The Giving Tree

[mandyjw]

@seeking_brilliance

@Zigzag Idiot I'll check it out, thank you!

@DrewNows Yes, the thoughts that come in can either enhance and preserve and learn from an experience or they can cut you off from it. At first it helps to stop all thoughts and just sense, but later on you learn to use thought in a productive way or they just come to you. When I was a kid, I thought something was wrong with me for just experiencing experiences, like a bad smell, or doing work I wasn't supposed to like doing, I really thought that I was supposed to judge things as bad or unwanted.  

Last night my kids disrupted my sleep a lot, but I really got to "save" my dreams and thought processes. The first one was trying to remind me of the significance of talking to the "crazy" guy who lives near the river the night before. I had looked forward to talking to him all summer but gave up on the idea and significance of where he lives. He came down just to talk to me. He said that he saw a pileated woodpecker and I remembered seeing one and being quite close it it by the largest apple tree at Pomroy's, the one with the bone underneath it. They are gorgeous birds, bright red, black and white. We laughed a lot about the people in the town and he told me memories of what it was like in the 70's including a few hilarious but sad stories about a woman who just threw her trash in the river and had a son who was enormously fat and drove around in a ridiculous old car and told everyone he liked 14 year old girls. I ask him why he came here, he said they lived in NYC and Philadelphia, and came her in the 70's as a part of a "back to the earth movement" and came here in particular due to "odd circumstances". 

It was funny that I was replaying that even in my dream thoughts because the conversation was pretty dream like.

I kept hearing someone call "Mom" and I got right up and went to my son's room, he was sick the evening before so I was worried about him but he was asleep and didn't even wake up when I spoke to him and asked what he wanted. 

Then I dreamed that I was in a library, and I remembered this as being a dream place that I have been before. It's a massive library like you'd expect in a city, only the books are on quite deep subjects, and the librarians are horribly bitchy. The downstairs is creepy and mysterious, but the upstairs is an expansive creepy book collection with no lighting except for maybe a candle flame to go by and the books are very very old. No one goes upstairs. Think the restricted section of the Hogwarts library, but being an entire floor and even scarier. The feeling of the upstairs and this entire experience came back to my consciousness like a flood, like I had just experienced it, and had never forgotten the previous dream. It was nighttime and I decided that this time I wasn't going to go back upstairs, instead I was going to leave the library. 

As soon as I left it was daytime again and I had traveled back in time. To exit the library, I had to go down a very tall series of steps. They were dangerous and there were no rails and no one seemed afraid but me. People coming up oblivious to my fear almost pushed me off the edge.  I have had thoughts recently about how in real life I seem invisible to people, and how I often sneak up on people and surprise them when I'm trying not to. Then the steps turned into chains and you had to swing from one to the next to get down and I was just tall enough to make it. Then it became an apple orchard and I was back in time, like back in the middle ages it seemed like, sort of like the upstairs library felt like. There was a girl gathering all kinds of apples in a basket. 

At the bottom of the "stairs" was this amazing apple tree, and it was a variety that doesn't exist. The apples were pale and variegated colors, beautifully shaped and HUGE. I picked a couple of the biggest most beautiful ones for someone else, (friends who just appeared?) and decided I had to try one. The next nicest one I found was a little off looking. A woman standing under the tree said "You're going to eat that, that apple is HIDEOUS!". And I said "No, it's beautiful," even though I partially agreed with her, I started describing why it was beautiful to her and birds appeared on the apple as I described them, complete with bright colors and feathers. As I described them, a peacock appeared and a blue jay, their feathers sort of melded into the thing like it was half bird and half apple. 

I heard "Mom" again over and over until I thought I was hearing ghost voices and eventually went to my son's room and he wanted me to cuddle him. I told him it was the middle of the night, and stayed with him and reviewed the dream in my head until I could remember it. 

Edited September 20, 2019 by mandyjw

[mandyjw]

A couple weeks ago I took my daughter out for a walk and as we walked back a huge cloud had appeared. I was walking by a massive field, which is rare around here, so I got to see the whole thing without trees in the way. It looked like a thundercloud bank but white and was this magnificent mountain and became heaven in my eyes with faces of men, angels, lions and gargoyles. The feeling and absorption and beauty of the moment stuck with me. 

I remembered how the first novel I wanted to write that I had an idea for after reading Harry Potter the second time through started. It starts with a girl lying in a field imagining things in the clouds and losing track of time. 

After that I had a similar experience, trail running at my parents. There's this "sacred" spot that I used to go to and pray when I was a teenager. Recently though, my Dad and his friend Tom cut wood there and "ruined it" so I haven't thought it was sacred for the past few years. I went there and took a break from running. There with this mushroom there in the sunlight, with subtle beauty beyond measure and I lost myself again like in the clouds. Little birds surrounded me and I asked for something there again.

