Zigzag Idiot

Straight posture is key in meditation. I tore some kind of something in my left shoulder six years ago. It stays dislocated most of the time. I customized my Centering Prayer to where I go from sitting with back straight to standing with back straight. I'll stand up and sit down how ever many times I need to in 20 minutes. It also gives me a time to remember my Centering Prayer word and let go. This might make all the difference if you have a chronic ailment in your posture like me. My Automaton has some wear on it. ?

Some interesting text below for those who are interested or trying to learn about Astrology,,,, https://timburness.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/russell-brands-astrological-birth-chart/ He sobered up around his 'Saturn return'. We all have Saturn return when we are around 29 and 1/2 years old

Love with a capital "L" gives one the Impartiality and persistence of 'honey badger' minus the violence.

Me too. Very much so.

@mandyjw @abrakamowse @Ero @SoothedByRain @Stefano Provenzi ??

@dmitry12312 Thank you, looks like a good practical resource. On the flip side, I hear Rumi say - "Don't scold the lover The wrong way he talks is better than a 100 right ways of others" Thank you @khalifa @Nahm @dmitry12312 @shamaanitar

As Rumi puts it - ,,,,,I ride after a deer and find myself Chased by a hog.,,,,, Got The Secret of the Golden Flower in yesterday but have spent all my time digging in Almaas Glossary. Earlier this morning and still now there is a humbled feeling over the rich responses in High Consciousness Resources, I feel strangely unable to even say thank you. How paradoxical,,,, Freedom Becomes, in Some Very Deep Way, Freedom From any Sense of Self As our range of freedom expands—from being free from suffering to being free to experience presence and realization—we can come to a place where we don’t know who it is or what it is that is enjoying the freedom. Because it is free from perspective and position, freedom becomes, in some deep way, freedom from any sense of self. Yet, at the same time, we are the particular individual for whom freedom is relevant; we live a personal life that is significant and that needs to be addressed, lived, and enjoyed. My experience is that the more freedom there is, the more there is heart, the more there is love, the more there is enjoyment and appreciation, and the more there is clarity and understanding in living as an individual. Clarity and understanding become freely given, love and enjoyment become freely given—given and not possessed by anybody. As individuals, we share in them, we express them, and we enjoy them. They don’t come from anywhere and they are not going anywhere. These are some of the qualities that we experience as we live a free life. Living realization, living freedom, means that life becomes practice and practice becomes life. Practice is not a way to get to freedom; it is freedom expressing itself as practice. As you recognize that you are both the particular, unique individual and also Total Being in its indeterminacy, your life does become free from unnecessary suffering but, more importantly, it becomes inherently free—the joy of living the authentic life of Total Being. Total Being—the reality of all times and all space, of all beings and all phenomena —lives as the irrepressible freedom of our individual lives. And the freedom of your life simply expresses the freedom of the dynamic creativity of Total Being. You are the living universe as the universe lives as you. Runaway Realization, pg. 244 The Mysterious Unity of Being and the Individual In other words, the delusion of the ego perspective is that Being identifies itself with the organ of its experience. That is to say that Being, in its mystery and vastness and magic and indefinable and immeasurable qualities, constrains itself by taking itself to be the organ through which it experiences and perceives. Being mistakes the individual consciousness to be all of what it is, to be its only identity. So the problem is not that there is an organ of perception, that there is individual consciousness. What causes all the trouble—the suffering and discontent and incompleteness and meaninglessness and dissociation and headaches and heartaches—is that we take the individual consciousness to be all of what we are, now and forever. But in reality, we are Being in its vastness at the same time as we are the individual with its uniqueness. This mysterious unity of Being and the individual manifests in infinite kinds of experience and realization, which signal the freedom that is possible for human beings.

