was further used by his student P. D. Ouspensky in his lectures and writings. After Ouspensky's death, his students published a book entitled The Fourth Way based on his lectures. According to this system, the three traditional schools, or ways, "are permanent forms which have survived throughout history mostly unchanged, and are based on religion. Where schools of yogis, monks or fakirs exist, they are barely distinguishable from religious schools. The fourth way differs in that "it is not a permanent way. It has no specific forms or institutions and comes and goes controlled by some particular laws of its own."[3] The Fourth Way addresses the question of humanity's place in the Universe and the possibilities of inner development. It emphasizes that people ordinarily live in a state referred to as a semi-hypnotic "waking sleep," while higher levels of consciousness, virtue, unity of will are possible. The Fourth Way teaches how to increase and focus attention and energy in various ways, and to minimize day-dreaming and absent-mindedness. This inner development in oneself is the beginning of a possible further process of change, whose aim is to transform man into "what he ought to be." Taken from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way

In the Fourth Way it is said that the act of Self remembering really can't be defined because the scope of its breadth and depth cannot be approached because of the limitation of language. A student and Teacher of the Work, Nicholas Tereschenko tried anyway and his attempt is found helpful by many others in the Work. He said- Self-remembering is the expansion of the field of Consciousness, so that both the outside and the inside worlds are perceived together in the unity of experience. Years ago, when I first found the Work or the Fourth Way, I assumed that I already had an inner world and at times I did but this inner world that I experienced was very shallow in its depth. Because of this, things in the outer world were always affecting me greatly and still does at times when I lose contact with the inner parts of my centers. A vital criterion in the ability of making contact with the depth of the inner world is establishing a solid grounding in the belly center aka, the hara. An embodiment in the belly center establishes the possibility of leaving the noise that goes on when we are stuck in the storm that results in a perpetual turbulence that goes on between the mental and emotional worlds. People often get disconnected from their belly center by the time of adolescence and a good many never again will rediscover and achieve a grounding there. Having an erect posture as well as experiencing inner quiet are only minor side effects of rediscovering this embodiment in which your belly expands when breathing like it did for many in childhood. Becoming grounded in the belly center makes it possible for the mental and emotional worlds to disentangle. Sensing the physical body is how you 'jailbreak your mind' to use Leo's allegorical description. Sensing, not feeling the body. The heart is the perceptual organ for feeling and intuitive seeing, but only after it becomes the manager-boss of the mind and disentangling has to be accomplished first. Until this happens the mind has you instead of you having a mind. Realization of Being is then possible and then one can have their being. I began this post with only the intention of sharing Nichols Tereschinko's attempt at describing Self-remembering but in the processes I began to spontaneously download and broadcast. So please pardon the resultant and ensuing spiritual mansplaining. Hope some of you find parts of it useful in some way. @seeking_brilliance I went to ask A. I. Philosopher once again about the Fourth Way but unless I'm wrong, it seems only to be available now if one purchases the app.

Valuable and very interesting insights @fridjonk . I appreciate your taking the time to express them here. What you say could also be true here where I live if only I got out more and interacted with people to discover. I no longer even read the local newspapers. The following is from a 12th century Egyptian Sufi named Dzou'l Noun and to me contain a whole world of meaning having to do with Conscience and the consequences of being awake in a culture that is asleep. All men are dead, except those who know. All those who know are dead, except those who practice. All those who practice are dead, except those who act. All those who act are lost,except those who act with righteous intent. And All those who act with righteous intent are all in grave danger.