Last evening I went for another run there and went back to the mushroom. It had rotten and turned black but now was in the shape of a raven with one eye in the center of its head. 

I went through Mom's garden, she grew scarlet runner beans this year and they are gorgeous. This year the apples did exceptionally well from all the rain, I've never seen them better. There's this small apple tree by my parents driveway and it makes tiny apples. I never bother with them but there were so many so I took one and tried one. I remembered eating them as a kid, and I remembered this memory I have of eating them and being incredibly depressed and terrorized with my OCD. And I remembered how I used to bite faces into the apples to entertain myself. Then I remembered the beads I started making this year, the poison apple from Cinderella. I haven't had a bead style be so popular in a long time.

It's like every little tiny aspect of my life is flowing together. 

I had a thought that our life could be split into three. "Real" life, dream life and creativity/imagination. I really want to compare the the holy trinity but I'm afraid Zigzag Idiot will be pissed at me if I do that so I'll refrain. Real life seems boring at times but it's the foundation where everything happens and can make sense and come into being. Dream life is a kind of communication and integration but it feels like it's happening to you. Creativity comes through and visits and links both worlds. This "insight" is half baked and could use some work, I know.

 

[mandyjw]

This song flashed through my memory this morning. 

 

[Aakash]

love you buddy 

[mandyjw]

@Aakash I love you too.

Songs about love aren't about romantic love. 

And when I see you like that
Then we see what we want to see all coming back to me
The flesh and the fantasies all coming back to me
I can barely recall but it's all coming back to me now

If you forgive me all this
If I forgive you all that
We forgive and forget and it's all coming back to me

Source sucks me in and eats me up, it's like walking into the den of lions. Nothing could keep me away. 

 

 

[mandyjw]

 

[Zigzag Idiot]

I really enjoy listening to Terence and how he can unpack a lot of this stuff,

seemingly off the cuff.

 

 

 

[mandyjw]

@Zigzag Idiot I listened to him quite a bit this week, including that very video. This is going to sound really stupid but my third eye loves his voice.  Making lots of connections. 

My husband had surgery this week and the combination of that and working more has been a challenge. Today I have the mow the entire lawn and do some work on the driveway and I made a skull design that came out all wrong yesterday so I have to redo it or I will be really disappointed with myself. The forum is generally my only downtime, except for running, meditation and being outside in nature. The kids would never let me watch to a movie or TV show, and if I read it's always interrupted constantly. I can listen to lectures and youtube all I want while I work. I love to make myself a victim of overwork. I'd have energy to do everything and more if I didn't overthink or get stressed out. Sometimes the only way to learn how to do that is to scale back on everything you're doing.

NOT TODAY. 

[DrewNows]

Not gonna lie every time reading from this journal feels like reading a novel or storybook. You’re good at the writing thing, could see you writing some, send jbram our best in a speedy recovery on whatever that entails 

[mandyjw]

@DrewNows I've been channeling your love for Teal Swan I guess. I was looking for this video and know know why I couldn't find it, she hadn't made it yet!

My reaction,

[DrewNows]

Oh cool ? looks intriguing and just started it, interesting (will give it a listen while i chore up myself, messy room means messy mind and vis-versa

yeah I must have handed that over to you then (the love for Teal lol)

Her content is no longer on my attention or in my suggestables but i did subscribe and appreciate seeing the new uploads, she’s a sick new outro   

Edited September 21, 2019 by DrewNows

[Truth Addict]

Send John my prayers. I hope he recovers very soon and gets back better than ever ?❤️

[Zigzag Idiot]

3 hours ago, mandyjw said:

@Zigzag Idiot I listened to him quite a bit this week, including that very video. This is going to sound really stupid but my third eye loves his voice.  Making lots of connections. 

My husband had surgery this week and the combination of that and working more has been a challenge. Today I have the mow the entire lawn and do some work on the driveway and I made a skull design that came out all wrong yesterday so I have to redo it or I will be really disappointed with myself. The forum is generally my only downtime, except for running, meditation and being outside in nature. The kids would never let me watch to a movie or TV show, and if I read it's always interrupted constantly. I can listen to lectures and youtube all I want while I work. I love to make myself a victim of overwork. I'd have energy to do everything and more if I didn't overthink or get stressed out. Sometimes the only way to learn how to do that is to scale back on everything you're doing.

NOT TODAY. 

I will take time for a tonglen  practice for John today. I type you a martial essence type and John as venusian. My friend I tripped wth yesterday is a Venusian. Venusians generally have a groundedness which is a good counterbalancing medicine for us sporadically hyperactive (adrenal) Mars types.

