mandyjw

Here's the deep woods version of no mud, no lotus. A starflower growing up through a huge pile of moose poop.

Well, there you go! Sure you don't want the rest of the signs? Some of them are pretty entertaining.

@Mikael89 Q: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could spare our loved one's from all suffering? Eckhart Tolle: No, it wouldn’t. They would not evolve as human beings and would remain shallow, identified with the external forms of things. Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego – but not until you suffer consciously. Humanity is destined to go beyond suffering, but not the way the ego thinks. One of the egos many erroneous assumptions, one of its many deluded thoughts is “I should not have to suffer.” Sometimes the thought gets transferred to someone close to you: “My child should not have to suffer.” That thought itself lies at the root of suffering. Suffering has a noble purpose: the evolution of consciousness and the burning up of the ego. The man on the cross is an archetypal image. He is every man and every woman. As long as you resist suffering, it is a slow process because the resistance creates more ego to burn up. When you accept suffering, however, there is an acceleration of that process which is brought about by the fact that you suffer consciously. You can accept suffering for yourself, or you can accept if for someone else, such as your child or parent.In the midst of conscious suffering, there is already the transmutation. The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness.The ego says, “I shouldn’t have to suffer,” and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it. ECKHART TOLLE - A NEW EARTH

@DrewNows Thanks! I have about 20 more shots of the same moth on my camera that are really blurry.

Here's a hummingbird moth I saw today, I was so confused the first time I saw one as a kid.

Rebecca at the well fountain, a dog statue with conch shells lining the fountain edges and walkways. https://mastermindcontent.co.uk/the-symbolic-meaning-of-the-conch-shell-in-buddhism/

The past two nights I dreamed about Grammie. She was alive in the dream the night before but last night I was attending some sort of funeral or memorial service for her. Backstory, my cousin was very close to my grandmother but always took advantage of her, even stealing money at one point so that my mom had to take over Grammie's finances. Grammie lived on foodstamps with barely enough to live on, but was never bothered by it. I was so angry with my cousin that year that I didn't even attend Thanksgiving dinner. I thought I was above the whole ignorant family and I didn't want to see my cousin who everyone forgave like it was nothing. It never dawned on me that my anger at my cousin was only hurting my Grandmother if she even cared much about me not being there. Hardly anything really bothered my Grammie. My cousin has identical twins girls who are hilarious energetic kids but last night I dreamed that they were younger than they are now and that my Mom was babysitting them for my cousin and when we got to the service she freaked out at my Mom for bringing them late. They weren't actually late at all but my mom like always, apologized and never stood up for herself or the fact that she was doing my cousin a big favor by babysitting for free in the first place. It triggered my anger in the dream but I became conscious of it in the dream. My cousin even apologized later. Then I went to the bathroom but my friend's little boy, the one whose Dad just died in a car accident in May, kept opening the door. It pointed out how I was taught to always give and forgive on the surface and never make waves with people but that it's ok to hold grudges and isolate yourself. Also how "otherly" I've made my cousin. Last night I was looking for the moon in the sky and couldn't find it but Venus was really bright, and when I went to bed Venus was staring at me out the window perfectly positioned for me to see. It was too hot to have the blinds down. I woke up really early after the dream and gone was Venus but exactly in it's place was the moon.

Yesterday I got an email from the lady who runs the historical society and she said that they just got new photos from doctor Pomroy. The house across the river just went up for sale and it, includes the land that I explored in a video this past spring. I was told that it was owned by the electric company but that's not true. The guy who put it up for sale gave her a box of things that came from the Pomroy manner including a photo album with lots of clues about the Eye family. The lady who runs the organization said, "I wish their name wasn't "Eye" that's so creepy." So many Easter eggs. My daughter played with a lady's pug at the river the past few days and fell in love with him. Then yesterday I find out that Doctor Pomroy had a pug and it's in his photo album. I joke about how we might be able to restart a sardine business again with a guy I talked to at the river and then in the photo album there's a picture of his picnic lunch including a can of sardines. It looks like the manner was called "Red Gate Farm" but no can figure out how it was turned into Elmsea" and always had beautiful Elms along it, and it appears that his childhood home was also where his mansion was built. With the photo album are the original family records for his entire family. No one knows what happened to his sister Amanda. Did she die as a baby? Is she buried on the property? The lane where the home is for sale is named Elm something or other. We don't even have any more elm trees! They all died of a disease. This is just a sampling of the puzzle pieces we dug through. I'm pretty sure there's no black walnut tree on the property. Where did the shells I found come from? Why is everything centered around a triangle in the middle of town? I went swimming with the kids and found a rock to sit on in the center of the current under the bridge. The trees framed by the bridge are the ones I explored with the property that donated the photo album.