I need to call Ghostbusters Either I'm hallucinating or I'm seeing ghosts or something,,,, It's been happening for more than a week anyhow. Couldn't deny it after my experiences today. Right before dark I was walking down to the mailbox and nearly called out to a man in camouflage to stop and identify himself. He was just a few yards ahead of me and I saw him become transparent. This was the most vivid apparition yet and undeniable because of the close distance, remaining daylight and vividness becoming transparent . Another odd factor is that they have been mostly in small groups and half the time are engaged in sex with one another. Not every time , but in a good percentage of these occurrences they are. Sometimes there will be just a handful and they seem to be talking to one another. I feel lucid and not delusional around these occurrences although the experiences have left me a little confused or perplexed because I couldn't decide if I was seeing actual people or not. It occurred most often when the daylight was dim in the morning or evening but sometimes at night and a little less often in full daylight when peering into woodlands. Go figure ?‍♂️ Another odd factor is that the, what I call paranormal phenomena, that Ive experienced almost continually for the last three years of hearing a chorus of crickets have grown even louder in volume. Over a year ago when I was faithfully doing two a day centering Prayer meditations, I noticed then that whenever I experienced brief periods of objectless or nonconceptual awareness and perhaps closer to that state of consciousness than normal, upon entering back into everyday awareness, I would recognize this background chorus of crickets would be louder than usual. Also a light pressure or pulse would be felt on my forehead simultaneously. This slight throb was noticed back around 2008 after having read a lot of the Almaas material and gradually recognized I too, on occasion was experiencing this which was similar to his personal descriptions of the phenomena. Telling about this probably won't help my credibility here on the forum but as I've mentioned in the past, I've intentionally left entries in that were odd, crass, petty, unflattering or just revealing a coarse sub personality or minor ship mate on this ship of fools that makeup my fracturedness which over time I'm trying to integrate into a more cohesive multidimensionality. Carl Jung once said that we should let people see us in just our undershirt. I think this was what he was reffering to. Like many of you, I come from a conservative small town environment and have refrained from revealing my journal/forum activity. For the most part, to be saved from being tarred and feathered. Lots of Christian fundamentalists, Trump supporters, and the like where I live. I did reveal this to my former Therapist and friend Jim who lives about 80 miles from here. Also two very nice ladies who were a part of my Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson group book reading on the internet, which took almost a year. One of these ladies, I would consider somewhat similar in Generation and worldview to my mother yet I felt a bond and friendship with in some way which in ordinary life would be unlikely. So Joan, if you still are stopping in from time to time and happen to be reading this, THANK YOU! and please excuse the more coarse aspects of myself that I've revealed. Knowing in the back of my mind, though, that you might be following along has allowed me to integrate and perhaps reconcile some of my fracturedness due to some stubborn aspects of My Superego. If that makes any sense. To me it does and I think perhaps it has. To those who are like myself in regard to flying under the radar of conservative small hometown environments.You better plan on the day coming when the cat gets out of the bag. Integrate before it's too late. Be like a green sapling who doesn't burn but only singes when the gaslighters come along. For those who are wondering what I'm talking about. You don't know how lucky you are. ? I'll report back on the issue of these apparitions, ghosts, or whatever they are when there is something to report.

