general comments
I really appreciated Jack’s Corner, The Moment of Change, in which he gives guidance regarding the ’stories’ we inhabit and how difficult making positive changes in our lives can be. In keeping with what he said, in particular:
“We are born into a story, we grow up into that story and make it our own, and we live out the story we have taken on.”
And,
“We need to explore the intricacies of what is going on. We need to inquire creatively into the ongoing story we inhabit, seeing how it comes together. We need to discover the story in its widest and deepest dimensions.”
Here is a link to a recent NY Times article: “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” It contains some interesting observations about time and space-perception, while citing some of the thought-shaping grammatical conventions we accept without noticing how they shape our thinking.
Best wishes to all,
David
August 31st, 2010
In opening to space of blue a spaciousness is felt…
A floating flowing where interpretation opens else…
Moving now through spacious blue alive with energy…
Allowing feelings to arise unlimited and free…
Blue edges now expand and ever~open up to space…
Knowing is uncertain yet not limited in place…
There is still distinction yet distinction is unbound…
Like traveling on the echoes or vibrations of each sound…
Diving into feelings ever~deepening and true…
Tasting all their richness and embodying their blue…
Every shade can be explored and opened up in turn…
Know the cold of blue yet feel the heat within it burn…
Now open space to wonder where imagination plays…
Bathe in it’s potential and ability to create…
There’s endless space available…adventuring into…
Opening to space and journeying into the blue…
Starlight Dancing…
August 17th, 2010
Does nature know the answers? Is it chattering behind our backs?
Setting course to make things right preparing for attack…
It’s devastation has been seen and will be felt again…
Are we at war with nature…and can we ever win?
Without respect, without regard, steadily we kill…
We justify and we believe we’re practicing free will…
We rape each other and the land; we take more than we need…
Making up new reasons why; new stories to believe…
Is our foundation faulty? Like the Earths that shifts below?
The countless whys we go to war…all based on what we know…
Earths atmosphere is changing and her punishments seem cruel…
Have we broken all her trust and her unspoken rule?
Seems what we do is based on fear and yet we carry on…
Inaccurate ways of knowing keep us ignorant to the bone…
Instead of loosening limits we hold tightly to the same…
Continuing in old ways we ignore and shift the blame…
If we decided one day to be radical with beliefs…
To take a chance and open up to new ways we could be…
Discard old ways of knowing and decide on something new…
Discover within the unknown…a knowing that is true…
Might this be what nature’s tried to tell us all along…?
That each and every precious form is longing to belong…?
If we stopped to listen to the many ways she speaks…
Would the questions come with all the answers that we seek…?
Listening to her language…mind and heart it opens so…
Connecting all of being…knowing asks…does nature know…?
Starlight Dancing…
August 16th, 2010
Comfortable in stories where we think it all makes sense…
We rest on what we think we know and and hope that time gets bent…
We open up our eyes to let the same world climb right in…
While mystery whirls around us, we live a life of pretend…
Waiting for the answers seldom questioning what is…
Allowing someone else to figure out eternal bliss…
Like monkeys we all mimic never saying much that’s new…
And yet we go to war, willing to die for given truth…
Repeating life in circles we long deeply to be free…
Accepting things we don’t know how to change, we let them be…
Looking to tomorrow while we hope and wish and pray…
That happiness will find us on some futuristic day…
Don’t rock the boat don’t tip it over just leave things alone…
Be grateful for your blessings, for one day they’ll be gone…
What will you do when your foundation breaks and disappears…
Will time dance you in spaciousness united with your fear?
This space and time is open…waiting…for you to explore…
Weaving a thread of knowing in awareness at your core…
You could live your life and never question it at all…
Never really dancing free or letting limits fall…
There’s so much more to life then you’ve been told along the way…
There’s magic in the making ever~rising with times play…
This space is ever~open, letting wonderment appear…
A vast new world of knowing at your fingertips…right here…
Layers of the senses and experience to expand…
Infinite realities like countless grains of sand…
So many possibilities are waiting just for you…
Life is an adventure with abundant shades of blue…
The preciousness of form and being dances in this space…
Flowing with potential time enacts this human race…
Stretching back and forward space accommodates all things…
Time contrives, breathes life alive…and knowing ever~sings…
Creative play imagines and a whole new world appears…
So glad I didn’t miss this dance of all that I hold dear…
Will you take my hand and dance new worlds of love and freeing…?
Ever~opening to knowing…this space of timeless being…
Starlight Dancing…
August 16th, 2010
We are trapped by thoughts, when we know through them. And freed when we recognize thoughts as forms or ways of knowing.
Hayward
May 7th, 2010
Here is a second point arising for me from the phone discussion – this one is on another way to use words:
Words can be thought of as ‘labels, that’s true. In that sense they might be thought of as concepts, and that is certainly how they are used in pure logic. However, what if, in everyday use , words were used like writing on water – where they mean what they do (in the speaker and hearer) ? Can they mean by acting on/in/from/as us, in the speaking (which will include the context we are speaking in and so many non-linguistic, non-conceptual elements, both known and unknown)? That is, can we use them in a way that changes the usual use of words, so that they mean something more than labels, and something before translation into further concepts?
In this way, words can include the ‘label’ aspect, but they can exceed their conceptual or labelling function – in their lived use. And, relating back to my last post, can the embodied felt sense play a part in generating this living (especially meaningful) use of words? This way they might include models, while not being limited by models; exceeding models.
I’ve been experimenting for some years with speaking this way, and it’s definitely a different experience than relying on them as labels for something that’s already been experienced. This latter kind of use – merely as labels that is limited by the past uses – draws on their public meanings (all those in the memory, library or in the dictionary), but this is exceeded by the embodied use of words.
This way of working with speaking and thinking might also avoid a commitment to ontological models behind such words as ‘self.’ The meaning of the word ‘self,’ then, can be found in how it functions in discourse. It can function to firm up a commitment to a model of self, a limiting fiction – and in Rinpoche’s books it seems that ’self’ usually means this – or it can function more experientially, in which case it won’t ‘thing’ a self. It won’t set up a self as anything ultimate or ultimately findable.
Experiment: While speaking with another, unify voice, breathe and awareness.
Regards,
Christopher.
April 23rd, 2010
So, if we move out of linear time, what we call birth is ??? and rebirth is more than possible. Right?
Lois S
March 6th, 2010
apart from the content, when I write, I feel/think/believe I am not in time as we conventionally know it. When the words come, I am neither surprised nor directing them. It is something entirely different.
Then, too, when I am ‘exploring’ several different ‘times’, in memories, i.e., conventional linear time, I don’t feel like I’m in the present or that the present even exists. In fact, I never think about it. It’s always a surprise. Also, I find it very hard to enter ‘linear’ time after that and become tense and anxious, though I’ve learned to hide it, often, because I’m supposed to fit to it.
Lois S
March 6th, 2010
Just listening the phone call and remind the short exercise in it, I found a good word for my ” confused ” experience. I was definitively not in a state of ” being self- forgotten”
” Selbstvergessenheit” , do you also say ” selfforgetness”? This would help to open the door – in this case?
Arthur
February 28th, 2010
What does the phrase ‘interpretations lack the power to found themselves’ literally mean? LOK 1. 170
February 27th, 2010
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