Seek Yourself

Adyashanti

It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.

The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:

From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002

I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"

Smurf Bible Scenes IV (2007)

Kenshō Is an Accident and Practice Makes You Accident-Prone

Kenshō does not arrive as a reward, a confirmation, or a personal milestone. It does not appear because someone has practiced correctly, behaved well, or accumulated enough years on a cushion. It arrives the way lightning does, without consultation, without announcement, and without regard for readiness, and this indifference is precisely what makes it intolerable to a mind that wants continuity, progress, and something it can call its own.

Practice does not produce kenshō, nor does it lead toward it in any reliable or causal way. Practice merely places the organism, again and again, in circumstances where the usual habits of control, narration, and self-maintenance are worn thin enough that, if seeing happens, there is less resistance to it. In that sense alone, and in no other, practice makes one accident-prone. Nothing more respectable than that can honestly be claimed.

What occurs is not a refined thought, not an improved understanding, not a conclusion finally earned, but a sudden, unmediated seeing of what is already the case, including the one who thought they were the center of it. Seeing occurs before explanation, before interpretation, before the familiar reflex of turning experience into something graspable. There is no commentary attached to it, and no one standing behind it to claim authorship.

This is sometimes called seeing with the eyes of emptiness, which does not point to a mystical state or a metaphysical belief, but to the direct recognition that nothing, anywhere, possesses a fixed self-nature, and that this includes the one who assumed they were doing the seeing. Nothing stands apart, nothing stands alone, and nothing needs to be removed or corrected to make this so.

What unsettles most people is not the content of this seeing but its ordinariness. This seeing is not rare, not newly generated, not dependent on special conditions; it is already occurring continuously. What fluctuates is not the seeing itself, but the degree to which it is immediately overridden by the thinking mind, whose primary function is not clarity but continuity.

Thought inserts a character into experience, a subtle “I” who claims ownership of perception, authorship of action, and responsibility for the unfolding of life. This insertion is automatic, persistent, and largely unquestioned. Memory reinforces it, language stabilizes it, emotion defends it, and society confirms it. Kenshō does not argue with this construction, nor does it dismantle it piece by piece. It simply sees it. And in being seen clearly, without resistance or fascination, the construction loses its authority.

Nothing replaces it. No higher self appears. No cosmic identity steps in to take the throne. What remains is life functioning without a proprietor, movement without a mover, experience without a claimant. This is not exalted. It is destabilizing. It removes the last place the mind was hiding.

And this is where the romantic image of awakening collapses.

The impact of kenshō does not feel like spiritual fireworks or blissful confirmation. What hits first is often disorientation, even panic, because the voidness that opens is nothing like the decorated emptiness imagined beforehand, stripped as it is of all the incense, cosmic reassurance, and spiritual tra-la-la that the mind had quietly smuggled in.

The “me” is suddenly not there, not weakened, not humbled, not improved, but simply absent and the next moment is not peace but shock. Now what? How does life continue without the central character? How does walking happen, how does speaking happen, how does one drive a car when there is no one at the wheel? These questions do not arise from insight; they arise from the reflexive machinery of identity suddenly losing its anchor.

The habitual narrative loop, which until that moment had been silently narrating, interpreting, and owning experience, drops out without warning. And because that loop has long been mistaken for the very condition of functioning, its absence is experienced as threat. Panic surges. The system scrambles. Thought races to reinstall the familiar center, to recover the sense of “someone” who is in charge, because the idea that life could continue without an owner was never supposed to be tested.

Although this absence is nothing other than our natural state, the suddenness of the shift leaves no time for acclimatization. The body-mind reacts as if something essential has gone missing, even though nothing has been removed. The habitual self fights its way back into the front row, not out of malice, but out of conditioning, habit, and sheer momentum.

What returns is not the old certainty, but a pale reconstruction: memory. Memory of an unrepeatable immediacy that cannot be summoned, stabilized, or lived in. Memory now owns what was never owned when it happened. The story resumes, but something has been irreversibly seen through.

And then comes the reflexive punch, almost crude in its honesty: Oh shit, that was it.

Too late. Already gone. What appeared without effort cannot be reproduced by effort. The sudden nakedness of immediacy has slipped out of reach the moment it is named.

Life continues. The controller quietly muscles his way back into the driver’s seat. Decisions happen again, plans are made, days unfold, and the familiar sense of being the one doing it all resumes its role as if nothing had happened.

But something has.

The memory lingers, not as comfort, not as certainty, but as a faint background hum: that was it, and now it’s gone.

And at the same time, something knows that this is not quite true. It isn’t gone. It was never owned. It never left.

Gassho, R.

1) they reproduce asexually and the children are clones of each parent OR

2) Kermit and Miss Piggy are members of the same sexually dimorphic species, hence the split between their male and female children

In which Captain Amelia (left), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic cat, had hybrid babies with Doctor Doppler (middle), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic dog, whom also gave birth to the babies

post (YESTERDAY) it stopped at

the second Eggman

With further development, these soft fibers could one day make it possible to use imaging techniques to detect early breast cancer hidden inside very small breast ducts. "While traditional, relatively rigid fiber probes may cause mechanical damage when entering narrow, curved or soft tissue spaces, our fibers are very soft with mechanical properties more similar to those of human soft tissues," said research team leader Yu Zhang from Harbin Engineering University in China. "We made these fibers using a draw-spinning method that was inspired by spider-silk spinning."

Acceptance: Embracing the reality of our current moment, no matter how uncomfortable it feels.

Dropping the fictional "I": Letting go of ego and analyzing what our life actually is instead of judging it.

Closing the gap: Moving from a place of being a detached spectator judging life, to being fully "one" with it.

…we tend to run our lives trying to avoid discomfort, suffering, or what displeases us.

It's easy to feel powerless against cancer, but research has identified several ways that we can reduce the odds of it occurring. According to a recent analysis from the World Health Organization (WHO), more than a third of all cancer cases globally are preventable. Lung, stomach, and cervical cancers make up nearly half of those cases.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.