Crushed summary of the following article- The heart is an organ of spiritual perception . Emoting is not the same of true feeling. When one is engaged in emoting, they are in a form of spiritual sleep. The Way of the Heart, by Cynthia Bourgeault From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind Post authorBy Cynthia Bourgeault Post dateJanuary 31, 2017 Photograph by Brandon Zierer From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind Put the mind in the heart…. Put the mind in the heart…. Stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart.” From page after page in the Philokalia, that hallowed collection of spiritual writings from the Christian East, this same refrain emerges. It is striking in both its insistence and its specificity. Whatever that exalted level of spiritual attainment is conceived to be—whether you call it “salvation,” “enlightenment,” “contemplation,” or “divine union”—this is the inner configuration in which it is found. This and no other. It leaves one wondering what these old spiritual masters actually knew and—if it’s even remotely as precise and anatomically grounded as it sounds—why this knowledge has not factored more prominently in contemporary typologies of consciousness. Part of the problem as this ancient teaching falls on contemporary ears is that we will inevitably be hearing it through a modern filter that does not serve it well. In our own times the word “heart” has come to be associated primarily with the emotions (as opposed to the mental operations of the mind), and so the instruction will be inevitably heard as “get out of your mind and into your emotions”—which is, alas, pretty close to 180 degrees from what the instruction is actually saying. Yes, it is certainly true that the heart’s native language is affectivity—perception through deep feelingness. But it may come as a shock to contemporary seekers to learn that the things we nowadays identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature. And so before we can even begin to unlock the wisdom of these ancient texts, we need to gently set aside our contemporary fascination with emotivity as the royal road to spiritual authenticity and return to the classic understanding from which these teachings emerge, which features the heart in a far more spacious and luminous role. According to the great wisdom traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, Islamic), the heart is first and foremost an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious, the boundaried surface of things, and see into a deeper reality, emerging from some unknown profundity, which plays lightly upon the surface of this life without being caught there: a world where meaning, insight, and clarity come together in a whole different way. Saint Paul talked about this other kind of perceptivity with the term “faith” (“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”), but the word “faith” is itself often misunderstood by the linear mind. What it really designates is not a leaping into the dark (as so often misconstrued) but a subtle seeing in the dark, a kind of spiritual night vision that allows one to see with inner certainty that the elusive golden thread glimpsed from within actually does lead somewhere. Perhaps the most comprehensive definition of this wider spiritual perceptivity is from Kabir Helminski, a modern Sufi master. I realize that I quote it in nearly every book I have written, but I do so because it is so fundamental to the wisdom tradition that I have come to know as the authentic heart of Christianity. Here it is yet again: We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities; intuition; wisdom; a sense of unity; aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties; and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Though these faculties are many, we give them a single name with some justification for they are working best when they are in concert. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind. This total mind we call “heart.”1 The purification of Muhammad’s heart by three Divine messengers. Bal’ami. Early fourteenth century “The heart,” Helminski continues, is the antenna that receives the emanations of subtler levels of existence. The human heart has its proper field of function beyond the limits of the superficial, reactive ego-self. Awakening the heart, or the spiritualized mind, is an unlimited process of making the mind more sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined, of joining it to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.2 Now it may concern some of you that you’re hearing Islamic teaching here, not Christian. And it may well be true that this understanding of the heart as “spiritualized mind”— “the organ prepared by God for contemplation”3—has been brought to its subtlest and most comprehensive articulation in the great Islamic Sufi masters. As early as the tenth century, Al-Hakîm al Tirmidhî’s masterful Treatise on the Heart laid the foundations for an elaborate Sufi understanding of the heart as a tripartite physical, emotional, and spiritual organ.4 On this foundation would gradually rise an expansive repertory of spiritual practices supporting this increasingly “sensitive, focused, energized, subtle, and refined” heart attunement. But it’s right there in Christianity as well. Aside from the incomparable Orthodox teachings on Prayer of the Heart collected in the Philokalia, it’s completely scriptural. Simply open your Bible to the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:8) and read the words straight from Jesus himself: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” We will return to what “pure in heart” means in due course. But clearly Jesus had a foundational grasp on the heart as an organ of spiritual perception, and he had his own highly specific method for catalyzing this quantum leap in human consciousness. I have written extensively about this in my book The Wisdom Jesus, in which I lay out the principles of his kenotic (“letting go”) spirituality as a pathway of conscious transformation leading to nondual awakening. You will see there how this goal formed the core of his teaching, hidden in plain sight for twenty centuries now. I will be drawing on this material from time to time as it becomes pertinent to our present exploration. For now, the essential point is simply to realize that the teaching on the heart is not intrinsically an “Islamic” revelation, any more than it is a “Christian” one. If anything, its headwaters lie in that great evolutionary incubator of Judaism, in which more and more in those final centuries before the Common Era, the great Israelite prophets begin to sense a new evolutionary star rising on the horizon of consciousness. Yahweh is about to do something new, about to up the ante in the continuing journey of mutual self-disclosure that has formed the basis of the covenant with Israel. The prophet Ezekiel gets it the most directly, as the following words of revelation tumble from his mouth, directly from the heart of God: I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land I gave to your ancestors, and you shall be my people and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:24–28) A new interiority is dawning on the horizon, a new capacity to read the pattern from within: to live the covenant without a need for external forms and regulations, simply by living it from an inner integrity. And for the first time in Western history, this capacity to see from within is explicitly linked to the heart, and specifically to a “heart of flesh.” Without any attempt to end-run the massive theological and historical parameters that have grown up around this issue, my bare-bones take on Jesus is that he comes as the “master cardiologist,” the next in the great succession of Hebrew prophets, to do that “heart surgery” first announced by Ezekiel. And his powerfully original (at least in terms of anything heretofore seen in the Semitic lands) method of awakening heart perceptivity—through a radical nonclinging or “letting go”—will in fact reveal itself as the tie rod connecting everything I am talking about in this book. Do I Really Mean the Physical Heart? Not to be naive here, but yes. We are indeed talking about the physical heart, at least insofar as it furnishes our bodily anchor for all those wondrous voyages into far-flung spiritual realms. Again, the Eastern Orthodox tradition is not in the