I love how the hero's journey video ends. “The village has disappeared in the evening mist And the path is hard to follow. Walking through the pines, I return to my lonely hut.” ―Ryōkan

Poison nightshade growing wild on the grave of an herbal healer. It's in front of a bird bath so the crows dropped the seeds there. Crows are awesome, hilarious birds.

Faces in the rocks on Prince Edward Island.

Each has their own magic. High quality videos on spirituality can transmit consciousness, there's heart involvement not just involvement of the mind. Especially if you use them as a mediation and don't expect constant intellectual stimulation from them. Books are magical because you can go at your own pace, and and they go deep and target specific subjects really well. The author has had the ability to rethink, revise and be ultra careful to word things clearly, the luxury of which someone doesn't have when they are speaking.

The mind is always seeking ground. Is it better to contemplate or clear the mind? Is it better to have a guru or be independent? What should the course of action be? At any given time, you may know the answer to these questions for yourself, but if you lock into the answer and turn it into ground or dogma you get stuck. Needing to know a "better" path is a way of seeking ground in thought that relies on time and future to exist. The only ground there is is quicksand. If you have questions, question. If you have a calm mind enjoy it.

@pluto That looks and sounds amazing!!!

Sex, alcohol and junk food are all spiritual practices, ESPECIALLY if you label them as hedonism. You can't escape God, nice try though.

Personality isn't quite as solid of a thing as we think it is. Ultimately by working with the ego, we clear the sky of clouds that obstruct the blue sky. The blue sky is infinite love and what connects us seamlessly with other people and life itself. True Love and connection is beyond our concepts of other people, our concept of our own personality and it intuitively connects in the moment in an authentic loving way. It's WAY, way better and more effective that any concept we can have of our personality or thoughts how we should relate to other people. It's as if you're going from robotic programming to becoming human for the first time. There can be some glitches along the way as we see through what is false about our view of self and other and free ourselves of programming, and it's good to allow ourselves grace for them. But there aren't as many as you might think.

@Aaron p There's a stage of enlightenment that is... half baked. During this stage one might be tempted to make "Fuck morality" into a dogma. Or a hashtag. Whatever.

Feeling a lot of disconnection between "others" and "self". Not in a conflict way, but feeling unfulfilled and disconnected from myself. I want to interact but I feel like anything I say to anyone else is unnecessary, maybe from ego and yet I am for now unable to connect in deeper ways.

Beautiful! This is a shell from a black walnut tree. I found it in a really special location but I cannot locate the actual tree there. Weird. Is it a heart with two eyes, or an owls face? Has anyone else noticed that Leo drew a flower in his latest blog video?

Check out Abraham Hicks.

I have a buckwheat mediation cushion, also I put a blanket under my legs and I take a break from the position and hug my legs to my chest in the middle of meditation when they fall asleep. Hip opening yoga and stretching helps too, I'm a runner so that kills my flexibility but running is a powerful kind of mediation too so it's worth it.

@Apparation of Jack Yes they did, I wasn't expecting any spiritual insights from his book but his story was a great illustration of the law of attraction and at the time I didn't believe in siddhis but it opened my mind to them. The Masonic organizations were a place where people learned about nonduality, mostly they were open only for men though. My intuition is that they have since watered down some of the teachings or people generally don't go as far with them as they did back then but that's just a guess from an outsider's point of view. Life is much more comfortable today, people went to clairvoyant doctors back then because modern medicine was completely insane. We rely on science and technology today, back then faith in a mysterious higher power was all the hope you had. We just have different challenges to realization than they had back then.

I think Leo will look a lot like this guy when he is older, minus the hair. He's a clairvoyant healer who grew up in the town I live in back in the 1800's. I read his book and had an awakening shortly after finding the old foundation of the house he built here. He awakened through the help of mesmerism and several mesmerists but there was a lot of confusion for him with as little information as they had then. Pretty cool.

@Truth Addict I'm excited to see how our path will unfold as well. I love the gift, you know me well.

@Truth Addict Thank you! I'm meditating first thing in the morning for a half hour. Besides that I try to be aware throughout the day and am bringing in a lot more body awareness than before. Leading up to my awakening I noticed that I was getting very non-reactive and that my depressive moods were getting more and more infrequent. The awakening completely threw me through a loop. An experience of no self causes ego backlash at first. When I think of ego backlash I usually think of anger, a depressive and nihilist state but this ego backlash was more complicated and complex than just that especially when bliss states are mixed in, ugh! It took months for my mind to slow back down again. I'm getting back to that "state" (nonstate?) I was trying so hard for before the awakening. At the same time I'm careful not to let my mind and ego define that "state" like it did before and try to dictate what it should look like.