A few days ago I said - Im trying to organize my thoughts for a topic in High Consciousness Resources concerning just 3 words. Personality - Ego- Mind As usual, I go digging in Ridhwan School Glossary,,,, Confusion About the Term "Ego" Here we digress to point out a source of confusion about the term “ego.” Readers who know both the spiritual and psychological literatures will find the term freely used in both, but with no general agreement on what the term refers to. This ambiguity often leads to confusion. The literature on spiritual development, on essential or inner development, on all matters of religious concern, generally uses the term “ego” to mean something which is seen as the barrier to spiritual realization. The literature on depth psychology, however, uses the term with a very different meaning. The ego referred to by Freud, and which ego psychology studies, is not the ego which is the barrier to spiritual development. They are two different concepts. The psychoanalytic term “ego” refers, rather, to the functional self, which is the site, organizer, and coordinator of the functions of perception, memory, mobility, and so on. There is, however, a concept in depth psychology and ego psychology that coincides with the ego of spiritual literature: it is called the “ego-identity,” and is sometimes referred to as the sense of self, or the sense of identity. This sense of self or separate identity is the main concern of ego developmental theory. This identity is, in fact, the acme, the most important outcome of ego development. It is ultimately the organizing center of the psychic apparatus. This psychic apparatus includes as one of its units the Freudian ego. In other words, the Freudian ego is part of the mind, is a structure or a structured process in it, while the self is a sense of identity and a center of action. The exact sense in which the ego identity is a barrier to spiritual development will become clear in later chapters. The Void, pg. 9 The following also goes with it The Main Difference Between Being and Ego To identify with the reaction that is the ego is to be cut off from Being, one’s true nature and identity. This is what the man of spirit means when he says the ego “is not,” it has no true existence. Now, we can understand in a deeper way the autonomy of Being. From the perspective of Being, what we are is not determined by either the past or the present situation. We are not a reaction; we simply are, an essential existence, totally free from the past. Our nature, our identity, cannot be influenced by situations. The main difference between Being and ego—which is that Being is just being-as-such and ego a reaction from the past—makes Being the true autonomy, and ego autonomy a delusion. It is ironic that object relations theory first describes so competently the way in which ego is structured from past object relations between inner images and, therefore, is compulsively reacting to situations in conditioned patterns, and then goes on to describe this same entity as autonomous! How can this set of reactions from the past be said to be autonomous, when true autonomy can be recognized to be the fullness of the presence of Being in the present? Again this understanding will be difficult for those who have no direct experience of what Being is; but actually almost everyone has had some experience of some deeper aspects of experience which are not completely dominated by ego activity. Here it is a matter of seeing these experiences for what they are, for their great significance.

This song inpspires me because Ozzy is pointing fingers and calling out the shit within the cultural consensus trance hooked into the control in part because of the mainstream media, fear, the military industrial complex, and much of the shadow in our culture, group think/collective ego. At 2:20 - 2:45 especially effectively allegory of the authority figure ripping the schoolwork away from the child and replacing it with the Bible then covering the Bible with the American flag and the scene shifts to war Bombers dropping ordnance. Very rich in other symbolism also. It was the second video I put in my journal when starting it back in December. Poetry - He's screaming - WAKE UP!

? ??? Just noticed his tattoos,,, ?

@Eden If it ever were convenient, I'd love to hear you sing it! I almost posted these next 3 recently. 3 generations showing their appreciation for one song. I grew up getting goosebumps from Roberta Flack's version. Thought I better add Perry Como.

@Ero Articulate assessment and interesting quote. It does indeed sound interesting,,,,, ?

She's in a league of her own, as the saying goes. I've been digesting on parts of this for about two years. ?

For several years I had a Bob and Doug McKenzie alter ego that rotated in and out among my ship of fools. It furthered my dissociation from a world that sucked. Okay, aye.

I've always loved 'The Doors'. This song always reminds me of a good friend who was having a nervous breakdown on a Sunday afternoon after a whiskey binge. Still teenagers, this song was playing in the background as we were talking and he made a comment about it. I didn't like this song as a child but in my mid teens, I became a true fan of The Doors. No one gets out of here alive is an interesting biography about Jim Morrison. Like Nirvana, I didn't discover the Stone Temple Pilots until 10 years after they were popular. I don't know why I'm sharing these. Just feel like sharing music,,, with some reflections,,,. Reify is an interesting word I learned about reading Almaas. Getting lost in music as a form of dissociation. Listening to the same song over and over which was a big part of my coping mechanism growing up. I was reifying.

@mandyjw ? Just ordered this version from Amazon. I look forward to discussing this one! In the meantime, feel free to paraphrase your understanding of it here on my Journal if the spirit moves you to. ? Im trying to organize my thoughts for a topic in High Consciousness Resources concerning just 3 words. Personality - Ego- Mind Tonight and the next few days, I'll organize here on my journal before I create it. These three words have multiple uses that cause a lot of confusion. @Keyhole Your last post just blew my mind! So good,,,,

Great addition! I've been enjoying them,,,, ?

@Marc Schinkel Glad you liked it! My internet connection at home has been out at the same time I'm trying to activate a new I phone which won't let me into it. I've had chicken and egg problems,,,, very frustrating. I hope it's somewhat resolved. Quite frustrating.

?‍♂️? You can see I'm partial to Coleman Barks reading ?

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about

@ValiantSalvatore I never really understood his quadrant map. Most of what I've learned about Spiral Dynamics is through Wilber audio and video though. I called it a lynchpin in how it opened up my understanding when It applied to rationality, conventional stage orange people and their dismissal of the mystical experience because transrational in their eyes looks the same as prerational. That's a part of how I've experienced it also.. In green I did the opposite of that and elevated some prerational things into transrational profundities. In working on myself have let some of these spiritual ego structures dissolve or play themselves out, mostly This seems layered. Still observing at times,,,

I liked a part of one of Wilber's comments in the above video - " the brighter the light, the darker the shadow" The Pre-Trans Fallacy A core lynchpin concept in Integral psychology.