least equivocal on this point. Lest there be any tendency to hear the word as merely symbolic of some “innermost essence” of a person, the texts direct us immediately to the chest, where the sign that prayer is progressing will be a palpable physical warmth: To stand guard over the heart, to stand with the mind in the heart, to descend from the head to the heart—all these are one and the same thing. The core of the work lies in concentrating the attention and the standing before the invisible Lord, not in the head but in the chest, close to the heart and in the heart. When the divine warmth comes, all this will be clear.5 The following instruction is even more specific: When we read in the writings of the Fathers about the place of the heart which the mind finds by way of prayer, we must understand by this the spiritual faculty that exists in the heart. Placed by the creator in the upper part of the heart, this spiritual faculty distinguishes the human heart from the heart of animals…. The intellectual faculty in man’s soul, though spiritual, dwells in the brain, that is to say in the head: in the same way, the spiritual faculty which we term the spirit of man, though spiritual, dwells in the upper part of the heart, close to the left nipple of the chest and a little above it.6 Mosaic, Jungholz, Austria While the sheer physicality of this may make some readers squirm, the contemporary phenomenologist Robert Sardello is another strong advocate for a full inclusion of the physical heart in any serious consideration of the spirituality of the heart. When he speaks of the heart, as he makes clear in his remarkable book Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness, he is always referring to “the physical organ of the heart,” which merits this special consideration precisely because “it functions simultaneously as a physical, psychic, and spiritual organ.”7 It is this seamlessly tripartite nature of the heart’s field of activity that bestows its unusual transformative powers. While there are many spiritual traditions that focus on “the heart as the instrument through which religious practices take place,” Sardello feels that “these traditions do not focus on the inherent activity of the heart, which is already an act of a spiritual nature.”8 To demonstrate what this “inherently spiritual nature” of the heart might feel like, Sardello leads his readers on a profound voyage of discovery into the inner chambers of their own heart. Wielding those two classic tools of inner work, attention and sensation, he teaches us how to access the heart through concentrated sensation (rather than visualization or emotion) and there discover its inherent vibrational signature as “pure intimacy…intimacy without something or someone attached to that intimacy.”9 I have to say I followed that exercise several times and was astonished by the results. I had experienced something of that “pure intimacy” before, as that sort of golden tenderness that sometimes surrounds a period of Centering Prayer. But never had I experienced it with such force or clarity, as a distinct inner bandwidth resonating in perfect synchrony with (in Kabir Helminski’s words) “its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.” No wonder the embodied aspect of heart spirituality is so important! For it is only through sensation—that is, “attention concentrated in the heart”—that this experience of utter fullness and belonging becomes accessible.10 Sardello is not the only voice in the field. There is now a substantial and growing body of “bridge literature” linking classic spiritual teachings on the heart with emerging discoveries in the field of neurobiology. I have already mentioned the pioneering work of the HeartMath Institute, but I want to call attention to two other fascinating and useful books for the spiritually adventurous nonspecialist: The Biology of Transcendence by Joseph Chilton Pearce11and The Secret Teaching of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner.12Marshaling considerable scientific data in a format easily accessible to a lay reader, each of these books demonstrates how contemporary science has taken us far beyond the notion of the heart as a mechanical pump to revision it as “an electromagnetic generator,”13 working simultaneously across a range of vibrational frequencies to perform its various tasks of internal and external self-regulation and information exchange. (An “organ of spiritual perception,” after all, can be understood in this context as simply an electromagnetic generator picking up information at far subtler vibrational bandwidths.) Both books call attention, as does the HeartMath Institute, to the intricate feedback loops between heart and brain—almost as if the human being were expressly wired to facilitate this exchange, which Pearce sees as fundamentally between the universal (carried in the heart) and the particular (carried in the brain). As he expresses it, “The heart takes on the subtle individual colors of a person without losing its essential universality. It seems to mediate between our individual self and a universal process while being representative of that universal process.”14 While such bold statements may make hard-core scientists writhe, from the spiritual side of the bridge it is easily comprehensible and brings additional confirmation that “putting the mind in the heart” is not merely a quaint spiritual metaphor but contains precise and essential information on the physiological undergirding of conscious transformation. The Weighing of the Heart from the Book of the Dead of Ani. c. 1300 B.C. British Museum What Gets in the Way? According to Western understanding, the heart does not need to be “grown” or “evolved.” Every heart is already a perfect holograph of the divine heart, carrying within itself full access to the information of the whole. But it does need to bepurified, as Jesus himself observed. In its spiritual capacity, the heart is fundamentally a homing beacon, allowing us to stay aligned with those “emanations from more subtle levels of existence” Helminski refers to, and hence to follow the authentic path of our own unfolding. But when the signals get jammed by the interference of lower-level noise, then it is no longer able to do its beaconing work. Unanimously, the Christian wisdom tradition proclaims that the source of this lower-level noise is “the passions.” As the Philokaliarepeatedly emphasizes, the problem with the passions is that they divide the heart.15 A heart that is divided, pulled this way and that by competing inner agendas, is like a wind-tossed sea: unable to reflect on its surface the clear image of the moon. Here again is a teaching that tends to set contemporary people’s teeth on edge. I know this from personal experience, because the issue comes up at nearly every workshop I give. To our modern Western way of hearing, “passion” is a good thing: something akin to élan vital, the source of our aliveness and motivation. It is to be encouraged, not discouraged. At a recent workshop I led, a bishop approached me with some concern and explained that in his diocese, following the recommendations of a church consultant, he had managed to boost morale and productivity by significant percentages simply by encouraging his clergy “to follow their passions.” Well-nigh universally today, the notion of “passionlessness” (a quality eagerly sought after in the ancient teachings of the desert fathers and mothers) equates to “emotionally brain dead.” If you take away passion, what is left? Madonna and child. Saint Augustinus Church, Miguel Hidalgo, Federal District, Mexico So once again we have to begin with some decoding. If you consult any English dictionary, you will discover that the word “passion” comes from the Latin verb patior, which means “to suffer” (passio is the first-person singular). But this still doesn’t get us all the way, because the literal, now largely archaic, meaning of the verb “to suffer” (to “undergo or experience”) is literally to be acted upon. The chief operative here is the involuntary and mechanical aspect of the transaction. And according to the traditional wisdom teachings, it is precisely that involuntary and mechanical aspect of being “grabbed” that leads to suffering in the sense of how we use the term today. Thus, in the ancient insights on which this spiritual teaching rests, passion did not mean élan vital, energy, or aliveness. It designated being