Troy Valencia's Daughter's energetic training

 So I'm watching instagram videos of Troy doing all sorts of cool stuff with his daughter.  Putting her feet in the ocean.  Smelling and feeling jungle flowers.   And the video narrates the hermetic principle that positive thoughts are followed by negative thoughts like the day gives way to the night.  And, of course, the new dawn reminds us of the transitory nature of the negative thoughts.  So its nothing to get hung about, strawberry fields forever.  Until they run out of water and shrivel.  

So the prevailing wisdom is that there is no sense dwelling in the negative thoughts.  But shunning so called negative thoughts is in a way the same type of animal and process of the negative thoughts themselves.  The process of constriction.  Picking and choosing.  Reducing not expanding.  So how to encounter the negative thoughts and energy states and relate to them as natural processes, natural spirits, natural friends?  Lets let that question hang for a bit, shall we?  Suffice it to say that when Mitch Horowitz writes that you must avoid cruel people like the plague, I get it, but it a way, its closing off part of what you are.  What you are expands when it connects with the vitality of the interplay.  That is my sense of it anyway.  So how do you expand your awareness to encompass the contraction?   I think you just do it and see what is actually going on.  Encounter it. Connect with it.  Don't label it as bad and run away from it.  

If I encounter  this flux within my practice of allowing the myriad phenomena of reality to dwell/enter me as opposed to the energy of our "self" creating the myriad reality,  all sorts of interesting permutations and dynamics are created.  And these are seen most clearly for me in the forest.  The  forest is my friend in the same way the morning is my friend as I look out to the expanded space of the forest and my attention intersects with the large expansive space.  Its not cramped with the energy of the self created reality.   And when the self is compressed, perhaps this is related to the negative thoughts that have constricted upon themselves.  

I don't have any answers to any of this. But there is something about participating in the process that is important.  Connecting with the ebb and flow.  Just like Troy letting his daughters feet feel the ebb and flow of the waves of the ocean.  

The Bird atop the cactus was pretty luciferian

 So I'm up at my happy place meditating next to the cactus and the petroglyphs in Tucson that is a relatively short walk up from my parents place.  And I'm sitting on a rock facing west and feeling the separation between the sky and the arid desert earth.  And I hear the birds.  And I notice one of the birds is making a lot of noise.  Then I notice that he is trying to keep the other birds from sampling the nectar from the blossoms in a fairly aggressive sort of way.  He (notice I'm assuming its a "he") even attacked another bird (with his talons)  that was perched on the cactus.  It didn't seem necessary.  This was a huge cactus with plenty of blossoms to go around.  And indeed, the aggressive bird left his perch to travel to the other side of the cactus to evict another bird that had briefly perched there.

And it seems that this bird would never establish any sort of community with this behavior.  He would always be alone, attacking other birds until eventually he became old and one of the other birds got rid of him and continued the whole cycle.

Previously I had thought of the dichotomy between  forces that unify and bring people together (light) and those energies that bring people apart, or ideas that separate people (luciferian).  And sometimes you need division before you can regroup.  I'm not necessarily poo-pooing lucifer, just pointing out that human civilization might have evolved because of the propensity of humans to cooperate and work together as a unity, for the common good etc, as opposed to lone bird aggressively guarding his territory. Without cooperation, I don't see that our civilization would progress.  We would just be birds, who to my mind do not evolve with this type of behavior and will simply be as they are for the rest of eternity.  I'm probably wrong, but go with me on this...lol

Mitch Horowitz is somehow related to this.  So I'm in the car listening to his audio book where he rails against belief systems.  And the thought occurs to me that in a way I sympathize with this criticism of belief systems and religious establishments.  Hell, I probably agree with him.  Humans tend to create all sorts of mischief with dogmas.  And it takes a little luciferian energy to keep things fresh and moving.  Yin and Yang so to speak.  But at one level, criticism is somewhat akin to that lone bird, it is the force of separation--tearing people apart.  And criticism is itself a separating energy.  By criticizing, you separate, dissect, analyze, bring things apart.  Its not a force of unity.  And it never creates anything.  That is a different energy.  I suspect Luther either had someone else working for him, or channeled an entirely different form of energy  when he got through nailing up the thesis and formed a community.  

I think what I mean to say is to criticize my own criticism.  My path is not the mind ultimately.  It is to unify.  Literally and figuratively.