Dougald Hine, Alastair McIntosh, Caroline Ross & Dougie Strang - Wu Wei in the Ruins

[@cheri238]

I just keep pressing buttons on my cellphone and now I have all of you. I am looking forward to this discussion. Thank you all again. Right down alleyways of all of us meeting serendipitously. 🙏❤️🌎🕊🎵🎶

[@johncarter1150]

Looking forward to your message reaching a larger audience! Listening in Northeast Georgia. Witnessing the exploitation of the local lands. Feeling disconnected and dissociated from the disposable small-minded sad consumers culture, while trying to live a low impact existence connected to the Earth and keep going... Gratitude for offering an alternative!

[@TheLurcherlover]

How wonderful

[@raymondtowers123]

Wu-Wei and competition an interesting path

[@ronalddegoede]

❤

[@fineasfrog]

The "forceful" mind comes from what? Some sort of imbalance in the person. Caroline demonstrated an example of "forceful mind" by giving us a caricature of it at 39:57. "Forceful mind" in one way is like having "bad breath", others can usually detect it immediately while we ourselves don't notice it at all. And equally well people may have some difficulty in telling us when we are triggered into having this peculiar but chronic 'bad breath'. And ordinarily we have resistance to hearing what they may be pointing out to us. Perhaps practicing something like 'push hands' is one way we can have revealed to us when we fall into trying to "push the river". One group of native Americans have an expression: "The tongue can make you deaf." There is a lot of wisdom to be discovered in that saying. One thing it indicates is that we very often, if not always, lose touch with our own possible receptivity when we start to speak because quite quickly as we continue to speak, a momentum of "pushing the river", like a kind of unnoticed bad breath, builds up and we lose our receptivity. To what degree is it possible to be able to speak and at the same time be able to be receptive to the tone of our voice, the tone of our words and also be able to be receptive to our listeners whether speaking to a large audience or speaking with others in direct conversation? Push hands can allow us to sense when we are going into a mode of "trying to push the river". Also here is a quote from the book "The Alchemy of the Heart" by Reshad Feild that points to another way this imbalance can be recognized in us: "A teacher of mine after saying to me 'You too ebullient', gave me the instruction: 'Breathe in only to breath out.' Eventually there ceased to be any sense that I was breathing; I was being breathed. This can only happen when the in-breath and the out-breath are balanced, which means we are in harmony with the divine flow of life. In harmony we have the possibility to help one another." For more hints and clues look up the poem of Kathleen Raine's which starts out "Let in the wind, let in the rain, let in the moors tonight".....and later says "Must I bind in human form a living impulse, a living power great and wild, that cries about my house with all the violence of desire, desiring this my peace." The demanding desire in itself does know how to find peace, it does not, as of yet, know how to "smell itself". Yet by allowing this living impulse, this power great and wild to be acknowledged, it is allowed into the point of return in which recognition can happen and we can at least stop broadcasting "bad breath". Recognition happens to us; the mind can't do it but can make room for it to happen by relaxing into the receptive, and what is given when we are sufficiently open and receptive is the original peace aka "the peace that passeth all understanding".