stuck, grabbed, and blindly reactive. This original meaning is clearly uppermost in the powerful teaching of the fourth-century desert father Evagrius Ponticus. Sometimes credited with being the first spiritual psychologist in the Christian West, Evagrius developed a marvelously subtle teaching on the progressive nature of emotional entanglement, a teaching that would eventually bear fruit in the fully articulated doctrine of the seven deadly sins. His core realization was that when the first stirrings of what will eventually become full-fledged passionate outbursts appear on the screen of consciousness, they begin as “thoughts”—logismoi, in his words—streams of associative logic following well-conditioned inner tracks. At first they are merely that—“thought-loops,” mere flotsam on the endlessly moving river of the mind. But at some point a thought-loop will entrain with one’s sense of identity—an emotional value or point of view is suddenly at stake—and then one is hooked. A passion is born, and the emotions spew forth. Thomas Keating has marvelously repackaged this ancient teaching in his diagram of the life cycle of an emotion,16 a core part of his Centering Prayer teaching. This diagram makes clear that once the emotion is engaged, once that sense of “I” locks in, what follows is a full-scale emotional uproar—which then, as Father Keating points out, simply drives the syndrome deeper and deeper into the unconscious, where it becomes even more involuntary and mechanically triggered. What breaks the syndrome? For Evagrius, liberation lies in an increasingly developed inner capacity to notice when a thought is beginning to take on emotional coloration and to nip it in the bud before it becomes a passion by dis-identifying or disengaging from it. This is the essence of the teaching that has held sway in our tradition for more than a thousand years. Now, of course, there are various ways of going about this disengaging. Contemporary psychology has added the important qualifier that disengaging is not the same thing as repressing (which is simply sweeping the issue under the psychological rug) and has developed important methodologies for allowing people to become consciously present to and “own” the stew fermenting within them. But it must also be stated that “owning” does not automatically entail either “acting out” or verbally “expressing” that emotional uproar. Rather, the genius of the earlier tradition has been to insist that if one can merely back the identification out—that sense of “me,” stuck to a fixed frame of reference or value—then the energy being co-opted and squandered in useless emotional turmoil can be recaptured at a higher level to strengthen the intensity and clarity of heart perceptivity. Rather than fueling the “reactive ego-self,” the energy can be “rejoined to its cosmic milieu, the infinity of love.” And that, essentially, constitutes the goal of purification—at least as it has been understood in service of conscious transformation. Gravestone, Jewish Cemetery, Olesno, Poland Emotion versus Feeling Here again, we have an important clarification contributed by Robert Sardello. Echoing the classic understanding of the Christian Inner tradition (I first encountered this teaching in the Gurdjieff Work), Sardello points out that most of us use the terms “feeling” and “emotion” interchangeably, as if they are synonyms. They are not. Emotion is technically “stuck” feeling, feeling bound to a fixed point of view or fixed reference point. “We are not free in our emotional life,” he points out, since emotion always “occurs quite automatically as a reaction to something that happens to us.”17 It would correspond to what Helminski calls “the heart in service to the reactive ego-self.” Beyond this limited sphere opens up a vast reservoir of feelingness. Here the currents run hard and strong, always tinged with a kind of multivalence in which the hard-and-fast boundaries distinguishing one emotion from another begin to blend together. Happiness is tinged with sadness, grief touches at its bottomless depths the mysterious upwelling of comfort, loneliness is suffused with intimacy, and the deep ache of yearning for the absent beloved becomes the paradoxical sacrament of presence. “For beauty is only the beginning of a terror we can just scarcely bear,” observes Rilke, “and the reason we adore it so is that it serenely disdains to destroy us.”18 Such is the sensation of the heart beginning to swim in those deeper waters, awakening to its birthright as an organ of spiritual perception. And it would stand to reason, of course, that the experience is feeling-ful because that is the heart’s modus operandi; it gains information by entering the inside of things and coming into resonance with them. But this is feeling of an entirely different order, no longer affixed to a personal self-center, but flowing in holographic union with that which can always and only flow, the great dynamism of love. “Feeling as a form of knowing”19 becomes the pathway of this other mode of perceptivity, more intense, but strangely familiar and effortless. The great wager around which the Western Inner tradition has encamped is that as one is able to release the heart from its enslavement to the passions, this other heart emerges: this “organ of contemplation,” of luminous sight and compassionate action. For what one “sees” and entrains with is none other than this higher order of divine coherence and compassion, which can be verified as objectively real, but becomes accessible only when the heart is able to rise to this highest level and assume its cosmically appointed function. Then grace upon grace flows through this vibrating reed and on out into a transfigured world: transfigured by the very grace of being bathed in this undivided light. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” In this one sentence, the whole of the teaching is conveyed. What remains is for us to come to a greater understanding of how this purification is actually accomplished: a critical issue on which Christian tradition is by no means unanimous. This will be the subject of our next chapter. ♦ 1 Kabir Helminski, Living Presence: A Sufi Guide to Mindfulness and the Essential Self (New York: Tarcher/Perigree Books, 1992), 157. 2 Ibid., 158. 3 Sidney H. Griffith, “Merton, Massignon, and the Challenge of Islam,” in Rob Barker and Gray Henry, eds., Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1999), 65. 4 For extensive bibliographical information on this work, see “A Treatise on the Heart,” trans. Nicholas Heer, (ibid., 79–88). 5 E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer, eds., The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 194. 6 Ibid., 190. 7 Robert Sardello, Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness (Benson, NC: Goldenstone Press, 2006), 82. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 86. 10 No wonder the embodied aspect of heart spirituality is so important! For if Sardello is right here (and my own work confirms that he is), then the stunning conclusion is that there is no lack. That primordial hunger for intimacy and belonging we so frantically project onto others in our attempt to find fulfillment is fulfilled already, there in the “infinity of love” already residing holographically in our own hearts, once we have truly learned to attune to its frequency and trust that with which it reverberates. In this sense, our physical heart is the quintessential “treasure buried in the field.” 11 Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence:A Blueprint of the Human Spirit (Rochester, VT: Park Street Place, 2002). 12 Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature (Rochester, VT: Bear and Company, 2004). 13 Ibid., 71. 14 Pearce, 64–65. 15 For a particularly clear and forceful discussion of this point, see E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, trans., Unseen Warfare, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 241–44. 16 Reproduced in Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2004), 136. 17 Sardello, 72. 18 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1939), 21. 19 Sardello, 72. From The Heart of Centering Prayer by Cynthia Bourgeault © 2016. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. From our current issue Parabola Volume 42, No. 1, “The Search for Meaning,” Spring 2017. This issue is available to purchase here. If you have enjoyed this piece, consider subscribing.