You said you usually mow the lawn anyway.? When he feels like it, tell him to get his ass back on the forum!

 

You said regarding:

This is going to sound really stupid but my third eye loves his voice.  Making lots of connections. 

 

Do you ever sense slight pressure or pulse in your forehead?  Or perhaps flash images?

Im a recovering workaholic. My Dad drilled that into me, bless his good heart. That's one reason I think Centering Prayer is so beneficial for me especially. Breaks the conditioned habit and momentum of going full speed most of the time. Age has helped me some with this as well. Past the initial resistance, sitting perfectly still and quiet and having quiet inside is similar to the regeneration of a good nights sleep. It seems to me at times anyway.

I just remembered Terence giving that humorous account of his own dream in that video of his you posted. He's just plain funny sometimes,,,,!

 

[mandyjw]

@Zigzag Idiot Thank you!

It feels like space in my forehead, like there's nothing there. Other times it feels like something moving or pulling apart like it has life of it's own, it almost reminds me of being pregnant and feeling kicks. It happens often when I go outside, in certain places and novel situations but there's not a lot of rhyme or reason. It's very curious. 

There's flashes of feelings and images together, they don't seem connected with the sensations in my forehead. I'm for the first time intellectually understanding what those are. I've had them my entire life. The forehead sensations are completely new since the awakening in April.

Edited September 21, 2019 by mandyjw

[Zigzag Idiot]

Reading the book Space Crusier Inquiry brought me recognition of this phenomena. Almaas refers to it as the Diamond Guidance. I reread the book two or three times before it registerd on me that he wrote that the Diamond Guidance was just another way of describing the channel of the Holy Spirit! 

Then it became more than a metaphor for me.

 

Opening of the Forehead by the Diamond Guidance

Usually the Diamond Guidance operates as a presence in the center of the forehead. When it arises in support of discrimination and understanding, we become aware of an expansion as space opens up in the forehead. With that expansion comes a sense of peacefulness; the Black aspect at the center of the forehead opens and we feel stillness and spaciousness. When the Diamond Guidance arises in this peacefulness, we feel a delicate presence, a pulsating energy that possesses a sense of clarity and transparency, an intelligence, an illumination. This delicate, pulsing, breathing presence appears as understanding, as insight, as intuition. As the forehead opens, we feel the Diamond Guidance as a tingling, an energetic throbbing—but very delicate, very soft, very subtle. If we are not attuned, we might dismiss it as just a physical twitch. Or if there is a lot of blockage, as is often the case in the early stages of our development, the diamond might feel hard. Due to the blockage, it can't get through, so it feels almost like a rock. But if we are relaxed and open, we feel it as a softness, a delicacy. 

Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 226

 

Outside of his own teaching he makes connection about this with knowledge from Sufism.

The Fourth Latifa

The fourth latifa is at the forehead between and just above the eyebrows. It is called khafi, meaning "hidden," and the color is a shining black. The consciousness is a state of peace and absolute stillness, related to the activity of intuition and objective understanding. It is connected to the black death, which is the state of annihilation of the sense of identity of the ego, which is the false self. 

Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment, pg. 143

[mandyjw]

@Zigzag Idiot Fascinating, thank you! I brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "open your mind". The insight of the importance of an open mind is one of the first that really changed my life after I found Leo's videos years ago. 

[mandyjw]

I really don't exist, I really cannot tell my own story honestly, I can't remember it, it's like sand slipping through my fingers. I don't know my own story, there's no ground to be found in the story at all. I never woke up, I never fell asleep. In searching for truth, I found that I am always an actor, always a fiction playing out some sort of script. My desires aren't mine, my failings aren't mine. 

The last sort of ground to seek is the feeling or notion that there's some sort of depression or depressing element to this.

There's not even that.

Edited September 23, 2019 by mandyjw

[jbram2002]

What if it's not your story to tell? Maybe it's everyone's story to write together.

[mandyjw]

@jbram2002 That's why I married you. 

I just had a whim to google your name and "meaning", even though I already know what it means. This is what came up.

Jon·a·than

 

 

noun

a cooking apple of a red-skinned variety first grown in the US.

From the Hebrew name יְהוֹנָתָן (Yehonatan), contracted to יוֹנָתָן (Yonatan), meaning "YAHWEH has given", derived from the roots יְהוֹ (yeho) referring to the Hebrew God and נָתַן (natan) meaning "to give".

Giving, apples, the title of my journal. Literally, what the fuck is this reality? Synchronicity CITY. 

Sycnchronicity

Oh, DEAR LORD it won't stop. 

 

 

[mandyjw]

"The World is instead some kind of linguistic construct, it is more in the nature of a sentence or a novel or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational redemptionism. The world only behaves as science says it should when we confine our engagement with it to information that is a great distance to us."