I'm not defending the current beef industry in the U.S. but if you want beef finished out to have the quality taste people are used to. That takes corn, cottonseed mill, soybeans, or other substitutes depending on different crop conditions for a particular year. There's a small slice of genetically engineered angus cattle that do real well converting grass into lbs of flesh but pretty much the idea of grass fattened beef is propaganda and fallacy.

What? There is no grass for cattle to graze on in America's 26,586 feedlots The most recent census of agriculture [3] reported an estimated 26,586 feedlots in the USA. Of these, approximately 61% have fewer than 100 cattle. Approximately 77% of cattle were produced in feedlotswith capacity greater than 1,000 animals.Jun 21, 2018 https://www.ncba.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx

It's all relative. Eating meat is bad, m'kay. It takes an enormous amount of corn to finish a feeder steer/heifer. That's bad, mckay. Like taking a duke in the Urinal, m'kay. That's bad. Hog manure is a wonderful fertilizer, mckay. That's good, m'kay. Ken Wilber points out that the Dalai Lama eats roast beef often. This is in a cold, high elevation environment where a vegetarian or fruitarian diet is not very doable. He also points out that a cow screams louder than a carrot when you kill them. Therefore it's better to eat a carrot than to eat a cow. M'kay. Unless your in Tibet. Toxic masculinity and the heritage of patriarchical dominance is bad. M'kay. Slavery's bad, m'kay. Liberals who are blind to their own lack of common sense, that's bad, m'kay. That's bad because it fueled the political rise of that Arch Idiot Trump, m'kay, which is really bad, m'kay. There's some truth in the idea of a negative energetic imprint from eating meat, m'kay but it's very subtle, m'kay and that's bad. Expressing negative emotions and treating each other rudely is more harmful though, m'kay, and that's too bad m'kay.

Spiritual Emergency This term is used by Jana Dixon as well as Stan Grof and his deceased wife Christina. Christina contributed much to this theory while she was alive. Roller coaster emotions may be a signal that a Kundalini awakening is underway. Jana Dixon articulates this in many different ways throughout this book. Also the felt sensation that one doesn't fit in the world and that life has no meaning until one settles into beginning stages of the Transpersonal. I hypothesize that this phenomena she describes is one of natures mechanisms to hurl humans out of the first tier of Spiral Dynamics. Thoughts anyone? Jana Dixon- Often we have a radical opening, just to find ourselves flipping back in the opposite direction. The ego and armor seem pull back ones closure around one after a radical opening. Through witnessing the openings and the closures time and time again we become aware that this vascilation is biochemically driven hyperbolic curves. Ultimately though with the radical heart expansions and associated gravity warping and acute sensory and psychic experience...we are essentially "broken open" by love. To achieve the Grail of the Soul the mind must surrender its frequencies and entrain with the Heart. One could say that the heart is the organ of meaning and purpose. If the metamorphic process proceeds with adequate grace and conditions are not too detrimental to the process then the Percival Heart is born, or the Heart that is radiant irrespective of external conditions. In this we learn to take such radical responsibility that we do not injure ourselves with the world. Compassion is so fundamentally deep at this point that we have transcended our reactive conditioning and the reptilian brain has less of an impact on our functioning. At this point there is just One Love, and so the energy that is usually wasted in ego-definition and protection is now spent on a higher order of functioning. We may back away from our flowering edge however, just because we can, and this return to a less mature state is taken for various reasons. But the major insight to get is that we have to give ourselves permission to show up in our full glory for the world is not going to invite us to arrive...it must be self-initiated. Thus we must become "causal," through the Percival Heart is the Solar or Causal Heart. If you can stop running from both the "loss of meaning" and the "presence of meaning" then you are enlightened. The transpersonal includs the glorification of the personal, the amplification of the self. Our inability to be causal and create a life is a matter of responsibility. There are so many steps and things involved, commitment to being here, being the first I think. And knowing approximately what one is doing here. But really a human life takes intimacy with others. If our sense of failure is equal to our faith, this provides a wall of detachment removal--a distraction from really being here. "Without the inner world the outer loses its meaning, and without the outer the inner loses its substance." ~ R.D. Laing from: http://biologyofkundalini.com/article.php@story=MeaningofKundalini.html

http://biologyofkundalini.com/ KUNDALINI - (Sanskrit kund, "to burn"; kunda, "to coil or to spiral") a concentrated field of intelligent, cosmic invisible energy absolutely vital to life; beginning in the base of the spine when a man or woman begins to evolve as wisdom is earned. Kundalini has been described as liquid fire and liquid light. The ultimate outcome of kundalini is the union of Will (sakti- kundalini), Knowledge {prana-kundalini) and Action (para- kundalini) http://biologyofkundalini.com/ Jana's energy amazes me. When you see everything she has tied together and researched, it's amazing. I've never talked to her or emailed her or anything. I've just enjoyed this site off and on over the years. I also like her for not being afraid of saying some far out shit. To be honest, there are parts of this book I have not read. Most of my time has been spent in a specific location of the book. This is a bit out of her chapter - toxic mind theory. Progressively it is coming to light that there is a large neuro-detoxification component to the kundalini phenomena. After reading Peter Levine, Robert Scaer, Alan Schore, Arthur Janov, Joseph Chilton Pearce and Ellie Van Winkle it is apparent to me that kundalini arises either spontaneously or through provocation in an effort to bleed of tension held in the limbic brain from the fossilized repression of emotion. Kundalini is a process by which the body is attempting to "throw off" its former conditioning through detoxification, death and regeneration. I am a big fan of the Toxic Mind Theory of mental and emotional illness which is described by Ellie Van Winkle at www.redirectingselftherapy.com/toxicmind.html He suggests emotional repression of the full expression of the fight/flight response and the consequent lack of resolution back to a neutral set point, results in the atrophy and toxicosis in catecholamine-noradrenergic neurons. A toxin is anything that cannot be utilized by the cell, and when elimination is impaired, toxins accumulate to intolerable levels and trigger a detoxification process. This cycle of toxification and detoxification shows up in the form of a mild to extreme disturbance in the emotions and personality. A kundalini awakening represents an intensive and extensive detoxification process during the temporary lifting of the repressive mechanisms of the "conscious" ego. Very many if not all factors lead me to this conclusion. For example fasting or going on a raw diet awakens kundalini because the body at last receives the energy and resources needed to bring about a detoxification crisis. Whereas the normal cooked diet requires so much energy and resources to process that it becomes an ally in the spiritual repressive mechanisms of the ego, as do all such addictions. Thus natural growth and transformation is thwarted as the personality clings to its past imprints by various means of self-suppression; including getting others to victimize you. Toxic Mind Theory is an elaboration of the stressing and unstressing process. A kundalini awakening is an amplified version of this normal cyclic detoxification process that affects us all. "A detoxification crisis is the sum of many crises in separate neurons, and depressive and excitatory symptoms may occur simultaneously. Whether symptoms will develop depends upon the extent of the toxicosis, and persons who are experiencing symptoms are healthier than those who are not because they are detoxifying their nervous systems." E. Van Winkle The bipolar shift from over excitement to depression is characteristic of nearly all mental disorders including addictions and Alzheimers. Van Winkle associates the hyperactive stage with excess norepinephrine and other metabolites flooding the synapses; first this causes excitation in postsynaptic neurons and then noradrenergic receptors become bound up with these other factors (dopamine, epinephrine, serotonin, GABA, peptides, amino acids and various waste products) and depression ensues.

My I CHING consultation this morning from The Oracle of the Cosmic Way Arrived at by throwing 3 coins, six times. Below is just a small portion of my second hexagram. The first hexagram was 44 - Coming to Meet; changing line six. Paraphrasing, it said to me- Hey Bud, you better watch it. You may have a bit of spiritual egotism going on,,,, I wanted to share a bit of the commentary of the second hexagram because it's so rich and has to do with 'will'. A topic in common it seems with other Journalers at the moment. It goes on,,,, I felt that copy and pasting all of the General commentary or "The Judgement", of hexagram 28 would be a bit too much and also involved in my decisions of posting a picture of text, considering fair use of copywrited material is always a concern for me that I take seriously. By the way, I feel more leeway is given concerning fair use in a personal journal than in the book review section of the forum for example. I welcome guidance from the moderators concerning this topic of fair use at any time.

Not Being the Victim by Dr. Jim Rosen ©2020 Dr. Jim Rosen Being a good person means not being the victim. When you allow other people to use you or take advantage of you – this is not what it means to be a good person. When you allow yourself to be abused physically, emotionally or sexually – when you stay involved in a relationship with an abusive person – when you don’t stand up for yourself, because you don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings – when you allow someone else to spend your money – when you ignore your own needs because you think it’s your job to take care of everybody else’s needs – when you leave your children unprotected in the hands of an abuser. These things have everything to do with being a victim and nothing to do with being a good person. If you really want to be a good person, it’s your responsibility to get help, it’s your responsibility to get out of the abusive situation, it’s your responsibility to learn everything that is needed to protect and take good care of yourself and your children.

@fridjonk You're not afraid. That's another reason why I love you.

I had to look that one up. Necroposting definition: Posting to something on the internet for the first time in quite a few months or years. Usually n00bs do this, but sometimes a pro will do it to make people laugh. Read CWG years ago when it first came out. I could do to read it all again. Appreciate everyone's feedback,,,,

Take your medicine. That means eyes closed and silence when doing 5 meo dmt. Otherwise it's just fun and dissociation. I come from stage Orange ranching and sawmilling so I had enough of that and decided to become a mystic. A retarded clown Mystic. Don't tell me about this stuff if you're not from here. You have no credibility with me. I'll hear you out though. I've been around cattle all my life. I used to trap coons, possums, grey fox and coyotes and club them to death and I used to love rare cooked, bloody steaks. Not anymore or I should say, not as much and definitely not cooked rare and bloody. Makes my gut cramp. Blood has to be cooked out of it. It's still delicious though. What's worse imo is refined sugar intake and for me personally, alcohol. It's an addiction and can manifest negativity and violence, sugar, that is. You have a right NOT to be negative. Maurice Nicoll nailed that one. It feels good. People are blind to their own love of feeding on negative emotions but this stops when they wake up. If they wake up. If not, they'll be the ones who are always on your ass all the time trying to push your buttons or guilt trip you. Don't look them in the eye. That's how they rob you of chi energy as they feed on it and waste it all. Is this a journal or a diary? I treat it like a diary sometimes I guess. That reminds me. Too much dairy creates bloatedness. That's a personal comment in this diary about dairy. I've always been considered weird. My thoughts are nonsequitor. After 40 years, which was 10 years ago, I self diagnosed an Aspergers condition. I like to be lighthearted and laugh. You can laugh at me but I'd rather you laugh with me as we enjoy classic British hard rock like Pink Floyd and Zeppelin. I understand everyone has their own preferences though. Be reminded of my having a permit to use personal pronouns in the 'spiritual community'. I just returned from using my last bit of 5 meo dmt. It doesn't last long around me. Having a supply that is. It inspired me to cut loose with this bit of spiritual mansplaining that will outrage a small percentage most likely.,,,,I have an ego which is in near continual identification with different forms and concepts but also there is an individuality of Essence which at times is capable of expressing from the Causal body which has access to the Causal realm and nowadays in some circles, is referred to as the Imaginal realm. Or the realm of Consciousness or the realm of the atom or the Causal realm. See, it makes a circle,,,,I guess that's it for now. Don't worry, be happy. Why frown, act a clown.???‍??‍♂️Your treasures are found in Being, but moreso as a multidimensional Being instead of conditioned personality.Let your fracturedness heal and integrate and become the basis for your multidimensionalness. Trade in the Superego for an awakened Conscience and get back bonus bucks which will be your own hard earned spiritual coin to spend as you wish. Spiritual materialist find spiritual coin lying in the street and immediately spend it by just talking out of their ass. Nearly everyone goes through that phase though. Overlook this tendency and one day they'll go beyond it. A lot of things are different from what you figured they would be. Some of you have already realized this. Real eyes, realize, real lies.

It's more than just a book. It's an interpretive tool for divination that I consult just about on a daily basis. Modeled after the Original I CHING or Book of Changes which is considered the oldest book on earth. Many call it an updated version of the I-CHING in which the oppressive twist of patriarchical ideas have been removed. From a review: Removing the Ego as the defining agent of reality releases awareness to reinhabit the natural world. --Jose Cedillos, Ph.D. Prof. of Consciousness and Creativity Studies, The Union Institute.